If you use search engines you'll spend huge amounts of time and persistence building ? and retaining ? your position. If you use pay-per-click you'll spend from a few cents to many dollars on clicks only a small proportion of which will generate actual sales. If you use any of the ?free' advertising systems you'll discover they are not really free, they all cost money or time. If you use Affiliates the commission could be anything from 50 to 75%. You may not have to carry risk but it does cost money.
To increase the price even further, ON AVERAGE 50 to 60% of customers will buy one thing (or have one visit) and never come back. This is an ?iron-clad average' in the direct selling business. This may not seem to matter in cash flow terms; after all you DID sell something. But it does mean that the cost of the real, multi-purchase customers is even higher. Your email list is an expensive asset, very expensive. And it gets worse!
When they arrive on the list, you don't know which are going to buy eventually, which of those that buy are one-timers, and when the multi-buyers are going to elect to leave you. You react to this by doing two things: (1) you spend dollars, time and energy marketing and sending promotions to your whole list as you don't know who is going to buy and (2) you continue to build the list through the same expensive approaches you used initially, effectively playing a ?numbers game'.
You are leaving a lot of money on the table. If you could do better than average finding multi-purchase customers (someone does, it is after all an average), if you could direct your promotions to those most likely to buy, if you could retain those ?hot' customers longer?. Clearly there is a lot of room to improve profits. So what is the secret to success?
The Secret
It's much less expensive to retain customers than it is to acquire new ones. Academic research bears this out*:
** The cost of acquisition occurs only at the beginning of a relationship, so the longer the relationship, the lower the amortized cost.
** Long-term customers tend to be less inclined to switch and tend to be less price sensitive. This can result in stable unit sales volume and increases in dollar-sales volume.
** Long-term customers tend to initiate free word of mouth promotions and referrals.
** Long-term customers are more likely to purchase ancillary products and high margin supplemental products.
** Regular customers tend to be less expensive to service because they are familiar with the process, require less "education", and are consistent in their order placement.
All this turns into three rules for success in managing your email list:
Rule #1: When you have a valuable customer ? hold on to her. ?Her': yes, women control over 80% of all retail spending!
Rule #2: Try to make less valuable customers more valuable over time. Do this by creating and executing promotions that focus on customers that will respond. Isolating those who will respond means focusing on their buying behavior ? hint: someone who has bought from you is MUCH more likely to buy again.
Rule #3: Acquire the types of customer who will be worth retaining in the first place. But, where do you find them? Link your high spending customers to the places you sourced them, then go back to that well. If you get your best customers from pay-per-click on Yahoo! Then go back to Yahoo! for more
Remember the old adage: "The money is in the list". Well it is, but there is more to maximizing your profits than simply mailing out offers. It's no surprise that the truly profitable web sites have their roots on established direct mail expertise.
*Source: Buchanan, R. and Gilles, C. (1990) "Value managed relationship: The key to customer retention and profitability", European Management Journal, vol 8, no 4, 1990.
Copyright (c) 2006 Michael Kay HBBReview.com
Free Mailing List Software
If you want people to come to your website more than once then you necessity to repeat them, from time to time, that you live and give them the newest reports about what's tainted and what's been updated. One of the best ways to do this is to gather launch addresses and use them to generate a mailing list. But how do you gather these launch addresses and how do you launch out emails to so many people all at once?
Collecting the send Addresses.
Collecting launch addresses is easier than you might think. People on the web are worn to typing their launch addresses in a lot, and regularly have an launch address to use for this purpose. In most cases, if you ask for an launch address as a situation of accessing something interesting sounding people won't truly mind generous it to you.
Going through the final part of this article, we will see just how important the subject can be to many people.
One way of liability this is to merely embrace a box on each page unobtrusive and not truly calling notice to itself that gives your visitors the choice to indicator up to your newsletter. rather counter-intuitively, it is regularly better to make mailing list sign-up wholly voluntary, as this means you will get a slighter list but it will only have the most enthusiastic people on it.
Basically, it's a trade-off between forcing as many people as feasible to indicator up or just marketing to the most eager people. Your strategy should regularly be decisive by how many people you plot to launch out emails to and what kind of retort rate you appear to be getting.
What to Write in Your Mailing tilt Emails.
If you want people to read the emails you launch to them then they can't just be the newest dull reports about your precise website features that no-one even cares about. You necessity to offer information and updates that are practical and germane to the part who's ready to be cavity that email.
If you just write in corporate speak and don't say something that's ready to be practical to true people then your launch is ready to be ready straight into their refuse mail. You should take some time over your emails. Make them something that their recipients are ready to want to keep and submit to more than once often-updated, time-sensitive information is best, if you have access to it.
Apart from that, make sure to embrace links to the newest things on your website, as well as a few elder things that are still popular. If you market anything, you should work in a link, but don't be too clear about it a good way of liability things is to embrace a tip or two with potential uses for a certain product (making them look like they are planned for people who already own the product), sparking the reader's curiosity enough to click through and judge buying it.
The official Side.
Once you've got a mailing list and you've printed the first launch you want to launch to it, the next step is to set up the precise side of things. Just how do you think those emails are ready to get sent out? Surprisingly enough, you can just use a usual launch series like Outlook, if you paste all the launch addresses into it. If you do this, though, you necessity to make sure that you use the Bcc (blind carbon copy) meadow for the addresses, to duck transfer out a duplicate of the mailing list to everybody on it.
Alternatively, there are specialist programs you can get that are dedicated to hulk mail. Because spam is such a big industry, companies producing such programs lean to be cool stay away from something that advertises itself on the center of how many emails it can launch in a detailed but if you look around, you should be able to find something that meets your needs.
There are even web-based solutions that duck you having to settle any programs or launch any launch from your computer, avoiding the hazard that you might get blacklisted someway for transfer out too many emails in too brusque a time. If you can find a reasonably-priced one, then they're regularly the model solution, allowing you to direct your lists directly and launch out emails easily. Make sure to do a few test runs with slighter figures of people before you commit yourself to anything, though.
No matter which way you look at it, having a firm understanding of this topic will benefit you, even if it is just slightly.
Both Michael Kay & Keith are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Michael Kay has sinced written about articles on various topics from Email Marketing, SEO linking and Computers and The Internet. Michael Kay edits the * Insights Letter* and *The Home-Based Business Review*. These are FREE publications stuffed with ideas, access to resources and free gifts. Subscribe now at. Michael Kay's top article generates over 12100 views. to your Favourites.
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