Thursday, November 19, 2009

Lifetime Value of a Customer Part II

Seth Godin's post today is on Lifetime Value of a Customer, which I wrote about recently.

"If you ran a business where a customer represented an additional $2,000 in profit, how would you staff? How long would you make someone wait? If staff costs $25 an hour, how long would that extra person take to pay off? ... Few businesses understand (really understand) just how much a customer is worth. Add to this the additional profit you get from a delighted customer spreading the word--it can easily double or triple the lifetime value."

That's an important point.

Which one are you?

You spend money to market your business via radio or TV. If so, that is Branding (getting their name out there). It isn't targeting your qualified prospects enough to be really effective as lead generation or a sales tool.

You have a billboard or 2. Again, mainly name recognition, because unless that billboard is on a road with lots of traffic, people are driving by barely noticing.

You tried direct mail once or twice and were unhappy with the results. Well, direct marketing is about 4 things: The List, The Offer, The Headline, and Repetition. You need to maximize these 4 factors to get good results. One client recently got a 5% response. (That's huge by the way).

You have a referral program, whereby you have a line or 2 on the bill about it and a paragraph on your website. You wonder why you don't get better results.

You keep being reminded to get listed locally online, but just can't get around to it.

If the lifetime value of your client is $2000, you should be spending money acquiring them! And then a few dollars more retaining them.

Here's the pitch:

RAD-INFO has a service to get you listed online locally. And we can help you with your direct marketing - preparing a list, an offer, and tracking.

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