There are two basic groups of individuals who you will have contact over the course of your marketing efforts: buyers and non-buyers.

Buyers have already made a decision to purchase, they just may not be sure exactly what they want to buy. They tend to be looking for the vendor that can most fully and readily justify that decision.

Non-buyers are psychologically very different because they have not yet made that decision. So even though they are offering you the opportunity to coax them through the decision-making process, your efforts are much less likely to be rewarded and the tactics required are very different.

The focus of this article is right where the focus of your own marketing efforts should be: on the buyers.

You see, a lot of businesspeople run into problems by failing to distinguish between members of these two very different groups. Whether you’re marketing by email, direct mail, over the web, through television and radio advertisements, or face to face, the surest way to make sales is always to appeal to the buyers. You may be able to convince a non-buyer to make a purchasing decision, but that will tend to be a hard-won sale. A buyer has already made that decision. They basically just need a safe place to deposit their money. Actually, what they need is a sense of security.

Take a moment to remember the last time you had made a decision that you had a need. You went out looking for a solution, and what did you do? If you are anything like me, you started greedily devouring all the information you could find about the possible solutions to your need. You went out and made yourself an expert.

And what did you end up buying? Probably the product you had the most information about. The one that offered to fulfill aspects of your need that you hadn’t even thought about. The authority product.

Many people make the mistake of keeping their email marketing messages, web pages, and other materials nice and brief in order to appeal to the widest possible audience. They justify this to themselves by imagining that a snappy, bullet-list approach will instantly embed itself into the subconscious minds of passers-by, spurring them to suddenly take the dramatic action of biting into whatever hook you’ve tossed out for them.

In reality, this approach does nothing for the people who matter most: the buyers. These folks come to you with money burning holes in their pockets, and all they want is for you to make them an expert on why your product is so wonderful. If you can sufficiently educate them on the benefits of your product and the needs of the market it serves, they will feel grateful to you for accepting their money.

The use of a good email marketing autoresponder system affords you a tremendous opportunity to communicate with your potential clients in a way that virtually guarantees future sales.

The key to making any kind of sale is trust. At the most basic level, a potential customer has to trust that you will give them what you say you will give them. Beyond that, they have to trust that the product or service you provide them will be high quality. They have to be able to believe that you understand their needs, and are offering them a suitable solution.

Broken down like that, it sounds like it should be very simple to win a sale. However, people are not as trusting as they once were. More and more people have had the experience of being ripped off in one way or another. Particularly when you are dealing with clients over the Internet, it can be difficult to win the kind of personal confidence that is needed to secure a sale. Ultimately, the client has to feel secure before they will take a risk on you. And it is your job to help them feel that way.

The surest way to build that kind of confidence is to trade on your reputation. For example, I find it easier to order from Amazon than from XYZ Online Shop because Amazon has more to gain by maintaining its reputation than by ripping me off. This is essentially what we mean when we talk about authority.  You are an authority when your reputation is worth more than the individual product you sell.

One of the surest ways to establish yourself as an authority is to teach people something they didn’t know before. The more you are able to teach someone, the more knowledgable they assume you are.

Now you can simply put up a lot of useful information on your web site, but that has some drawbacks. For starters, it creates a situation where the client has to seek out the information on their own. The feeling this produces is often closer to being self-taught. One of the ways that companies have gotten around this is by starting blogs.

Because a weblog is time-sensitive and tends to be a little more informal than a traditional static web page, it tends to be more successful for building up your authority with your subscribers. It creates the feeling of a relationship in which you are providing excellent information and they are waiting for more. This is effective, but it is also a lot of work!

A blog is a commitment that only retains its effectiveness through long-term updating. That means creating more and more content. You also never get to assume that a particular visitor has been exposed to your previous work, but you’ll lose long-time subscribers if you rehash too much old information. So a lot of bloggers end up somewhere in the gray area, never really establishing as much authority as they may deserve, simply because they lose the ability to guage their audiences.

