Making Your First Million.pdf - Association of Net Entrepreneurs and ...

Making Your First Million
My mailing list built and built. Two hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, twenty, fifty, a
hundred. What I started to discover is that I was starting to waste money mailing to
people who didn't purchase. In the very early days almost everyone with an Apple
computer (This was well before IBM entered the PC scene) was automatically a
customer. As soon as my mail-list hit a couple of thousand I started to suffer real
rejection. People wouldn't buy from me. Why? They had a choice. New outlets opened.
Random Access. Seahorse. Direct Computer Sales, ComputerLand. I didn't have it all to
myself any more. My customers were going elsewhere. How dare they, after all I'd done
for them. Harrumph! Then I realized that this is normal. The only time you'll get 100% of
the sales is when you're the only seller. It was time to get efficient.
And I recalled the ChopLifter episode. My best customers were my best prospects! It will
always be so. I started regularly mailing to the top 20% of my customers and my sales
accelerated. I started too, to read marketing advice and tried some interesting techniques
such as getting my customers to recommend my company to their friends. Sales rose
again. I started noticing the trend for high schools to acquire computers so I got every
phone book in Australia and typed in the name and address details of every high school.
Later on I was to add primary schools, and still later I purchased collated lists and added
in the missing bits.
One of the greatest advantages I had in mail-order was my existing database. I used it to
grow my business. Who is most likely to buy? People who have already bought or people
like them. My database includes purchase history as well as such critical information as
email address and fax numbers enabling me to infinitely target my advertising. By
including advertising material in my parcel mailings, with a note to pass it on to friends,
or write the names of computer-owning friends for my database, I was able to increase
my sales by 10% for no additional cost. Equally, by including twinned discount vouchers,
one for you, one for a friend, and offering twinned sweepstake prizes, one for you, one
for a friend my sales continued rising. Pauline's publishers use the same technique,
printing a re-order form in the back of her book. This now accounts for nearly all sales
and costs nothing. This is a particularly powerful technique, second only to
recommendations and testimonials.
On the order forms I would always print a space asking for customers to write or fax back
with their response to our service. I would publish the best of these on a full page in our
catalog. Testimonials work.
Advertising regularly to my best customers was the answer. Once a customer hadn't
purchased for a couple of years they were downgraded to the irregular large mail-shot.
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