The Golden List
by Asi Erenberg - March 4th, 2006 12:17 pm
Asi Erenberg is CEO Ecommerce Partners &
Dr. Roni Horowitz Chief consultant for Ecommerce Partners
Subscription to a mailing list, must it be on a website?
Repeat after me… “The objective of my internet business is to create a real relationship built on strong foundations of trust and long term commitment with my existing and potential customers, all with the intention of constantly increasing the lifetime value of each visitor to the website.
Relationship is the key word to business on the Internet. You need to check each marketing action to see if it contributes to or damages the relationship with your customers.
Relationship with customers is now a very fashionable topic in the business community and you may therefore wonder why I’m raising such a worn subject.
The Internet is different from the old business world at some point. On the Internet you first create a relationship with the visitors and only afterwards do you sell. In the old business world a person first becomes a customer and only afterwards (maybe) a relationship is formed.
In my Internet business, for example, I have a weekly newsletter with over 10,000 subscribers. The objective of the newsletter is to promote sales of my e-books. Some people purchase e-books from me only after reading my weekly newsletters over a fairly long period of time – one person subscribed for two years before purchasing from me.
A necessary condition for having a relationship with visitors and customers is to collect their e-mail addresses. The trick is that you have to provide a very good reason for people to willingly provide you with their e-mail address – everyone is very sensitive about their privacy and their time.
It’s necessary to do whatever possible (and sometimes creativity is required too), to persuade visitors to give you the thing that is most precious to them – “their time (that’s how the majority of people view providing their e-mail address).
Let’s assume that you have a hair salon. You have a website and you want to encourage your customers to provide you with their e-mail addresses.
Do you expect them to go into your website and register after a visit to the hair salon? That would be hard to believe. Even if you promise them significant benefits, chances are that they’ll simply forget to do it.
You therefore need to use a totally different tactic in this case:
An example would be to provide the customers waiting in the hair salon with Internet access in return for providing their e-mail addresses. Another possibility would be to offer a discount on the next visit to those who agree to provide their e-mail address on the spot.
One other way would be for a few hair salons to unite and produce electronic newsletters on the subject of lifestyle that will be sent free to the customers who provided their e-mail addresses.
There’s a need to break the fixation that subscribing to a mailing list must be on a website. This can be anywhere, even outside the Internet, in a hair salon – notices on the board, etc.
When you have the list in your hands, you have the gold in your hands. And if you use it correctly, you’ll increase your sales significantly.
Using the list, the hair salon can invite customers for an inexpensive haircut on slow days. It can also sell other products, for example cosmetics.There’s no limit to the possibilities.
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