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But many entrepreneurs run their business this way because it’s how they see other small businesses doing it. When you think about that, that’s crazy town. Most small businesses don’t do very well. Somewhere between 4%–8% of businesses never reach $1 million in sales, so copying models from people who haven’t figured it out yet is a bad idea. If you look at businesses that have had significant success, you’ll see they understand that making the sale is just the beginning. Once the sale is made, the real work begins. AFTER-THE-SALE STEPS TO MAXIMIZE CUSTOMER LIFETIME VALUE One way to get an amazing ROI on a newsletter is to use it to help you maximize your customers’ lifetime value. When you’re planning nurture campaigns after a sale, it’s important to set expectations. Most businesses either don’t do this at all or do it only once at the start of the sale. Using your newsletter as the primary media in your nurture and relationship-building campaign is going to be the foundation on which you attain higher retention and customer lifetime value. This is one place where you can really track your ROI — that is, if you’re tracking the right numbers. If you’re not tracking your numbers, then the reality is you don’t know what is and isn’t working in your business, let alone whether a newsletter or other piece of marketing is getting you the return you’re looking for. As an added bonus, creating a nurture campaign with your newsletter will increase your customer retention rates and lifetime value, and both of
those numbers will mean an increase in profits, plus a decrease in customer churn. This will really drive your business forward! HOW TO CRUSH YOUR NEWSLETTER NURTURE CAMPAIGN You want to use a nurture campaign to build relationships with your customers. This means you should be willing to open up and get personal to entertain, educate, and upsell. Newsletters are a great avenue for this type of campaign, but if you do it wrong, it can actually hurt your business. For example, if you make the newsletter all about selling your product or service, people will ignore you because they will just see it as spam. Another major mistake is mailing your newsletter inconsistently; if you do that, you’re just telling your customers you’re not organized. Nurturing doesn’t work when you’re hit or miss. It would be like taking a girl out on a few dates and then not calling for two months and expecting her to still like you. She may not even remember who you are when you come calling again. The core of any newsletter is the personal article on the front page. You need to be real in it — you need to get personal. Think about it like this: With so many choices of places to do business, there isn’t a ton to separate your business from the pack except you, your story, your relationships with your customers, your referral partners, and your prospects. Even if you have a USP (unique selling proposition), better service, more features, or more experience in the industry, most customers either don’t care or don’t understand that you’re better than the next
One of the benefits of a newsletter is that you don’t have to make the same offer to the whole list plus your prospects. You can divide the list and send different offers based on who is getting the newsletter and who isn’t. This way, prospects can get a first-time customer offer and clients get a different offer that they will love. At The Newsletter Pro, we do this all the time. If you’re not a client yet, you’ll never see the customer FSIs (free-standing inserts). A newsletter really shines when it comes to the parts of the customer journey that take place after the sale — nurture, refer, retain, and upsells. TURNING AN ROI AFTER THE SALE So many businesses think their goal should be to make sales and that’s it. That couldn’t be more wrong. The goal of your business is to get a customer. You can’t get a customer until you make a sale, true, but it doesn’t stop there. If you don’t work on nurturing and retaining that customer, you’ll end up with a lower customer lifetime value. Think about it like this: Just because you make a sale doesn’t mean the customer will buy from you again. Since most of us lose money on our first sales, making a single sale is not some great accomplishment. Anyone can lose money and make a sale. After the sale, you have to deliver on what you sold, of course, but if you don’t nurture the new customer and build a relationship with them, you run the huge risk that they won’t remember who you are or what you do. When this happens, they treat you as a commodity and simply price-shop every time. That is a low-profit way to run a business.
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