|
|
|
Ebook Marketing: Is It True That I Really Need to Use An Opt-In List for Potential Customers? |
|
Saturday, 27 February 2010 |
By Johnny Jones
 Many ebook marketers agree that having a carefully thought out business plan is critical to their success. And that plan is there because it helps the business owner to navigate: more specifically, the business plan is, in a sense, a map to finding customers.
So when we are talking about how to make money with ebooks, one dimension of that is growing the number of customers. The more customers we get, the more profit we get.
But it is not just customers we want. We want satisfied customers that revisit to buy more of our e-books or other products or services that we may offer.
So it is not sufficient, as seen from a long-term business standpoint, to have completed some sales and having some new customers; we also need to take care of our already existing customers and recommend them new products and services.
What Are Your Plans for Those Who Visit Your Website?
Now let us look at your web site or blog. If we assume that you have lots of traffic to your website, what do
you do with your visitors? Do you let them get away with not buying any ebook from you, and never return to your site? Or do you have some method of knowing who they are?
So the real question is this: Are you letting new website visitors who haven't bought anything when they visited your site just fade away into thin air, without knowing who they are? And even more importantly, are you letting returning visitors who already have bought from you leave? If so, what is your plan?
Even if you have steady traffic to your website, that traffic has not come to you completely free; normally lots of time and money have been spent to drive traffic to your pages. So why let anyone escape if you can stop it? Implement an optin email list (or several ones, for different types of visitors or products) and you can stop that tendency, and you will get a much better ROI (return on investment) in the long run.
This way, you will also let your potential customers in control: they sign up and listen to your email messages; and when they are truly convinced that they can trust purchasing from you, they will (usually later than sooner) buy from you.
The Optin List: Seeing Our Ebook Marketing Plan In Action
The most important idea of this article is the following: by investing some time and money in preparing a professional opt-in list with which you can build a list of potential customers, your e-book business will thrive. By being able to always track new customers that are added to the list, we will thus see, with our own eyes, that our e-book business plan is working.
Someone may, of course, criticize this statement and say that we don't need an email opt-in list to tell us that our business plan is working; for we can just keep an eye on our actual sales figures, and that will be enough. After all, the critic may say, the email list is not necessarily a list of buyers, but only a collection of people who possibly will buy in the future.
The skeptic does have a point here: the number of potential customers on the e-mail opt-in list does not indicate any current sales figures; so when estimating the current situation, the sales figure alone may be the best gauge. However, it is reasonable to expect, especially for large numbers of people on the emailing list, that there is a correlation between the number of email addresses and the number of people who will buy from our company in the future.
If we can accept that principle, then it would be fair say that an increasing number of subscribers would point to that our business model is working even in the near future, and that we are on track to making even more money. In other words, the list is not mostly a measure of current sales (for that is measured by the actual sales figures), but a measure of what our sales figures are going to be in the future.
Optin Email Lists: Also Good For Customer Behaviour Analysis
Email lists are thus necessary tools for getting your business to grow with new customers and sales. But opt-in lists are not merely used to signing up new potential customers or generate new sales; they can also be used to analyze the customers in various ways.
One way to do that is to be careful to note the time at which the customer signed up. If you have just had an AdWords advertising campaign, and you detect that the customer signed up two hours after you launched the campaign, and six hours before you stopped that campaign, you may conclude, with the help of other analytic information, that this person opted in to your email optin list as a direct result of your advertising. So he was attracted to the offer that you presented in your campaign.
Another example of tracking customer behaviour could be to use different opt-in forms for different places on your website. When the user signs up, you can then see which form he has used to join your list, and it might give you an indication of what type of customer he is. In addition, it may also give you an indication of how well that specific form performs, compared to other forms -- statistics which may come in handy if you need to modify your website or blog to provide a better user experience.
Adding an Opt-In List Is Excellent Ebook Marketing
The bottom line, however, is this. You have got to build an optin email list for your e-book business. Whether or not you carry out the analysis of the customers' behavior to further enhance your business is, of course, up to you. But in any case, you should seriously think about setting up your email responder to maximize your ROI. By using a professional opt-in list for your business and doing some serious email marketing, you can continuously communicate with your subscribers and gradually build their trust. And when the trust is there, and the products are there, there will be sales.
Article Source : Article King Pro - Free Reprints and Distribution
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Johnny Jones currently writes for the EbookBrothers.com website, where he shares his experience on ebook marketing and other aspects of running a lucrative ebook business, including topics such as how to build your email list, etc.
For a free subscription to the EbookBrothers.com Newsletter (with free e-articles, tips and tricks on how you can succeed with your own e-book project plans), visit the EbookBrothers.com web site today, before the free offer expires.
Email Hosting |
|