With email autoresponders, all of these problems are solved. There is no continued commitment to produce content, because every new subscriber will receive the same sequence of messages. All you need to do is keep your information up-to-date through minor editing. You also have much tighter control over the progress of each subscriber, because you get to design the sequence of messages to offer stages of learning. And unlike a static web site, an autoresponder series can give the recipient the feeling that they are being personally tutored. They receive a personalized message from you every so often, that is custom-tailored to their current knowledge level, and that they can respond to for extra help.

If your autoresponder series makes sense and shows your recipients how to gain the maximum benefit out of your product or service, you will not only have established yourself as an authority. You will have also convinced them that your product is truly useful. And what do you do when a truly useful product is supported by a knowledgable authority? You buy it.

Every successful business fills some type of need. This is a useful thing to keep in mind when it comes to marketing your products and services, because you will be much more likely to make the sale if your potential clients clearly understand why they need to have what you’re offering. If they think your product is something that would be nice, but is ultimately unnecessary, how likely do you think they will be to open up their wallets at a time of economic crisis? In order to succeed, you need to show them why the benefits of your product are absolutely indispensable to them.

Now the reason we say that something is a “need” is because there are strong consequences if the need is not met. You need to eat, because if you don’t eat then you won’t survive. You need to sleep, because if you don’t sleep then a lot of very bad things will happen to you. So in order to demonstrate that your product is not just desirable but necessary, you have to figure out what will happen to a person who fails to buy it from you.

It might sound like an impossible task, making your product sound as essential as food or rest. In fact, you really don’t have to go to that kind of extreme. And if you were to try, it would be pretty difficult to sound convincing. But the scary part is that our world is full of twists and turns, and we’ve all had the experience of thinking we had something completely taken care of, only to find out that we had missed some crucial ingredient.

Here’s a great example: everybody eats because they know they have to, and they even enjoy it. But up until a few years ago no one had ever heard of Omega 3 fatty acids. Your brain is made of them, and your mood and immune system go wonky if you don’t get enough of them, but nobody ever knew the difference. Until suddenly, some ingenious vitamin marketer caught wind of the discovery and went around explaining to journalists and magazine writers that the food everyone had been eating wasn’t enough. We all needed more of these mysterious and elusive Omega 3s that we’d never heard of before. We call this creating a market.

And what happened as a consequence of this publicity? Supplements like Omega 3 fats are now driving the continued growth of a 25 billion dollar a year industry, even while the rest of the economy is tanking! So you see, the real meat and potatoes of remaining profitable is explaining what is missing from the meat and potatoes that people already have.

All of this is leading up to the real practical application, and that has to do with email marketing. If you set your mind to it, email marketing can be a really outstanding way to spread just the right kind of fear. In fact, if you do it right, your likely to increase your subscribers’ level of engagement with your newsletter. Because every company has some handy dandy product or service that would make life easier, and most of them send out “newsletters”full of product updates and sales information and the like. But very few of them ever contain any real “news.” And, coincidentally, very few of them ever get read.

Think about it: what kinds of things do you see on the front page of a newspaper? Mostly scary things. And why do you see them there? Because they sell newspapers! People are always drawn to scary information, because we know that we have this tendency to overlook things. I was sure something was missing from my diet, and so I listened when all the bloggers and TV doctors started telling me I needed Omega 3s. And I’m still listening! I’m waiting for someone to tell me what else I’m overlooking. Everyone is. And we’ve got 25 billion dollars to spend just on supplements that we never knew we needed before!

So if you’re sending sending out a newsletter, why not make it less about your product and more about the “news.” Point out some recent tragedy that could have been cleverly avoided through the judicious use of your product. Highlight some failing market that is plagued by a dramatic underuse of your product. Share a case study about some customer who almost didn’t make it because they weren’t using your product. Create your market.

And if you’re not sending out a regular email newsletter, in this economy? Good luck!

