Email Marketing For Small Businesses

So you decide you want to sell one of your widgets.

You put together an email that talks about your widget. You may even show a photo of your widget, and send it out to your clients. And you send your email out to your entire list.

How direct are you with your overall selling process?

I’m a member of Barnes & Noble. We shop there a lot, and of course I’m a member.

So once a week I get emailed info on their current weeks sales, and an occasional coupon to help motivate me to visit online or come in and buy.

Because I’m a member, they have everything on file for past purchases. So my emails aren’t just talking about current releases, they focus the email specifically to me.

So this week, my email started out “New From an Author You Know” and went on to say that since I’ve purchased a book from this author, I may be interested in the newest release.

Great marketing!

The book is for my daughter, and yes, we’re heading over after school to buy it.

Consider these two questions:

1. How many customers do you have that regularly buy from you?

2. Do you know what they buy and what they would be interested in buying from you in the future?

In both cases, you can probably divide your list into categories, and send out emails that pertain exclusively to that list.

Maybe a portion of the people purchase holiday cards from you every year. You can send out an email saying you know they’ve purchased holiday cards from you in the past, and if they purchase 100 cards between now and October 15th, you’ll throw in an additional 25 at no cost.

How’s that for motivating your clients to purchasing more.

It’s all about knowing who your clients are, and giving them what you know they want. Motivate them. They already love what you have, why make the buying process difficult?

Lifetime Value Of Your Clients – What’s Your Value?

To celebrate our daughter being back in school, and our chance to get back to work on a fairly regular basis, we decided to head out to lunch at our fav – Qdoba.

We spent a long time going over our goals for this fall, and talking about ways to bring in different types of clients. While we were talking about lead generation, we suddenly got onto the topic of lifetime value of customers.

We’ve been Qdoba regulars since they first came to town – at least six years ago. Qdoba has a frequent customer card that allows you to get one meal free when you purchase 10 meals. Because we usually go together – 2 meals at once – we usually can fill the card in five visits.

Each meal is about $6, which means they give you $6 when you spend $60. We also made the assumption we filled one card every two months (it is our favorite place after all). Which means we spend about $360 a year, and they give us $36 of free food each year.

Because we’ve been going there for around six years now, we’ve spent about $2160 – if you assume everything I mentioned above is constant. [Wow, this is actually a great lesson for me - I can't believe how much we've spent going out to lunch once every week or two.]

And because it’s one of our favorite lunch spots, we’ll be going there well into the future. Which means our lifetime value will end up being several thousand dollars. What’s an occasional free meal to someone who is going to bring several thousand dollars into your business?

You can see how quickly even $6 adds up. What about big ticket items? Maybe you have a $1000 monthly program, or several different products worth several hundred dollars a piece. How many times do your clients buy from you? What’s your overall lifetime customer value?

Once you find out how valuable a client is to you, you can begin to see how much you can spend to get a client through your doors. If your average client is worth $5000, maybe mailing $100 worth of marketing materials to gain that client isn’t very much after all.

As I’m planning two new promotions for the fall, I’ll be spending some of my time calculating the lifetime value of my clients. Even with quick calculations, I know my numbers are high. I’ll definitely be using this to come up with my promotions.