The Path To Customers

Email deliverability is a big issue when your ability to market to online customers relies on a strong email link to them. You have a valuable product or service to offer your customers. The problem is that your good emails are being mixed in with a lot of junk emails or "spam" and the protections customers have built are very good at blocking spam. When your email goes down with the ship, so does your profitability.

Finding out if and how spam filters or other email blocks are killing your marketing program is a big part of managing the email deliverability problem. You know from conventional marketing studies that when it comes to advertising, the amount of customers who will respond to advertising they see is small and the percentage of those customers who actually buy is even smaller. So if your advertisement reaches 10,000 customers, 1% of that group might respond. Of that 100 people, you might realize 1-5 sales. But in a marketing model, that is a successful advertising campaign.

Internet marketing complicates the formula. That is because if you send out a mass mailing email to 10,000 customers, the odds are that a tiny percentage of those emails will actually reach the customer. So if 1000 of those emails reaches the customer and the 1% rule is still valid (and it is), the chances of you getting even one new paying customer go way down. That is just not acceptable.

It might be that the answer lies in thinking outside the box. Instead of depending entirely on tricking spam filters and other ploys to actually reach the customer, a better way to approach the battle might be to think again about the path to the customers that you are using. If you think of how you go about trying to reach your customers as a road, the mass mailing method is clearly a road that has a lot of road blocks on it. The answer might not be to get over or around or remove the road blocks. The answer might be to find a new road to the customers.

That road lies in customer behavior. Think about it. If you are throwing your marketing at trying to attract the general internet population to your products and services, thousands or millions of those people will never become your customers. So your promotion to them is a waste of time. The key to any successful marketing plan is to narrow your focus to only the customers who want to buy from you.

So how do you know which of those millions of internet web surfers out there have an interest in your products and services? You know because they are already coming to your web site. This is the old "look in your own back yard" theory. The customers who are finding you online and visiting your web site, even if only for a short time have or at one time had an interest in your business. So instead of going out into the general population and trying to get everyone to be a customer, focus your energies on that smaller population who already are your customers or at least showed an internet in being your customer.

This approach to building a new path to the customer vastly improves the percentage of responses to your emails. Now in stead of sending out 10,000 mail to random email addresses to harvest maybe one sale, you may narrow your focus and send 2000 emails to people who are interested in what you do and get 50 sales from the effort.

That is just smart marketing. Instead of trying to assault 10,00 spam filters and 10,000 disinterested customers, you enter into a relationship with a smaller niche of the market. And because that smaller group of customers already knows you, your emails are welcome and will get read. Your message gets across and the customers who are ready to buy will come to you. And all because you used strategy instead of brute force to reach customers on a different road, a road that lead directly to the real customers, not one lined with obstacles and hazards.