If you’re familiar with the wonderful marketing training by people like Jay Abraham, Dan Kennedy, etc. please realize that some concepts that work in the “real world” don’t compute as easily online.
It’s not that the concepts are wrong… they’re not.
It’s that online work adds a new dimension and tricks marketers into thinking someone is a customer who’s really not.
For instance, if the lifetime value of your average customer is $5,000, in the real world then your marketing budget can estimated based on this figure.
Anything under $5,000 per customer and you’re “in profit”.
That’s still true, but who’s a customer online?
Where did you get the life time value figure? From your experience in a brick and mortar busines? Online?
What constitutes a customer?
Someone who signs up for your free ezine?
Maybe… sometime… when money is paid.
But how much do you spend on acquiring the name?
Unlike a “snail mail” list, email addresses change with greater speed.
Email lists have been hyped by saying that every name is worth $1 per month in income.
That might be true of a direct response mailing list, but I doubt it’s true of an email list… at least for most people.
I guess I’m saying test cautiously. For example, I recently (last few months) purchased about 40,000 “clicks” to find new ezine subscribers. They were about a penny per click.
I wouldn’t be suprised if most of them were purely fraudulent clicks given the low conversion rate.
If I confused traffic with customers, it’d all look great.
But until you can cash the check, watch out.
Don’t spend your rent or mortgage money hoping for a quick fix.
Here’s another example.
What about someone who spends $49.95 on an ebook?
Are they YOUR customer - really?
Or did you just refer them away to the ebook provider to lose them forever?
If you thought they were your “lifetime customer” and invested $25 to make the sale, you may have broken even, but you didn’t get a real customer.
Be aware that online, it’s easy to be deceived about who your customer is.
When there’s any doubt, all the marketing math goes down the tubes.
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