In my last post I discussed some ways that you can use email marketing to build up positive feelings so that people will look forward to receiving your messages and feel relieved when they arrive. Rewards, even small rewards, play a huge role in shaping our motivation and determining the types of actions we will take in the future.

However, as important as positive reinforcements are for successful marketing, they are only a part of what it takes to motivate people to take action. And this is doubly true when you are trying to market your products or build your brand during a slow economy. When fragile markets and shrinking budgets are making people more and more hesitant to invest their resources, you have to develop an understanding of their hesitation.

People hesitate because they are afraid of making the wrong decision. They are afraid of wasting their time, their money, and their manpower, and they are ultimately afraid of failing. There are two ways that you can work with this fear: by defusing it, or by turning it to your advantage.

Email marketing offers an ideal platform for defusing fear, because it allows you to portray your company as a solid and reliable performer. You can emphasize your commitment by developing a regular schedule of mailing that go out just like clockwork. Over a long period of time, you become as familiar and comfortable as an old pair of sneakers. People come to feel at ease relying on you because they find that you stay with them in good times and in bad times.

Of course, not everyone has the luxury of being old faithful. But there are plenty of ways that you implicitly and explicity build the perception of reliability into your mailings. If you’ve been around a long time, you can celebrate the anniversaries of important dates in your company’s history. But if you haven’t, you can build the sense of reliability into the very fabric of your company by sending out company timelines that stretch out years into the future.

Above all, you want to position yourself as someone who can help with the problems that your potential clients are inevitably experiencing. And the best way to do that is to talk knowledgeably about those problems. Try building your newsletter around the idea that you are in the business of solving the problems that your clients experience.  Then your actual product or service is reframed–it is just another way that you’ve come up with to help people overcome the problems that you seem to know so much about. There’s something very comforting about that.

In my next post, I’ll explore the flipside of this equation: ways that you can turn your clients’ fears to your advantage, by placing the emphasis on what will happen if they fail to fully utilize your products and services.

If you’re like me, you probably check your e-mail right after you sit down at your desk. If there are no new messages, you probably go ahead and hit the button again “just to be sure.”

You probably interrupt your work every 10 minutes or so to check for new messages, even though you are completely aware that the computer will tell you as soon as a new message has arrived. You might leave the window open in the background for a while, so that the next time you have to check for mail it will take less time to load.

And if you do decide to close the window, you probably click the refresh button just one more time before you do.

My name is David, and I’m an Email Addict.

Most of the time, I just can’t seem to help myself. The good news is that this is now pretty much normal. Nearly everyone you know is doing the same thing, compulsively checking their e-mail every few minutes.

Now that we’re all getting smart phones, we can take our e-mail addiction with us everywhere we go. Got a free minute in between point A and point B? Time enough for a quick e-mail check. The other day I saw someone checking his Blackberry in a public restroom.

Most of the e-mails we receive aren’t even anything good. Most of them get deleted right away, and half of the time we decide to mark the messages unread and “save them for later.” So why should we be so obsessed with checking to see if there are any new messages?

Because sometimes you get one that’s really good.

Like a lab rat, you hit the button over and over and over again until you get a reward. And, like a lab rat, the conditioning is most effective when you don’t always get the reward.

Behavioral psychologists refer to this process as operant conditioning. When you receive a reward (or “reinforcement,”) you become more likely to repeat the behavior that got you the reward. But if you receive a reward every single time you enact the behavior, then you either get tired of the reward, or you give up as soon as the reward stops. So the most effective conditioning takes place when you are only rewarded intermittently.

While many are understandably looking for ways to become less addicted to the technologies they use, business owners and marketers can make it work to their advantage. Because when you understand that everyone is as addicted to their e-mail as you are, and that everyone is waiting for that one rewarding e-mail that will let them stop checking their e-mail for 15 minutes, then there is really only one question to ask:

How can I make my own email campaigns feel like a reward?

