The Trick or Treat method for attracting clients online

Recently I was thinking about how us adults celebrate Halloween night. You get your bowls of candy ready and wait eagerly for the first little knocks on the door. You smile and laugh with the kids, give lots of great candy, maybe even dress up yourself. The children leave happy, and the following year (or maybe even later the same night!), they look forward to knocking on your door once again.

That got me to thinking. There’s actually an important message there: if you are nice to people, they want to come back.

And that’s how I came up with the idea of the Trick or Treat method to getting clients. In a nutshell, the method is this:

Treat people well, and they will want to come back



Sounds easy, right? You say please and thank you, you offer good service, you do a good job, and you are polite and smile.

Well, what I’m actually getting at is a bit more complicated than that. Yes, those things are important, but things have changed a lot in the past few decades. Why? Because of the internet, of course.

Attracting clients on the internet just isn’t the same as doing it in person. In person you can engage in chit chat to warm people up. You can be friendly and smile. You can answer questions on the spot. You can hand out a business card. You can have a conversation in which your potential customer learns about you and the services you offer.

But today, well, reading about it on the internet just isn’t the same. People get bored really easily when they read websites. So in order to keep them around, you need to treat them well.

Let’s look at what that means.

1. Make your site user friendly

You want to make your site easy to use. Here’s how to do that.

  • Use easy-to-read fonts. You don’t want to make your site hard on people’s eyes, so use fonts that are clear, easy to read, and big enough.

  • Break your content up into short paragraphs, or bullet lists. Long paragraphs are boring to read, and intimidating.

  • Make things easy to find. You don’t want people hunting around, frustrated because they can’t find the information they want. So use descriptive menu item names, and put things where they will be easy to find. Making your website easy to navigate will make it more likely the visitor will actually explore it.

  • Use colours that are easy on the eyes.

  • Include descriptive headings to help people find what they are looking for.

  • Make your site easy to use by persons with disabilities (that’s not just good practice, it’s now the law in some provinces). That means using larger fonts, adding alt text to your images, formatting your content properly with HTML tags such as headings, etc.

  • Make sure your site loads quickly. Nothing turns a visitor off faster than a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load.

  • Make sure your site works well on both desktop and mobile.


2. Make them feel safe

People are wary—there are just too many things like spam and viruses around. And that caution can be a barrier for you if it means visitors aren’t sure they are “safe” on your site. 

So, how do you make them feel safe?

Privacy

  • Have a professional privacy policy and post it on your site.

  • Beside/below every CTA (call-to-action), include a statement letting visitors know you keep their information private.


Contact Information

  • List your contact information in an easy to find location (in the footer of your homepage and as a link in your menu). Visitors don’t like it when there is no contact info—it makes them suspicious as to the validity of a site.


Kindness

  • The tone of your words matters. If you write in a way that is positive, accepting, and supportive, it will help convince people that you will be a trustworthy, reliable person to work with.


Testimonials

  • Including a few testimonials helps people feel that you are what you say you are, and that you can do what you say you can.


3.   Help them

People visit a website because they need or want something. Basically, they need help of some sort.

Maybe they want to learn how to do something, or fix something. Maybe they want to get some ideas, or information to help them make a decision.

But the bottom line is that they want help, and that’s what you need to give them. Make no mistake: if they don’t find anything helpful on your website, they will leave and go to a site that does help them.

The best way to help people is to give them information. A website that is full of helpful information will be much more appealing than a site that provides little help.

For example, if you are a website designer, you would want to make sure you have plenty of free information on your site to help visitors learn/solve a wide range of website related problems. Now, lots of new business owners balk at this suggestion—they don’t want to give away free information; they want to be paid for it.

But the reality is that people need to test-drive your services, and the best way to get them to do that is to show them some of what you can do, for free.

4. Give them presents

One of the ways we treat our friends and family nicely is to give them presents. So why not do it for your customers? In fact, this is such a great way to treat your website visitors well, that it has become a very common marketing tool.

In the olden days, companies often gave away things like pens or fridge magnets. But in today’s online world, the gifts are quite different. It would be just too expensive to mail a pen to everyone who asks for one, so the focus instead has moved largely to free documents that people can just download.

What types of documents? The list is almost endless.

  • How-to guides

  • Newsletters

  • Checklists

  • E-books

  • Book chapters

  • Consultations

  • Lists of helpful tools


In fact, a blog article is a freebie. The person/company behind it is giving you free information on a regular basis, usually in the hopes that you will one day buy one of their products or services.

There are also freebies that aren’t documents, but can still be delivered for free over the internet. Here are some examples.

  • Consultations (30 minutes or 1-hour)

  • Workshops

  • Mini courses

  • Demos

  • Free trials


The nice thing about freebies like this is that they don’t cost you any money (as opposed to pens, mugs, fridge magnets, etc.). They also help convince potential customers that you know what you are talking about, and that helps close future sales.

5. Keep your promises

Every website has little promises scattered throughout it, and you want to make sure you keep those promises. Here are some examples.

  • A link involves the promise that if you click it, it will take you to what it said it would. Make sure you deliver.

  • If you say you respect your visitors’ privacy, make sure that you do so.

  • If you promise “we will never spam you”, make sure you don’t.

  • If you offer a freebie, make sure that it is, in fact, free, that it’s easy to get (e.g. easy download process) and that it is exactly what you said it would be.

  • Make sure your website content matches your website title/theme. For example, if your website is called “Golf with Me”, then your content better be about golf.


So that’s my list of ways to make sure you use the Trick or Treat method to keep your online visitors happy. Because it’s as true today as it was a hundred years ago—treat your customers well and they will come back.

Happy Halloween!

Cheers,

Tim

Helping you engineer the business of you

Tim Ragan