It's one of the recurring questions in a business, and more so in a startup. Creating a consumer habit in a group of consumers is the key to success, or at least to the beginning. But this isn't as simple as creating suggestions Call to action or make a large investment in campaigns and notoriety. To convert customers well, we need to know those potential customers and give them what they want.Next, we give 5 tips for turning those prospects into returning customers.1. Allocate a marketing budget for follow-up. All companies allocate resources to attracting customers, but a subsequent step is Retain enough of them for your company to generate business. Therefore, we must also strive for retention. Some of the potential customers leave clues (data) when they have any contact with your brand. Why not follow up with them? You will have more knowledge about them to try to convert them into customers (and then into returning customers). But before that, you'll always draw conclusions to underpin your overall marketing strategy.2. Make life easy for them. While the ultimate goal of following up with potential customers is to convert, your relationship with them must go beyond sending them direct messages to do so. Instead, use the knowledge you gain from the potential customer to become something like a trusted advisor. You can, for example, Create content that is useful to them and, finally, helps them understand why your product is needed, for example. Not the same content for everyone, but a different one for each consumer profile, focusing on their interests. With this, you can establish yourself as an agent who is an opinion leader in your sector, who is aware of trends and learns from the hand of those clients, and also as that kind of advisor who provides the information that a type of consumer needs to make decisions. When they're finally determined to convert, they'll be much more likely to decide on your brand.3. Use multiple touch points. Of course, email is still one of the channels that give the best results when it comes to reaching your audience and/or requesting some additional effort or data on their part. And it's also a good way to follow up with potential customers. But we must be flexible. It's no longer about separate offline and online marketing. The marketing strategies of the future (already present!) they must take into account the versatility of the new consumer: they use different types of devices and services to relate to brands, and they are increasingly used to brands using different channels to reach them. Marketing strategies must be more comprehensive and multichannel than ever.4. Establish a follow-up schedule. The tracking of potential customers has to have an order. To do this, you must cross the average sales cycle of your business and the normal life cycle of a customer with the habits of a potential customer. Assuming that the sales cycle of a business is one month, one of the most used models consists of contact a potential customer twice a week for the first month, once a week for the next two weeks, and once a month for the next twelve months. And most importantly: don't give up. Yes, you have to space out those communications, but you don't have to give up. In fact, time eliminates competitors and gains in efficiency.5. Use monitoring tools. When monitoring potential customers, you have to have a left hand, apply experience, be subjective to achieve objective results... but today there are many tools that we can rely on to quickly and automatically gather information that will be useful to us to adjust our relationship with those potential customers. As we have explained in Other posts, CRM systems have yet to undergo development to identify customers and order information regardless of the point of contact they use (be it social networks, email, navigation, leads, or even offline actions), but there are still many tools that help us. From social media listening tools to any advanced database system, and of course, analytics tools. The connection of all of them is what will achieve increasingly polished CRM systems, but in the meantime, we can use all of them and know how to cross their data to have a more computerized knowledge of customers (whether potential, one-touch, or recurring).“What is not defined cannot be measured. What is not measured, cannot be improved. What is not improved, always degrades”, said William Thompson, Lord Kelvin. Potential customers are one of those aspects that you can improve. More: Why can having the support of an accelerator boost your startup?7 steps to create a startup and be successful