Who's Buying What?

“Wealth flows from energy and ideas” -- William Feather

Now that we've made sure you have an easy to use content rich crawlable site... do you have an online marketing strategy?

Is it on paper? Do you follow it?

It's important to have an actual strategy that has been thought through and matches your business goals. With e-letters it's all about acquiring new names.

I'm a broken record, eh?

Yes, we've talked about many different ways to bring in names over the last few months... but have I mentioned that your name collection strategy and your sales strategy must overlap 100%?

If not... I am now.

As we market to the lifetime value it means bringing in not just names but names that buy your products.

For those new to the CVoD blog... "lifetime value" means bringing in names that will produce the greatest long-term benefit to the company. It means taking a name that reads your free e-letter, at a zero value, and converting it to a buyer. And then, take it up a level, and convert it to be a multi-buyer. In other words, you take a newly acquired name and get it to buy products (from your company) for years into the future - that's your goal.

Let's be honest... anyone can bring in useless names. That's easy. Crappy names are all over the Internet. The skill is bringing in good quality free names... names that you can convert into a buyer.

But...

How do you do that? Where do you look? And how do you tell the buyers from the non-buyers on your list?

Here's a simple tip... it's more than a tip actually, it's the difference between being a successful marketer and being lost in a fog. (I'm not ashamed to admit I've been both at times.)

It's tracking.

Tracking, reporting and analysis.

Tag the source of every name that comes in to your file. When it comes in... where it comes from... the type of effort and the costs associated.

If you do this... above all things... you'll know exactly everything you need to know about your list. This information will allow you to track the dollar per name on your list per the source of where they came.

Why is this important?

With this specificity you'll be able to see what names are the most profitable and you'll be able to go back out and spend your time and money acquiring more of those high dollar worth names. AND there by staying away from the names that are worthless.

This may sounds simple - and it is.

But it all starts with correct tracking in EVERY effort.

I've seen many a so-called marketers use the same tracking code three or four times to different efforts just because of time constraints. As a result, they may bring in great names but they won't know it. They wont know where the result are coming from. Which one of the four efforts produced the stellar results?

These same marketers are than confused as to why their reports are inaccurate. And they blame the database or reporting teams. When the screw up is theirs!

It's the old saying "garbage in garbage out."

So remember tracking... it all starts there for list building. Oh, and with websites.... it's crawlability. But you all ready know that now.