What to Do with Your Customers…

This is the fourth post in this series of Targeted Traffic - The Life of Your Online Business.

=> Targeted Traffic The Life Of Your Online Business Part 1

=> Targeted Traffic Part 2

=> What to Do with Your Email List

Part Four:  What To Do With Your Customers

Moving on from your list and your most general and untargeted form of targeted marketing, let’s take a look at the first specialized section here, your customers. The people that have either only bought low priced introductory products from you before, or have only purchased from you once.

What you’ll start to see is as we get more specialized and move up the food chain in terms of profitability, things start to get easier to figure out what to do and when to do it when crossing your resources over. It’s also important to note, that with paying customers, and them being lower in numbers than your list, it’s easier to make a mistake and lose profit potential rather quickly if you’re not careful about where you’re setting foot.

When thinking about what to do with what resource, remember to always think in terms of where these people are going next in the standard form when setting orders in the way of importance. For example, with our short-term customers, in the standard flow of things, they’ll be turning into your big buyers. The people that buy the most products from you at the highest price, so again, short term, they may not seem like much now, but in the future, this is where your big profits are going to be coming from, hence their major importance, and the general attitude is that you should give them something a little extra for their time. That’s not because they’re more demanding than your list, but because the profit potential is much higher for you, their numbers are much smaller, and the margin of error also is much smaller.

Organizing Is the Key to Success

Now, before we even start, we’re seeing a new problem emerge. The organizing and managing of five different resources that all overlap can become a complex, time consuming and confusing task, and that’s not what we want. I can rightly see why many just take all their five resources and just bundle them into one list. I’d highly suggest you avoid doing this unless you’re just promoting other peoples stuff or very rarely create your own products. If your business is, and will in the future remain all about the products you’re creating and selling, keep them separate. If you carry this section out correctly, it won’t mean a huge amount of extra work, aside from five short mailings per product promotion drive or launch instead of one.

Back to Managing Your Customers

The reason I mention the above is that when you get to this stage, the people out there that do things this way and keep their resources separated, try to give them the earth. For example, if I told you how valuable these people are, and you wanted to turn them into affiliates, how do you do so?

The general answer would be to give them higher commissions. This however is not worth your trouble, because we’re overlooking one serious flaw in that plan. Unless your product is geared to give higher commissions in the beginning to people who purchase it, these people aren’t necessarily suited to affiliate material, and in my experience, it’s best not to bombard them with affiliate signup pages and adverts about how much they can make unless that is a specific benefit of your product.

I’d suggest to you that the only way around this is not to do the above, because your main aim is not to make them promote for you, but to buy your higher priced products and move up the ladder. So the solution is treat them as such. When you’re mailing them about a new product, include information about how much they can earn promoting for you. I highly recommend not deviating from the original plan and flow of the chart with these important people, especially when it comes to trying to turn them into affiliates. You’ll gain plenty of them via the other resources, leave well alone trying to give them bonuses or bigger commissions at this stage, because otherwise you’ll just end up with a big tangled ball of yarn and a headache. We’ll get on to just how we make them valued in a moment.

But first, let’s look at turning your customers into your list. To start with, you’ll find that most of your customers are on your list anyway. Not much needs to be said about this subject for that very reason. Any customers that aren’t on your standard list will still be receiving ads for your products, high cost products and low cost products as part of your introductory series each time you launch something new using the backend sales flow chart. What they won’t be receiving are the mails that you use to try and separate your list into one of these categories for the same reasons as with the lack of affiliate mailings as explained in the previous point.

Any of your customers that are not on your standard list won’t be missing much in the way of making you money by not being there, because they’re already where you want them, in a prime position to buy a premium product from you. In my experience, customers are more than ten times more likely to buy from you again than your standard list, and this is the reason I said that your list is the least targeted and lowest quality of the big five resources. 

Customers to Long-Term Customers

Moving on swiftly, lets look at the probably the most important part here, and that’s turning your customers into long-term customers, or big buyers. Now just because they’re in this phase and haven’t bought your first high ticket item after standard follow-up procedures, doesn’t mean they’re useless, and will only ever buy the fifty dollar products from you. Far from it, but it does mean one of three things. Either there was a gap in your marketing system that they fell through, whether it was your intro product, your ad copy or your sales letter, or they couldn’t afford to purchase the larger product, or finally they weren’t interested in what you had to offer.

For those reasons, you have to make sure to cater to all of them when you launch your next products. They will receive your small intro product, and as a follow-up to this they will also receive your larger high-ticket product. This is important here, because if they didn’t purchase your first high priced product, you’ll want to get them in at the bottom again before you do anything else, and have them move through your intro product up to the bigger product. If your first time around was shoddy, they’ll know your game, and not buy into the second fresh new product line you’ve set up, and never move through to buy high-ticket items from you.

Now as a follow-up to this, you’ll want to also notify them directly about your high-ticket item some time after you notify them of the intro product. This way, you’re again regenerating the trust and the familiarity of your brand through your intro product and at the same time, having those that didn’t move up the ladder through your first product move up now. And of course don’t go thinking that people will be annoyed that bought the intro product to receive a bigger, better product later, again for the reason that your intro product is a real, and helpful product, not just a cheap excuse to sell bigger stuff. It’s ethical, it covers all angles relating to your standard customers, and what’s more, it works like a charm.

Turning Your Customers into JVs

Finally, turning your customers into joint venture prospects works in much the same way that you carried out for your list. You’ll also be pulling research numbers from these guys, and from that research you’ll know who to pull up for joint ventures. This is the only way to effectively do this and keep the joint ventures personal, instead of just mass mailing a list. It keeps you in the driver’s seat. Of course, at this stage there’s no other way to do this, chances are your list of customers who have purchased from you even though not as big as your list, will be too big to talk to all of them personally at this stage, which without this or affiliate stats, you have no other way of knowing who you want to make deals with.

What to Do with Your Customers Summary

Summing this up then, your customers are important to you and have a specific role. Changing that role at this all important stage can do more harm than good. If you’re going to contact them about anything other than research or sales of your products, refer to your research first and do it personally and individually for joint ventures, and avoid it altogether for turning them into affiliates. If you really want your customers to become affiliates as to plug the gap, make sure you have a higher commission integrated into the products they’re buying from you, so they can take this offer up as a benefit if they’re interested in the first place, and not to do it as afterthought.

Right, we’re going to stop this one here as not to give you information overload. In the next section, after the summary that follows, we’ll continue looking at how to cross your resources to get more out of them when we take a closer look at what to do (and what not to do) with your affiliates, long term customers and joint venture prospects. We’ll also be taking a look at a few of the generalized ideas about treating all your lists correctly.

You’ll see exactly what effect this has later, but I can tell you now, that when you launch into this type of cross promotion of your resources, you’ll be drawing on all of this knowledge without having to wade through a bunch of text when you’re busy launching your products and managing resources. It may seem a little strange right now, but I assure you, it’s for the best, which you’ll be finding out for yourself very soon. See you in the next section!

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