Many e-book marketers agree that having a carefully thought out business plan is essential to their success. And that plan is there because it helps the business owner to navigate: more specifically, the business plan is, in a sense, a map to finding customers.
So when we are talking about how to make money online with your ebook business, one dimension of that is growing the number of customers. The more customers we get, the more profit we get.
But it is not just clients we want. We want satisfied clients that return to buy more of our ebooks or other products or services that we may provide.
In other words, from a long-term business standpoint, it not adequate to be able to find a few new customers and be getting a few new sales; we also have got to make sure that those who already have bought from us will do so again.
What Are Your Plans for Your Website Visitors?
Now let us look at your web site or blog. If we assume that you have lots of traffic to your website, what do you do with your visitors? Do you let them get away with not buying any ebook from you, and never return to your site? Or do you have some method of knowing who they are?
The question, therefore, is this: Can you afford to let non-buying visitors just leave without telling you who they are? And, perhaps even more important, should you allow buying visitors to go?
All efforts to bring in visitors to your website have cost you something. So why let them escape to possibly never return, if you can prevent it? By implementing an e-mail opt-in list on your website you can get the most money in return for your ebook business costs.
This way, you will also let your potential customers in control: they sign up and listen to your email messages; and when they are truly confident that they can trust buying from you, they will (usually later than sooner) buy from you.
The Opt-in Email List: The Ebook Marketing Plan In Action
The main idea of this article is the following: by investing some time and money in preparing a professional opt-in list with which you can build a list of potential customers, your ebook business will flourish. By being able to continuously track new customers that are added to the list, we will thus see, with our own eyes, that our ebook business plan is working.
The argument can, of course, be made that we don’t need an optin email 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 sign of that our ebook marketing 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.
Although the above objection may have some truth to it, let me say this. It is true that potential customers do not necessarily indicate the amount of the current sales; as for current sales, the sales figure alone is the best gauge. However, as is known from statistical analysis of sales figures and prospective customers, it is reasonable to expect that there is a certain percentage of those who have signed up for the optin list that eventually, in the future, will become buyers, and perhaps even be returning buyers.
If we can accept this as true, then an ever-increasing number of prospective clients signing up to our opt-in email list would, indeed, indicate 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 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.
Optin Email Lists: Also Good For Customer Behaviour Analysis
But email lists are not solely about getting an estimation of how your future sales is going to be. One may also use them in other ways to understand your customers better.
For example, the information about when they signed up to your email list can be important. If you just had an AdWords advertising campaign going on, and found out 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 list sign-up information to understand 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 information about how to tweak your website.
Opt-In List Building Is Good Ebook Marketing
The bottom line, however, is this. You have got to build an opt-in email list for your ebook 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 is currently writing for the EbookBrothers.com website, where he publishes his thoughts on ebook marketing and other aspects of running a lucrative ebook business, including topics such as how to build an optin email list, etc.
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