by John Almberg, Identry LLC

I visited my favorite used bookstore last weekend and got into a conversation with the bright, business-savvy young owner—let’s call her Jill.

“Business is great,” she said, in answer to my question. “I’d love to kick my marketing up to the next level, but I don’t have the time. Got any ideas?”

I looked around her shop. It was clean, well lit, and busy. One happy customer browsed through the mysteries. Another was in the travel section. And my partner, Helena, had obviously found some bargains in the business section.

But Jill raised a great question: How can a small business owner—with limited time and money—consistently, frequently, and professionally market to her enthusiastic customers?

“I can think of one way,” I said. “Automate your marketing.”

And that’s just what we’ll do in this issue of SELLING ON THE WEB.

* * *

Most businesses spend the bulk of their marketing budget on advertising – trying to sell their current products to new prospects. But if your product line is right, the easiest and fastest way to increase your sales is to sell more of the same products to your current customers. In short—to increase your repeat business.

If you sell bridal gowns, this is not going to work for you. But if you are lucky enough to sell an ever-changing range of products to enthusiasts—people who always want more of what you sell—then this technique can really boost your bottom line.

For example, among Jill’s many customers is a group of avid mystery readers, including me! As any business owner knows, Jill could easily increase her sales to me simply by showing me books that she thinks I’ll like.

When Jill knows her customers and her products, and uses her knowledge to make targeted offers to her customers, then Jill is doing what marketers call One-to-one marketing.

In a nutshell, One-to-one marketing is about dealing with each customer as an individual and creating a long-term, interactive relationship that leads to meeting more and more of his needs:

One-to-one marketing is actually an old technique—one that you probably use with customers you know personally. What we want to do is to systematize this technique so you can use it intensively on all your customers.

How? Let’s look at 5 steps you can take to automate your marketing…

Step 1: Get Top 20% to ‘raise their hands’

The first step in any One-to-one marketing campaign is to convince customers to sign up -- to start telling you what some of their needs and interests are, so that you have the opportunity to satisfy them.

If you’ve already got an extensive email list of customers who are happy to receive information from you, then you’ve already completed the first step.

If you don’t have a good email list, the easiest way to one is to focus on your Top 20% -- the 20% of customers who generate 80% of your profits.

Your Top 20% already trust you and are always hungry for more of the kind of things you sell—more mysteries, or more large cents, or more first day covers from Cleveland—so it’s easy to launch your campaign by focusing on them.

Let’s look at one way to get your Top 20% to ‘raise their hands’…

One of Jill’s best customers walked into her store the other day.

“Do you have any Maigret mysteries in stock?” he asked.

“Sorry, Bill. I had two last week, but I sold them. The good ones go fast!”

“Don’t I know it,” Bill said, disappointed. “I just don’t have time to stop by every week to check.”

“You don’t have to,” Jill said, handing Bill a form neatly printed on a 5x7 card. “Just fill in your name and email address, and check off the kind of books you are interested in. You can also write down specific books you are looking for. Whenever we get new material that matches your interests, we’ll alert you with an email. Then you can come in to buy it, or even order the book right through the email to make sure you don’t miss out.”

“Wow! What a great service. Sign me up!”

That’s the key to getting people to ‘raise their hands’ – just offer them a valuable service with obvious and easy to understand benefits.

But don’t you wish you had a computer system that could automatically collect your customer’s interests? (Then keep reading!)

Step 2: Match new inventory with your customer’s wants

The next step is to match each new item that comes into your store with your customer want lists. If you find one or more matches, then send a personalized email notice that includes a picture, a description, and price for each matched item.

This is reasonably easy to do with your 10 or 20 best customers. But what do you do if your Top 20% is 800 people? How can you possibly afford the time to compare each new item against 800 want lists? To say nothing of the time it would take to write hundreds of personal emails every day or even every week.

You know it would help your business enormously, but it’s just not practical, right?

This is where you need some automation…

What you need is a system—an automated marketing system—that will:

• Take in your customer and inventory data

• Match your new inventory with your customer wants

• Automatically create personalized emails that include your customer’s name, a brief message from you, and a list of new items that match your customer’s interests.

Sounds great, but suppose you already have your inventory data in a Point-of-Sale system, and your customer data in an Access database. Would you have to enter the data twice? Once in your existing systems, and once in the automated marketing system?

Not if your automated marketing system is smart enough to read data from your existing system or systems. Then the automated marketing system could simply read the data from your POS or other database, match customers and inventory, build personalized emails, and mail them automatically, all without any extra effort from you!

Step 3: Make it easy to buy

Just offering new inventory to your customer will dramatically boost your sales, even if recipients have to call you or go to your shop to make the purchase.

But for the best results, you want to make it as easy as possible for your customers to buy. The best way to do that is to let them buy right off the email.

For example, if the item description in the email included a “Buy me now” button, then customers could just click on the button to purchase the item.

How? If you already have a web site with a shopping cart, the button could add the item to your web site’s shopping cart and they could complete the purchase through your web site.

If you don’t have a web site, a great automated marketing system would also include an online shopping cart that your customers could use to complete the purchase.

Step 4: Use the trust you’ve earned to learn more about your customer

One-to-one marketing is not a one-time effort. It’s a continual process of building trust, exchanging information, and serving needs.

To complete the circle, you need an automated system that makes it easy for customers to tell you more and more about their needs and wants.

Automating this process makes it easier for your customers to provide this information, and saves you time. But most importantly, it helps you build long-term, interactive relationships with your customers.

The objective is to create an interactive, long-term relationship, so that you can harvest not just a single sale, but a lifetime of sales from each customer.

And for that, you need trust, knowledge, and some automation to handle the grunt work! That’s where we come in.

Step 5: Automate your marketing the easy way!

You could execute a small One-to-one marketing campaign with a completely manual system, but to reach your Top 20%--or your entire customer list—you need to automate the process.

Identry’s Email Marketing System is an automated, one-to-one marketing system that connects to your existing customer and inventory databases in about 10 minutes. Once connected, it automatically:

• Matches your customers with new inventory

• Generates personalized, targeted emails whenever it finds a match

• Processes orders, either through Identry's Top Seller II website or your own website

The Email Marketing System also automatically learns about your customers’ interests and even their specific wants. The longer you use the system, the more it learns and the more effective it becomes as a marketing tool.

Automatically.