APD-Marketing Newsletter

Hello and welcome to January’s edition of the APD Marketing newsletter. I hope you had a very merry Christmas and the new-year hangover is now fading away.

Now, normally at this time of year, all the newsletters tend to talk about goals for the coming year. Is this year really going to be your year and are you actually going to getup off your bottom and make something happen in 2007.

You know the score.
And…as you’ve recently read my business start up course where I go into some detail on goal setting and taking action, I thought I’d spare you and talk about something totally different…

What’s a Customer Worth?

What an interesting question. Have you ever stopped to wonder?

So, what is a customer worth?

The trite answer is, “It depends what you do with them!”

Before I do talk about the value of a customer and how to make sure you get the maximum value out of your customers, (in the nicest possible way), just one small point.

You Do Need Customers!

Obvious, I know, but…you do need to actually have customers. Now, I’m sure you have realised this, but…without customers you simply don’t have a business. Yes, you can have the website, the office, the letterheads in fact…all the expenses. But you just cannot claim to be “in business” until you have customers. Without them all you have are expenses and you will be down the tubes before you can say “London Underground”!

You see, customers are the greatest assets of any business. Your customer list is what gives your business its value. Make sure you understand this.

Your income (and therefore profits) derives from the fact that your customers buy from you. So, as a business owner, your main focus must be the continuous building, maintaining and nurturing of your customer base. This is the life-blood of your business and is what enables you to grow…expand to greater levels of profit and sales.

At it’s most basic level, business is all about…

•  Acquiring new customers
•  Delivering superior products / information
•  Building a relationship
•  Maintaining contact
•  Maintaining a steady flow of new products
•  Keeping customers happy
If you can achieve this, you will have a customer base that buys from you regularly and you will also gain many “word of mouth” referrals for your business.

Keep In Touch

So, today, I’m going to talk about the “maintaining contact” aspect of the business.

For any sales people out there, you will probably remember from your training that, on average, it takes seven contacts from you before your potential customer really trusts you. And, of course, they will not buy from you until that trust is earned.

The same applies in the online world.

Your copy can be the strongest around but your initial conversion rate will be low. That is why you must have some form of personal details capture mechanism on your site. If you don’t “sell” to your prospect (and that’s all they are at this stage) on first contact you will need to “capture” their personal details so that you can maintain contact.

You see, if they don’t buy initially you will probably need (on average) a further seven contacts to make that happen.

As an example, have another look at my site ( www.apd-marketing.co.uk ), and you will see that my “capture mechanism” is the free seven-part business-start up course that you all signed up for. OK, you didn’t buy the Start Up Kit that I was offering, but rather than let you just “slope off”, I offered an inducement for you to give me your contact details.

So, the fact that you signed up for the course offers me seven more opportunities to “talk” to you. Hopefully at the end of the course you will have gained some benefit and feel more disposed towards buying products from me, either now, or at some stage in the future.

You will notice that I followed up the course with my free newsletter (which you are now reading), and so, I now maintain regular contact with you. Again, this can only be good for my business as I deliver benefits to you on an on-going basis. This in turn builds trust and once more, makes you more likely to buy from me.

Now, in the past, keeping in contact on such a regular basis, via the postal system, would have cost thousands of pounds! In fact, it would have meant instant massive losses for any business. The old direct response methods never made a penny until the back end products were sold.

Nowadays, the advent of e-mail makes online businesses much more profitable, even on the front end.

So, how does one make these contact mechanisms work?
The reason that I am able to keep you so well “informed” is that I use an automated system that sits behind my business. It sends out what information I say to whom when I tell it to! Understand?

The Power of Autoresponders

Seriously though… I use an Autoresponder to manage my business. The package also has an integral Shopping Cart, which means online check out software.

These things have really come of age over the last 18 months. The system manages everything as far as customer contact is concerned.

•  It keeps a database of all my customers and people who sign up for my
courses and newsletters – I don’t even need a desktop contact management
program.

•  I can, however, export all the contacts to a desktop program if I feel the need!

•  It allows me to set the dates and frequency of communications I send out

•  I can send out “broadcasts” i.e.; one-off messages

•  I can track my ad campaigns

•  All my orders are managed for me, including the “order” and “thank you”
pages

•  I can manage my product database including all the relevant marketing
materials

•  I can develop custom forms and pop-ups for my websites

•  I can manage my entire affiliate program

•  And, there are superb online tutorials to help me make sure I get everything right with the minimum of fuss.

In short, I manage my entire business through the Shopping Cart / Autoresponder.
The one I use for my business is AWeber. Have a look by clicking on the following link. You can get a free trial run by clicking here.

To be honest, I really couldn’t run my business without this product. It takes a bit of commitment to learn how it all works, but as I said, the tutorials are excellent, so it’s just a case of dedicating a little time to learning what you need to know.

End Game

So, back to the original question, what is a customer worth over the lifetime of a business? To be honest I can’t even begin to imagine. What I do know is that approximately 20% of any customer base will become loyal and long-standing customers – customers how come back to buy time and time again. OK, so the front end product is only £67, but back end products range from £399 up to £1,499.

I also know that without my autoresponder, I couldn’t even begin to plug into this potential. So, the answer, is, without my autoresponder, a customer is worth very little! With it? Well, many thousands of pounds. When I decide to retire, I’ll sit down and work it all out, but I love this business, so that’s some way off. Watch this space!

I love working out new ways to do things, I love helping other people get up and running and hearing their success stories. I love writing these articles, I love finding new and useful products and I love learning about this business. With the pace the Internet moves at the only sure thing is change – that’s for sure! I learn somethingnew every day; it’s what keeps me going!

That’s it for today, so I’ll say goodbye until the next time.

Cheers now, and have fun….

Derek

Derek Armson
APD Marketing Ltd

derek@apd-marketing.co.uk
www.apd-marketing.co.uk