Resources for working the internet from home.

"Your Golden $$$ E-Names"
Copyright 2001 Steven Chabotte

You feel pretty good. You survived the dot.com shakeout and make some good money in 2000. And the future looks bright. You have your online business running smoothly and you feel you can grow it this year and be even more successful. In fact, that was one of your New Year resolutions.

Yet, you feel that in some vital way you are missing some opportunity, some way of looking at your business and its operation that could be worth a great deal of additional income to you... if you only knew how to tap into it!

In fact, there is one place that all businesses can tap into to dramatically increase their sales and profits, often with very little change in their day to day business operations. And that area is making intelligent use of every potential customer that finds your web site.

How do you do that? You put in mechanisms that assist you in gathering information about the various interests of each email customer.

See, the typical web site experience is very non interactive. A visitor goes to a web site, perhaps looks at a few pages and then leaves. Except for a few additions to your monthly page count, you know nothing about that visitor. All the effort and expense of getting that visitor
to come to your site is wasted as you will likely have no chance of ever getting to that person to visit again.

Instead, suppose you made some efforts to get the customer interacting with your web site. For instance, when a potential customer comes to your site, you let the visitor take a survey that marks out that person's interests or perhaps make a selection from a list of free reports or
you just ask several questions "to better serve the visitor" while on your site. There are any number of ways to attract a visitor's attention and to get the visitor to give you valuable information in exchange for something of value to that person. Also, you may choose to make this an "in your face" experience with a pop-up box when the customer arrives at your site and/or leaves. You have probably seen many examples of pop-up boxes when you visit web sites and you can use them too to increase attention on certain important details, like subscribing to an e-zine or adding your name to your special promotions list.

For the rest of this article, we will assume that you make efforts to get a person's email address as opposed to giving a free report with no information collection attempted (although you may decided to use the free report as a sales letter and want everyone, even folks who are
uncomfortable leaving an email address, to get the report as it helps you generate sales.)

Once you get that information (email and demographics data), you can use it immediately by sending a "thank you for visiting" email which also contains a summary of the important things on your site and perhaps a special offer given to people who have been courteous enough to stay on your site a while (perhaps a special 10% discount on an order or an additional free report that matches the person's interests.) Additionally, if adding the person to an email list, you should offer a way allow the visitor to unsubscribe from the email list if he or she so desires.

Most business owners who get an email address stop right there (one contact) and never contact that potential customer again. There are several reasons for this but the most common reason is a lack of tools. For instance, does that program running on your web site to collect the email address to send out a report archive the email address for your later use or does it throw it out? In most cases, these types of programs are one shot affairs and do not save any information. And if you are lucky enough to have a tool saves the email, does it collect and save other information that may be useful to you down the road when you want to contact that customer again? Does it have a way to contact the list again or do you need another tool to do this?

As the above shows, there are two places where the business owner usually fails in getting maximum use out of every visit. First, information on the visitor is not collected at all. Second, if it is collected, it is collected in a throw away manner or if it is saved, only the most basic of details (the email address) is saved.

To be successful, you need to build into your web operation a set of automated contact tools. They should be sophisticated so that they can do everything you need or anticipate in the future and they should work well together.

You should consider a tool or set of tools that can capture a visitor's email address as well as name, address and any demographics (i.e. interests) data you can collect and all this data should be automatically saved in a database for immediate and future use. The tool suite
should also allow you to contact these visitors on a periodic basic (with proper email list etiquette - ability to unsubscribe, etc.) both as a mass mailing of a generic offer or as a demographically tuned mailing of a special offer.

This allows for several types of actions. You can do general follow-ups to your visitors, reminding them about all the good things at your web site or some limited time special you are running. You can do periodic, timed follow-ups to them based on specific interests that they
have expressed when visiting your site. And, you can contact subsets of your list with specific offers that would be of interest to that visitor based on one or more demographics selections. This last item allows you to build several very targeted special interest lists out of your larger, general purpose contact list.

By doing the demographics targeting, you can write a very detailed letter to that particular interest and only send it to the people most likely to respond to an offer. For instance, if you were selling stereo systems and you had the ability to sell just 5 really top of the line ($50K) systems to your customer list at 20% off, who would most appreciate being contacted with this information?

Obviously, the people who indicated they buy high end equipment would most appreciate the letter and you would probably very quickly sell out your inventory. But what would happen if you sent that letter to your entire list, which includes people who think $500 is an expensive stereo system? You would probably get a large number of unsubscribes as many people would think they were on a list that was of no value to them. This means that when you run a special on the $500 equipment, you will have a much smaller list of contacts.

Making the most of every contact is what makes your business grow and the very best way to do that is to be sensitive to every individuals particular needs and desires. By having the right data collection and analysis tools for your website, this process becomes a reality and will greatly improve your bottom line in any business, whether it be retail, a service business, MLM, business to business sales or any other endeavors.

Steven Chabotte is president of Big-Web Development Corp,
a company specializing in the development of email
productivity and marketing tools for the web. Steven can be
reached at webmaster@maxsponder.com or you can visit our
website at http://www.maxsponder.com

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