Build Your Business by Building Your List

If I had to guess where most of Walmart’s money comes from, I would say it comes from the people who shop at Walmart everyday or at least a few times a week. These people, generally aren’t people who are going to Walmart because they saw an advertisement or commercial. They shop at Walmart because they are existing customers who like the products and the prices.

Let’s take that Walmart example and apply it to your business….

[membership level=”0,3″] [/membership] [membership level=”1,2,4,5,6,7,8,9″] Are you making steady sales like Walmart or are you getting sales few and far between? Are you sitting at your computer or phone, waiting for a new order? If your sales are not steady, it is probably because you either focus more on new customers than old customers or you do not interact with your existing customers as well as you should.

If you want to build your business, you need a steady flow of traffic and the majority of that traffic should come from existing customers that continue to want what you are selling. The reason why you want return visits as opposed to new visits is simple, you don’t have to pay to marketing costs to find your old customers because you already have them. Client Retention is actually something I learned from entrepreneur and marketing expert, Richelle Shaw. As Richelle points out in her Recession Proof Your Business Plan, by focusing on existing customers you reduce your marketing costs and increase the revenue you generate from return sales.

If you are an internet entrepreneur like me, the best tool that you can use to build and track your list of customers is an email marketing solution. It’s funny how times change; email marketing has gotten a bad rap for years, because most entrepreneurs did it the wrong way. They sold lists, bought lists, and randomly sold to anyone with an email address, which created the SPAM epidemic that we all hate. I hated statistics in high school, which is why I never saw the value in buying huge lists and thinking there was a high probability that I would get a few good leads. While some entrepreneurs were losing money because they opted to buy lists, others figured out how to use email marketing as an effective tool. If you create a list from scratch, with your existing happy customers and interested potential customers, you will essentially create a list of people who you know will open your emails and buy what you are selling.

Don’t you think it’s better to have a list of 500 loyal customers than a list of 50,000 strangers who don’t care about what you are selling? I believe that the key to effective email marking is as follows:

1. Build Your List from Scratch
2. More People Isn’t Necessarily Better: Don’t Add People Who Don’t Opt into Yourself
3. Don’t Buy Lists in the hope of getting Fast Leads
4. Don’t try to Sell to Your List every day or all the time
5. Don’t devalue your list buy selling them things they don’t want

If you are interested in building your list via an email marketing solution, I recommend using iContact. You can read my review about iContact if you want.

[/membership]