Many ebook entrepreneurs are careful about planning their businesses and their ebook marketing strategies. One point that most of them agree on is that they have to have a well-thought-through marketing plan. Lacking it, they are helpless. And that ebook marketing plan is there for a reason: it aids 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 on the topic of making more money using e-books, we are almost certainly talking about an increasing number of customers (although other factors may be there also). For the more customers we can get, the more profit we will be able to acquire.
But we are not purely talking about any sort 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 viewpoint, it not sufficient to be able to find a few new customers and be getting a few new sales; we also must make sure that those who already have bought from us will do so again.
What Are Your Plans for Those Who Visit Your Website?
Now let us turn to your blog or website. Let us assume that you already have traffic to your site. Thousands of visitors come to your site every day. The question is: When new visitors come to your site, what do you do with them? Can they come to “window-shop” and leave without doing anything at all? 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 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?
All efforts to bring visitors to your website have cost you something. So why let them escape to possibly never return, if you can stop it? By implementing an optin email list on your website you can get the most money in return for your ebook business expenses.
Getting your visitors on that email optin list will let you have them at your fingertips: you can now email them at any time with information regarding the products and services you provide, and gradually build a long-term relationship that will be mutually beneficial. And as soon the potential customer is sure that you are an expert in your niche, he will buy from you, providing you have the right products to offer.
The Email Opt-in List: Seeing Our Ebook Marketing Plan In Action
The main idea that I am trying to put forward is this: if you invest some time in setting up an optin list (a so-called autoresponder system), this makes perfect business sense. By being able to track potential customers we are, in a sense, getting a map of the territory and our future customers. We may thus see the email list as tangible evidence that our ebook marketing plan is working.
The argument can, of course, be made that we don’t need an optin list of potential customers to verify that our business model is working. After all, these people are not necessarily the real customers anyway, since they have not necessarily acquired anything yet. So it is no indication of that our ebook business plan is working. If there are no sales yet, what good is it for? So a better indication of that our business plan is working would be to just look at the sales figures: if there is more sales, then it is working; if there isn’t, it’s not.
Our answer may be this. It is true that the actual sales figure is the most tangible evidence that the business plan is working right now. However, the email opt-in 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, especially if the number of subscribers on your list is substantial (say a thousand or more), that there is a strong statistical correlation between the number of subscribers on your list and your future sales.
If we can recognize this as true, then an ever-increasing number of prospective clients signing up to our opt-in email list would, indeed, be a sign of 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 primarily in the idea 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 Optin Lists: Also Good For Tracking Customers
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.
One way to use the opt-in list sign-up information to understand your potential customers better is to note the date and time when they signed up. This may be essential for various reasons. One example may be that you just have launched a special AdWords advertising campaign, and you observe that the sign-up happened when that advertising campaign was live. By investigating also other aspects on the site, with for example Google Analytics, you may conclude that this, indeed, was a result of your AdWords campaign. By investigating all such occurences, you may get a nice picture of whether or not your ebook advertising campaign was successful.
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 particular form performs, compared to other forms — statistics which may come in handy if you need to alter your blog or site to provide a better user experience.
Using an Opt-In List Is Great Ebook Marketing
The bottom line, however, is this. You have got to build an optin 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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Johnny Jones currently appears at the EbookBrothers.com website, where he writes about ebook marketing and other aspects of running a lucrative ebook business, including topics such as how to build an email optin list of customers, etc.
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