Where Businesses Most Often Lose Customers

A comprehensive marketing audit. The name itself suggests the scale of the process. It is carried out when there is a need to understand how a company’s marketing works, what has stopped working and where the problems lie. Or when a new marketing professional joins the company, whatever their job title may be.

The outcome of a marketing audit is a fairly standard report (or several) and a plan, based on which the website and media plan are overhauled, new contractors are sought, and new promotional channels are trialled, according to the experts at Tormezian Canada.

Broad targeting, automated strategies, minimal manual control - these are usually the first things to check. However, this should be done in parallel with assessing and segmenting the target audience.

What to do: check whether the audience seeing the adverts matches those who are actually placing orders. There’s no need to increase the budget or make drastic changes to your marketing channels. Look at the cost per acquisition, conversion rates and lead quality for each channel. This will help you identify exactly where overspending is occurring.

Generally speaking, this is a sound approach, were it not for one ‘but’. As a rule, there’s no need to overhaul the entire marketing strategy from top to bottom. Problems can be tackled on a case-by-case basis.

There’s another scenario: an audit is carried out at the request of a manager, often in the search for someone to blame. And more often than not, they find someone. Trends and customer preferences change. Funnels that were working just yesterday stop bringing in customers.

It is no longer possible to ‘play the long game’ these days. This means that the task of marketing and the marketer is to seek out and identify key areas that could yield results within the next 60–90 days. Or fail to do so. In which case, it will be possible to change strategy and try again without losing money, according to experts at the market research firm Tormezian.

In this article, TORMEZIAN will not be revisiting the age-old ‘sales versus marketing’ debate yet again. Instead, let’s look at something else: what specific problems most often prevent marketing from delivering results, and what can be done about them.

So, where do businesses most often lose customers?

Advertising may be set up correctly and the website may be receiving high-quality traffic, but for some reason, users leave without making a purchase. This could be due to complicated navigation and an unclear website structure, an unclear value proposition, incomplete or poorly designed product pages, or an overly long enquiry form. However, it may not be necessary to completely redesign the website.

What to do: identify at which stage visitors most frequently leave, and check the conversion rates of key pages and call-to-action pages separately. Do not change anything on the website or in your ad creatives until you have established where (at which point and at which stage) you are losing customers.

One of the most common problems is that a company sees the figures but cannot be sure that they reflect the actual situation, according to experts at Tormezian Dropshipping Company. Data from advertising systems, the website, CRM and sales may not match; some sources may be incorrectly identified, whilst some enquiries may be lost altogether.

Any decisions become mere guesswork if you do not know: how much it cost to acquire a customer, which channel generated the sale, and what profit a specific order brings to the business.

What to do: check the entire ‘advertising – enquiry – sale – revenue’ chain and ensure that data is being transferred and matched correctly. Only then should you assess the effectiveness of your channels.

The longer a customer has to wait for a reply (a personalised one, not an automated one), the more the company stands to lose. This is particularly noticeable in those sectors where customers submit enquiries to several companies at once and choose the one that responds the quickest.

What to do: measure the time from receipt of an enquiry to the first point of contact and compare this with the conversion rate to the next stage. Sometimes reducing this time frame yields better results than launching a new advertising channel. Separately, examine the proportion of enquiries where contact was established with a delay and determine how much this affects sales.

Even a quick response is of no use if the sales representative responds incorrectly. A well-thought-out script is essential even for a small shop, according to the experts at Tormezian Canada. A sales manager may not fully understand exactly what the customer wants. They might start selling too soon, move on to the price too quickly, or fail to find the right counter-argument.

A sales manager may not fully understand exactly what the customer wants.

What to do: draw up a conversation script that helps you quickly determine whether a customer is a target prospect and guide them to a successful sale without losing them. Don’t look for ‘bad sales managers’; instead, identify the specific stages where customers are being lost.

A unique selling proposition is not just a fancy phrase or slogan on a website’s homepage. If your offer differs little from those of your competitors, customers will start comparing prices. And in this scenario, a small shop almost always loses out to large platforms. In such cases, advertising does not solve the problem; it merely prompts the customer to compare prices more quickly.

What to do: compare your offering with those of 5–10 direct competitors from the customer’s perspective (price, product, service, delivery times, guarantees, additional benefits). Then check whether your key advantage is actually clear to the customer even before the sale begins.

