How You Can Get Your Customers to Buy from You for Life…
It’s More than Just Creating Quality Products at a Discount! Online and digital marketing is about creating a strategy to get your customers to buy from you for life. And it’s quite satisfying to serve people in this way, as well.
Raise your hand if you feel customer service is sorely lacking in today’s world. Well it’s even worse on the internet where you’re doing business with a static domain via your computer screen.
Here’s the deal: When you sign up for a credit card or buy a new car, the dealer or company gets your contact information, right? Then you start getting mail about special deals on oil changes or an insurance offer just for Visa owners.
You have the right to tear it up and throw it away or sign up for the deal, cash in for 20% off an oil change, or agree to whatever it is they’re offering. Online, sellers also want a way to reach you for future offers – and it’s to your benefit because you usually get a better deal than the rest of the paying public.
We’ve gotten it ingrained in our heads that all email offers are SPAM and just plain evil. But is it any different from your Honda dealer contacting you to let you get your windshield wiper fluid topped off at a fraction of the cost?
Now if all I do is capture your name and a few other details and then email you non-stop with blatant sales-speak of product offer after product offer, then you’re right – I’m a spammer.
However, what you as a marketer want to do is put your white gloves on and handle your customers with care.
I can’t tell you how many lists I’ve opted out of just because I got emails every single day – sometimes more than once a day! It’s annoying, even though all it takes is a quick click of the mouse to hit “delete.”
The Lifetime Value of a Customer… Crucial in Your Quest to Get Customers to Buy From You for Life
When someone buys from you online, they’re buying a part of your niche. Maybe it’s a parent of a newborn seeking a solution to their child’s diaper rash. The original purchase they made was only $47.
You can have 100 $47 customers and leave it at that. Or, you can turn those 100 customers into lifetime buyers and increase their value tenfold. What if only once a year you released a product that they purchased for $47 because they admired your first item and felt it had a great deal of value for them?
Suddenly after 10 years, that $47 has turned into $470. Multiply that times 100 customers, and you’ve built a database worth $47,000. And you can create a new product every month if you want to – there’s no annual limit on how fast you can grow your eBook and information product empire. I routinely get requests for 5 eBooks at a time – from a single top-level client. Market saturation is their strategy. In fact, they love it when their own products compete against one another!
What did it cost you to get that customer in your virtual door in the first place? Did he or she click through on a pay per click ad that you bid $1.50 for? Then you can subtract that from your $47 initial profit to get an idea of the bottom profit margin.
Now, what if your info products are ripe with hyperlinks to affiliate items like baby or child gear being sold at Amazon? Do you know how much parents pay to raise a child these days? There are necessities and impulse buys – tons of things you can market to your niche audience to turn that single purchase into a treasure trove of profits.
There’s only one way to get this lifetime value building – and that’s through marketing to them again. Your only way to contact them is via email, but you don’t want to risk offending them or turning them off.
Quick Detail Tip: Hyperlinking anywhere on the internet should be done with cloaking tools. I use and recommend Pretty Link. Otherwise, you risk getting ripped off when someone goes to buy your recommendation.
If you’re tracking a link to a PDF file, then change the ending to “.PDF” instead of “.html” so that people don’t click on it unsuspectingly and have their computers get bogged down trying to download a large file (I learned this one the hard way when a marketer blasted me for doing this, but I was never told – one of those little details everyone “forgot” to fill me in on).
After where it says, “to URL” you want to add the actual destination URL, which will be your affiliate link to the product or service you’re recommending. Then click the Add button.
The Risk of Sending Spam
Permission marketing is a vital element to your promotional plans. You do not ever want to send emails to people who don’t want them, didn’t sign up, and didn’t ask for them.
Sometimes, this even means your existing customer base. There are two schools of thinking in the Internet marketing world – those who believe you MUST send an email message out at least every three days to keep your name fresh in the eye of the consumer, and people like me – who believe in the power of only speaking up when you have something important to say.
I don’t always send out weekly emails to my list (unless they’ve signed up for a weekly tips course). I don’t email them with every affiliate offer other marketers want me to promote – only ones I really believe in. I try to never, ever spam them with useless dribble. At least it’s not in my mind.
