Many ebook entrepreneurs are careful about plotting their businesses and their ebook marketing activities. One detail that most of them agree on is that they have to have a well-thought-through marketing plot. With no it, they are lost. And that e-book marketing plot is there for a reason: it helps the business owner to chart out the territory so that he can grow his business. In other words, it is a map to find customers.
So when we are talking about growing our ebook business, one dimension of that is growing the number of customers. The more customers we get, the more profit we get.
But we are not merely talking about any type of customers. What we want is satisfied and returning customers that buy again and again from our pool of products and services.
In other words, from a long-term business top of view, it not adequate to be able to find a few new customers and be receiving a few new sales; we also have to make sure that those who already have bought from us will do so again.
Let us take for granted that you have transfer to your website. Thousands of visitors come to your site every day. What do you do with them? Are you just letting them come to “window-shop” and do nothing? Or are you counting on them to buy something? What happens if they don’t buy anything?
So the real question is this: Are you letting new website visitors who haven’t bought anything when they visited your site just disappear 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 plot?
Even if you have regular transfer to your website, that transfer has not come to you completely free; naturally lots of time and money have been spent to drive transfer to your pages. So why let anyone run away if you can stop it? Implement an email list (or several ones, for different types of visitors or products) and you can stop that trend, and you will get a much better ROI (return on investment) in the long run.
You will not only make more money, but you will also serve your clients better. They will sign up to your opt-in e-mail list and take part of your email messages. And when they gradually get more and more won over that they want to buy from you, they will one day (usually later than sooner) do so.
So my proposal is this. The most intelligent thing to do, from a business top of view, is to invest some time in preparing an opt-in list for your company. By collecting email addresses we are, so to speak, construction a map of the territory and our customers. In other words, this list of potential customers may be seen as real proof that our ebook marketing plot is working.
Someone may, of course, criticize this view and say that we don’t need an optin list to tell us that our business plot is working; for we can just keep an eye on our actual sales figures, and that will be sufficient. After all, the critic may say, the email optin list is not necessarily a list of buyers, but simply a collection of people who possibly will buy in the future.
Our answer could be this. It is right that the actual sales figure is the most tangible evidence that the business plot is working right now. Though, the optin email list can tell us about the future, and in that sense it is a measurement about whether our business is continuing to work, or whether our destiny is another. For it is reasonable to expect, mainly if the number of subscribers on your list is substantial (say a thousand or more), that there is a passionate statistical correlation between the number of subscribers on your list and your future sales.
If we can accept this as right, then an increasing number of potential customers signing up to our opt-in list would, indeed, top to that our business model is working, and that we are on the right track to making more money. The power of the list lies therefore not chiefly in the thought that it is a measure of the current sales, but that it is a measure of what our sales figures are going to be in the near future.
Email lists are therefore 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.
For example, the in rank about when they signed up to your email list can be vital. If you just had an AdWords advertising campaign going on, and observed that the campaign was still running when the visitor opted in to your list, you may conclude, in conjunction with other factors, that this was a direct result of your campaign.
Another way to use the email optin list sign-up in rank to be with you your potential customers better is to place different sign-up forms in different locations on your website. When the user signs up, you can then track from which form he signed up. This may tell you more about his interests and personality. Also, it may tell you something about which forms work best, and by doing so, it may give in rank about how to nip your website.
Whatever some bum marketers may be saying, email list construction is essential for anyone who is plotting a serious e-book business. By construction an opt-in list, the ebook marketer can continuously communicate with the subscribers and gradually build trust. And whenever there is trust (and products or services to sell), there is sales.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Johnny Jones currently appears at the EbookBrothers.com website, where he shares his views on ebook marketing, and on individual topics such as opt-in lists: yes or no? etc. For a free subscription to the EbookBrothers.com Newsletter (with free tips and articles on how to succeed with your own e-book marketing plans), visit this site on ebook marketing today, before the free offer expires.