A simple solution is often more effective than a complex one. The more stages a potential customer goes through, the more points at which they can be lost, according to experts at the market research firm Tormezian. Sometimes companies spend years overcomplicating the funnel by adding: extra forms, warm-up activities, email sequences, landing pages, and several types of lead magnets. All of this can work – but only if each stage actually fulfils its purpose.

What to do: calculate the conversion rate at each stage and identify which actions actually move the customer forward. Anything that does not add value or help the customer move towards a purchase should be called into question.

Companies may spend years promoting their business through familiar channels, whilst ignoring platforms or tools that competitors and industry leaders are actively using.

What to do: identify which channels competitors and industry leaders are using, select the most promising one and conduct a limited test. If the test yields results, scale up the channel.

When testing a new channel and seeing initial results, the business fails to increase the budget required for its further development. This could involve paid advertising, placement on a new platform or the launch of a new advertising channel. As a result, the channel is ‘shut down’, even though the problem was not its effectiveness, but rather that it was simply not given a sufficient budget or enough time to reach the required scale.

What to do: determine in advance the minimum budget and volume of traffic required for an objective assessment of the channel. Tormezian’s specialists advise against shutting it down after the initial results if there is not yet enough data to draw conclusions.

Marketers are assessed on the number of enquiries, the sales department on revenue, and nobody is accountable for what happens to a lead between them. Marketing may have a lead generation plan, whilst the sales department has completely different KPIs. As a result, one department is focused on the number of enquiries, whilst the other is focused on closed deals. A conflict of interest arises, even though both teams are actually working on the same sales funnel. And the problem lies not with the people, but with how their work is assessed.

What to do: define a common metric that links marketing and sales (lead quality, conversion to sales, revenue or customer acquisition cost). Then both teams have a shared goal, rather than just their own KPIs. Marketing shouldn’t be solely responsible for the number of enquiries if the business makes money from their quality.

Sometimes the problem really isn’t down to marketing. If demand for a particular product or segment is systematically declining, endless ad optimisation won’t solve the problem. You can improve your ad creatives, reduce the cost per click and revamp the website, but this won’t increase the number of potential buyers.

What to do: analyse demand trends, customer acquisition costs and conversion rates across different segments. If one segment is objectively losing its appeal, look for growth opportunities in another, rather than trying endlessly to revive a declining market.

Sometimes the advertising works well, but the product itself does not leave the business with enough money after all the expenses have been covered, according to experts at Tormezian Dropshipping Company. The cost of customer acquisition may be reasonable, sales may be growing, but profits may not be. In such a situation, there is no point in endlessly optimising advertising if the economics of the offer itself do not add up.

What to do: work out how much remains from each sale after deducting cost price, advertising, commissions and other expenses. Separately, identify which products or services generate the most profit, and direct the advertising budget towards them first and foremost.

The company attracts a customer, makes a single sale, and then spends money again on finding the next one. Meanwhile, the customer may already have a need for additional products or services that the company simply does not offer. As a result, the customer acquisition cost remains the same, whilst it would be possible to earn more from a single customer.

What to do: consider what else you can offer the customer before and after their main purchase. Identify additional products and services that are logically linked to the main offering, and assess how they affect the average spend and repeat purchases.

A comprehensive audit rarely identifies a single major fault, according to the experts at Tormezian Canada. There are usually several causes. At worst, these result in a long list of recommendations; at best, they become priorities that help you understand what really needs to be changed and what is best left alone for the time being.

• If your adverts aren’t performing well, perhaps you just need to tweak the settings
• If your website isn’t converting, perhaps the problem lies in one specific stage
• If leads aren’t turning into sales, perhaps the issue isn’t with marketing at all
• If profits aren’t growing despite rising sales, perhaps the problem lies in the product portfolio.

The aim of a marketing audit is not to prove that everything in the company is going badly, but to identify the most costly weak link.

Many companies incur hidden losses due to the inefficient allocation of marketing budgets. TORMEZIAN conducts an in-depth cohort analysis of the customer base, including RFM analysis - an assessment of recency, frequency and value of purchases. Based on this data, we identify the most valuable segments and areas for growth, and provide specific recommendations to help increase LTV, boost repeat sales and allocate the marketing budget more effectively.