Chasing New Business?

By Aaron Snider
Posted Wednesday, November 10, 2004

As well you should. New business is what makes the world go round. Your business relies on new business to survive. To get new business you must constantly change your marketing efforts. But what about old business? Have you made a business crippling mistake? Have you forgotten your previous customers while looking for new ones?

There are many ways to advertise your business. What kind of response do you get from e-zines, safelists, startpages, etc? Email is a great way to advertise your business, you can email so many people its hard to not get a response. E-zines are nice, better response cause you can target your promotion a little more than normal email. Start pages are good for Alexa ratings, but not much more. What kind of response do you really see though? 0.2%, 0.5%, 1%, 2%? If you get even 1% response you are the most fantastic copy writer and have the best product in the world. For the rest of us we are ecstatic when we get a 0.2% response or any at all.

Well what about the people that do buy from you? Do you even email them anymore? After you send your thank you for purchasing whatever they purchased from you, do you ever email them again? Well you should.

Lets take one person as an example. He/she buys an ebook about making minisites from you for $19.95. What can we tell about this person from their purchase? Well if they want to make mini web sites, they must have a webhost. Maybe your an affiliate for a webhosting company. Maybe they need products to sell on their minisite. Maybe they need an ebook about copywriting for their new minisites. Whatever else they need, they will buy it from somebody. They have already bought from you once, why not buy from you again?

When you make sales, make sure you have other products available to make the one they bought perform better or easier to use. If you sell one product to 100 people, then you sold a second product (that made the first product easier to use) to 50 of those people, you just sold 50% more products. You also just made 50% more profit, and didn't spend any more on advertising as you did before.

The point is, don't forget your previous customers. You will make more sales on a monthly basis with 1-2 simple emails to your previous customer base, and will significantly build your current business. Your previous customers trust you, like you, have money, and will buy from you again.

What the heck, let's all make a million.

About the Author
Aaron Snider
Support@something-big.com
(http://www.thecustomermanager.com)
Aaron wrote the Customer Manager Program