If your business or online shop isn’t making enough money, more ads are usually the most expensive fix. Before you buy more traffic, check what happens to the people who already found you: how fast you reply, how easy it is to buy, and whether you ever talk to them again. That’s where the cheapest money is.

“Can you run ads for me?” Yes, after one question.

The question is: what happens to someone who clicks?

Ads are great at one thing: bringing people to your door. They do nothing about what happens once those people get there. If the door is hard to open, or nobody’s home, every extra click is money spent on someone who leaves. More budget doesn’t fix that. It just makes the leak more expensive.

Where do customers usually leak out?

In my experience, in four places:

1. The reply. Someone messages you at 9pm and hears back two days later. By then they’ve booked with whoever answered first.

2. The path. If buying or booking takes more than a couple of taps, or a phone call during office hours, people give up quietly.

3. The inbox. Leads living in someone’s email aren’t leads. If it’s not in a CRM, it doesn’t exist, and nobody will follow up.

4. The second sale. Most businesses work hard for the first purchase and then go silent. The second sale is the cheapest one you’ll ever make.

What is email nurturing, and do I need it?

Email nurturing is a set of automatic messages that keep talking to people after they first show interest, so follow-up happens without anyone having to remember. A welcome email that answers the first questions. A note after the first purchase. A friendly nudge when someone goes quiet.

You need it when you have more interested people than time to talk to each of them. That moment arrives sooner than most founders expect.

The receipt: Kaymera

Kaymera made covert secure phones for high-profile users. When I joined, as the only marketer, in the first week of COVID, the sales team was using Salesforce as a notebook, email deliverability was terrible, and prices depended on which salesperson you talked to.

The tempting fix would have been “more leads”. Instead, we fixed what happened to the customers we already had.

The value was invisible. The phone looked like an ordinary phone, so customers couldn’t see what they were paying for, and some stopped paying. With the head of product, I designed a branded onboarding experience and a weekly report showing the attacks the phone had stopped. We also turned Support into Customer Success. Churn dropped 20% year over year.

Buying was hard. There was no way to just buy online. I launched the company’s first e-commerce channel end to end, on Shopify and WordPress. It added 15% to revenue in its first year.

Neither of those was an ad campaign. Both made more money than one would have.

How do I make more money from my online shop?

Check these before you raise the ad budget:

• Can people buy in two taps, on a phone? Try it yourself, on a slow connection.

• Do you reply within hours, on every channel where customers can reach you?

• Do you know where your last 10 customers came from? If not, ask them: a code, a link, or simply “how did you hear about us?”

• Do you talk to customers after the first order? A thank-you, a how-to, a reason to come back.

• Is there a reason to buy again? Refills, bundles, a loyalty perk, early access.

Fix the first leak you find. Then the next one.

So when is it time for ads?

When the follow-up is fast, the path is short and you can measure what comes in. Then ads stop being a gamble and become a dial you can turn up with confidence. That’s the fun part, and you’ll have earned it.

Not sure where your leak is?

The Are We a Match? quiz checks your lead flow and follow-up in two minutes and tells you what to fix first. Or book a call and we’ll find it together.