The Wisdom of the Discerning Marketer

Your Customers are Discerning, so you Need to be as Well

Over the years, we have met many online retailers who have been dissatisfied with their marketing. When you get to the bottom of it, they are normally unhappy that they don’t get better returns from their promotional initiates.

For instance, they send out emails, either with or without some sort of offer, and they don’t get much of a reaction. Or, they invest in a new online store and find that their sales actually go down rather than up. Perhaps they invest in Adwords and find that they have to spend too much money to get one sale.

There are two possible reasons for the above results:

  • their offering just isn’t competitive any more; or
  • they aren’t applying enough thought and effort to the way they go about promoting themselves.

Many businesses are quite competitive, and by that I don’t mean ‘cheap’, rather they offer a total proposition that is attractive compared to others out there, but almost by definition, it isn’t going to appeal to everyone.

So, DON’T SEND IT TO EVERYONE.

The Number One secret to getting the most out of your ‘marketing’ investment – I put the ‘M’ word in apostrophes because marketing is much more than promotion, which is what people most often think about when the word is mentioned – is to be more targeted on the sub set of your potential customers most likely to buy from you, because what you offer is different to what others are offering, no matter how small, or apparently insignificant, that difference might seem to you.

To do this, you need to make the most of your customer data and analyse it to look for patterns. If you have been trading for a while there are ALWAYS patterns that can be used to make targeting decisions and if you use this information sensibly it ALWAYS leads to better returns from your marketing spend.

We specialise in making the most of your customer data, to make you more successful and to help you make better returns on the capital employed in your business.

To find out more about how we could help you, give us a ring.

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