Instead, I save my emails for when I have an important announcement (like my new product coming out) – but I also give them an incentive to stay on my customer list. They get a discount or they get access to my product before it’s released to the public.
I sometimes run a free report by them just to get feedback on it before I sell it to the masses. Everything I do has to have true value or else I’ll get dozens of people opting out of my list every day.
My advice is to treat your customers like gold. If you don’t have anything to offer them as a thank you, then create something. Make sure it’s something within their niche – something they can find useful.
If you break the rules and start sending Spam out, you can lose everything and risk fines and even jail time! Make sure that everything is done with confirmation emails, assuring you that this person really did sign up for your list.
Customer Management Tools to Get Your Customers to Buy From You for Life
When you decide to create a customer database, you need to have a system in place to handle everything for you automatically. I personally prefer to use AWeber – an affordable autoresponder tool that costs me less than $20 a month and I’ve gotten that recommendation from almost every guru I’ve ever worked with.
Here’s how it works (and it doesn’t matter which tool you use, just that it has all of the features you need):
You can set up multiple lists – so I have ones for my blogs (for those who want to subscribe), lists for buyers of products, and a list for my membership sites. When the time comes to blast out a message, you can tag more than one list and send out a single email.
Some people join more than one list and others stay on one. They all receive different messages unless I broadcast a single announcement to all of my lists. Once you name your list, you can write a short description about it.
You want to check the box that allows people to opt out of all of your lists with one click of a mouse. Because what happens if you’ve signed up for 3 out of my 4 lists and you forget that fact?
Then one day you unsubscribe from one list yet still get email messages from the other two? You’re going to think your unsubscribe link didn’t work and then report me for spam, which I don’t want.
You also want to have a verified opt-in email going out. So if you were a writer and went to go sign up for my weekly Action Habits Challenge emails, you’d first receive a verification email asking you to click on a link to assure me that you’ve really requested this.
Here’s what it should say (customized with your words):
Hi {!firstname_fix},
Thank you for signing up to receive your copy of chapter 1 from my eBook, XYZ. Before I can send it to you, check your email for a confirmation link. I have to ensure I’m not accused of sending spam out to anyone.
As soon as you confirm your email address, I’ll send you the first chapter of my eBook and you’ll also start receiving your weekly tips!
Notice the salutation where it says, {!firstname_fix}? That’s a code that populates the email with whatever name the person signed up as. So if you entered Betty as your first name, it would say, “Hi Betty.”
This email gives you proof that someone opted into your list in the event they report you for spam. It protects you to a certain degree. But it’s also just good customer service!
I have also set up weekly tips and I’ll keep adding more as we go. But the third message isn’t set to deliver until 7 days later – one week after they receive the first tip. After every message you create, you want to conduct a test and email it to yourself to see if it looks right, check the spelling, and see how the links work if you have links within the email message.
I can’ tell you how many times I’ve been in a rush or gotten lazy and sent out a bad link – like one with an extra comma at the end or something. It makes me mad and I vow never to do it again! (Every time I do it).
Click Tracking is either On or Off in your message. If I have a link my list can click on, then I can track how many people clicked through on it. I can also use the black arrows to move a message up or down in distribution, but if I want to delete it, then it needs to be at the very bottom of the list so I can click on the X and remove it.
At any time I can check the leads for each list to see who is on my lists, who has verified their contact information, and see who unsubscribed. I’ve found AWeber to be very easy to use and I know many other marketers utilize it, too.
Just remember – before your customers hear a peep out of you, stop and think before you hit send. Is what you’re sending worthy to them or are you just trying to squeeze another dime out of them? Serve people well and get your customers to buy from you for life!
I’m author, publisher, and entrepreneur Connie Ragen Green and would love to connect with you. If you are new to the world of online entrepreneurship please check out my comprehensive training on how to set up Funnels That Click and learn how to gain an unfair advantage when it comes to building a lucrative online business. This strategy will help you to get your customers to buy from you for life.
Leave a Reply