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Many ebook business owners intuitively understand the value of a correctly laid out business plan. In fact, without such a plan many feel that they are lost. For the idea behind it is to continuously inspire the business owner to expand his business. In other words, it is a map how to locate new customers.
So if one is trying to identify certain ways to make money with ebooks, we could say that the growth of customers may be an intrinsic part of that. By increasing the number of customers, we also step up our potential profit.
But it is not just clients we want. We want satisfied customers that revisit to buy more of our e-books or other products or services that we may offer.
In other words, it is not just enough, to get some quick sales and some one-time customers; we also must plan for the future, so that we may end up with happy customers that are to purchase again.
What Do You Do With Those Who Visit Your Site?
Now let us look at your blog or website. If we assume that you have lots of traffic to your site, what do you do with your visitors? Do you let them get away with not buying any ebook from you, and never return to your site? Or do you have some method of knowing who they are?
The question, therefore, is this: Can you afford to let non-buying visitors just leave without telling you who they are? And, perhaps even more important, should you allow buying visitors to go?
All efforts to bring in visitors to your website have cost you something. So why let them run away to possibly never return, if you can block it? By implementing an e-mail list on your website you can get the most money in return for your e-book business costs.
Getting your visitors on that opt-in e-mail list will let you have them at your fingertips: you can now email them at any time with information regarding the products and services you provide, and gradually build a long-term relationship that will be mutually beneficial. And as soon the potential customer is certain that you are an expert in your niche, he will buy from you, providing you have the right products to offer.
The Email List: The E-book Marketing Plan In Action
So my proposal is this. The most intelligent thing to do, from a business point of view, is to invest some time in preparing an optin list for your company. By collecting email addresses we are, so to speak, building a map of the territory and our customers. In other words, this list of potential customers may be seen as real proof that our ebook marketing plan is working.
Someone may, of course, criticize this statement and say that we don't need an opt-in email list to tell us that our business plan is working; for we can just keep an eye on our actual sales figures, and that will be adequate. After all, the critic may say, the opt-in e-mail list is not necessarily a list of buyers, but merely a collection of people who possibly will buy in the future.
The skeptic does have a point here: the number of potential customers on the opt-in list does not indicate any current sales figures; so when estimating the current situation, the sales figure alone may be the best gauge. However, it is reasonable to expect, especially for large numbers of people on the emailing list, that there is a correlation between the number of email addresses and the number of people who will buy from our company in the future.
If we can acknowledge this as true, then an increasing number of potential customers signing up to our opt-in email list would, indeed, point to that our business model is working, and that we are on the right track to making more money. The power of the list lies therefore not primarily in the idea that it is a measure of the current sales, but that it is a measure of what our sales figures are going to be in the near future.
Opt-in Lists: Also Good For Customer Behaviour Analysis
But email lists are not solely about getting an estimate of how your future sales is going to be. One may also use them in other ways to understand your customers better.
One way to do that is to be careful to note the time at which the customer signed up. If you have just had an AdWords advertising campaign, and you detect that the customer signed up two hours after you launched the campaign, and six hours before you stopped that campaign, you may conclude, with the help of other analytic information, that this person opted in to your email opt-in list as a direct result of your advertising. So he was attracted to the offer that you presented in your campaign.
Another way to analyze information from the opt-in procedure could be the following. Let us say that you have various types of opt-in forms on different pages of your site. So when the user signs up, you can straight away see which page and form he has used. This may tell you more about this customer's preferences and interests. Also, this information may be gathered from many customers sign-ups, which then may be compiled to a report on which forms work the best -- statistics which in turn may be used to redesign or tweak certain aspects of your website.
Using an Opt-In List Is Excellent E-book Marketing
The bottom line, however, is this. You must build an e-mail opt-in list for your ebook business. Whether or not you carry out the analysis of the customers' behavior to further enhance your business is, of course, up to you. But in any case, you should seriously think about setting up your email responder to maximize your ROI. By using a professional opt-in list for your business and doing some serious email marketing, you can continuously communicate with your subscribers and gradually build their trust. And when the trust is there, and the products are there, there will be sales.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Johnny Jones is currently a contributor to the EbookBrothers.com website, where he shares his views on ebook marketing and other aspects of running a lucrative ebook business, including topics such as how to build your email optin list, etc.
For a free subscription to the EbookBrothers.com Newsletter (with free e-articles, tips and tricks on how to succeed with your own e-book plans), be sure to visit this ebook publishing web-site right now, before the free offer expires.
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