Digital Marketing Essential Keys 3.

Continuity or Just Call it Good Old Repeat Business

Cracking the code to getting this aspect of any business right is the real key to success.

If you can keep on selling to your existing customers then good luck to you, as you've got a fantastic business.

The first important thing to understand though is that not everyone that comes to your web site will buy from you or even get in touch - most will stick around for a few seconds then just leave.

So to prosper from this inevitability it is important to get some mechanisms in place that try to hook a share of these passive visitors into your sales funnel.

Not sure what a sales funnel is? Ok just quickly, it is the process that you put in place that turns your prospects in to conversions.

So like I have said in part 2 you need to have a set of clearly defined goals and one of these should be to capture email addresses.

When you build a good list of prospects that you regularly email you are effectively keeping them in your sales funnel without them actually having to be on your site.

So How Do You Capture Quality Email Addresses?

Now there are still some people that think that a newsletter sign up hidden somewhere on their home page, is enough to compel users to give up their email addresses, and hey presto, you can start spamming them with pointless updates about your new warehouse or chief executives new car...with a product thrown in for good measure.

...think again.

You are trying to get QUALITY leads, not necessarily volume (but it helps).

The secret to attracting relevant prospects when gathering emails, is to offer something to people that is worthwhile, (and you should continue to provide something worthwhile EVERY time you hit that send button in future).

Using our hand made furniture business as an example, a free buyers guide written by a craftsman, on how to save money by spotting a well made piece of furniture over a dud, is going to really appeal to a possible buyer.

A communication like this is going to be welcome and will reinforce you as an expert.

When done properly, keeping in touch via email is very effective. You will find that being trusted by this person is not then too far away.

It is highly likely that if you continue to provide useful information to them, you can almost guarantee that you will be bookmarked for future reference and make the sale sooner or later.

Another Effective Method for Repeat Revenue

Most businesses have a lot of content that just languishes on hard drives because nobody thinks it has any real value, or it has not been considered for packaging up for the public.

Well, next up is a way for monetising that content, by allowing access to it all packaged up as premium content, via a low cost monthly membership subscription.

Now you might be thinking that there is so much available information on the internet for free, that nobody in their right mind would pay for content and in some ways you'd be right. In fact though, in most ways you would be wrong.

The proliferation of content is precisely why membership sites are flourishing, because it brings all of the information and resources they need under one roof. They also provide a community of like-minded people to interact and share experiences with.

If you have got access to a raft of great content, then it is just a matter of repackaging it and presenting it in a different way. You can then set up a membership web site (and that is really not too much trouble too as there are plenty of scripts available to enable this).

For example a restaurant could provide access to its top 5 secret recipes every month, available for download as an 'over the shoulder instruction' video with a PDF transcript or as a physical DVD (these are not that expensive to manufacture these days).

Attached to this service could be a private members forum, special member offers and monthly newsletters and bingo! you have got yourself a membership site with regular monthly revenues.

Simply, if you can get your target audience to sign up to a membership style site, then promoting your products or services to them will take a tenth of the effort of winning new business.

---

For more information on how to plan a long term digital marketing strategy, call us for a no strings chat on 05603 145 278.