That’s the one question that can get your messages opened, read, and enjoyed again and again. It is easy to think about what you stand to gain by sending out a mass mailing, but often more difficult to think of reasons why your clients might want to open up another newsletter pitching your same old tired products and services.

What would you send out if your entire goal was to make the recipient look forward to your next message? Would you send them an amusing or inspirational story? A link to an obscure but hilarious YouTube video? Some kind of special gift just for being a subscriber?

Why not give it a try? The next time you launch an email marketing campaign, why not begin with an e-mail whose sole purpose is to make the reader feel rewarded, so that they’ll look forward to your next message? Or throw in something just for fun, a little treat just to let them know you care and to share a little of your personality and warmth.

As we near the general beta release of 5.0 we are have setup a 1-2-All Beta blog.  You can view screenshots, read about the new features, and let us know what you think.  The download will be available shortly as internal and alpha testing is nearly complete.

Click here to view the 1-2-All Beta Blog (Current 1-2-All clients only)

A while back we released a feature that allows certain ActiveCampaign products to authenticate users with an external login source. This feature is currently supported in KnowledgeBuilder 3.x and SupportTrio 2.x, and will soon be included in every ActiveCampaign product.

I wanted to share how dead simple it is to get started creating a new login source using your own authentication system. We’ve included some of the more popular applications like Joomla, PHPBB3, and vBulletin, as default external login sources, which can be enabled at any time.

But you may have your own custom authentication system that you’d like to use. In order to do this, you’ll need familiarity with editing PHP files, as well as a programmatic understanding of how to use PHP to speak to your authentication system.

To get started, open up the ac_global/loginsource/ directory contained within your KnowledgeBuilder 3.x or SupportTrio 2.x installation:

You’ll see a number of individual .php files, each corresponding to a separate login source configuration. For this example, I’ve added the last file, zencart.php, as we will be creating an external login source for Zen Cart.

Set up .php file

Once you create the new .php file in this directory, edit the contents of the file with this:

<?php

$loginident = "zencart";
$loginvars = "host,dbname,user,pass";

?>

Here we specify the name of our new external login source (the $loginident variable), as well as the settings you’d like to specify when setting up this login source (the $loginvars variable).

The $loginident variable will correspond with the name you see listed under the available login sources within the application:

The $loginvars variable will correspond with the available fields that allow you to input specific information pertaining to this login source:

Once you have included those two variables in the new .php file, you should be able to access the login source directly within the application:

Enable and further configure .php file

Once you’ve saved your new login source settings, using the above application pages, you are ready to configure the .php file to speak to your authentication system.

The easiest way to set up the rest of the .php file is to copy an existing source. For example, if you open vbulletin.php, you’ll see the necessary functions that need to reside within the class:

class vBulletinLoginSource extends AC_LoginSource {
....
}

Modify names to match your new login source. For example, vBulletinLoginSource would become zencartLoginSource.

Keep the five core functions in place:

Modify these functions to extract and authenticate a given username/password combination. For more information on what each of these functions should return, please view our detailed help documentation article.

We can also set this up for you, if you provide us the database structure that houses your external user credentials, as well as any specific PHP authentication/validation functions.

Testing out your new login source

If you feel confident that you’ve modified the .php file correctly, the only thing left is to test it out!

Make sure you’ve enabled your new login source, set User Type to Public or Admin, and promote it to be the first login source the system tries to use for authentication:

Then, log out of the application, and try logging in as a user from your external system. If everything is working, you should be able to log straight in to the application as normal!

Anyone who has done a lot of work with email templates/email design will tell you that there are a number of “gotchas” and inconsistencies between email clients.  Email design is certainly not the easiest or the most logical type of work you can do…  One area where I find people commonly making mistakes is in regards to table cell padding.

Test Example: Applying padding to a single cell in a row

It is easy to get used to the idea that tables work across clients and would be a logical thing to use in our HTML emails.  The unfortunate truth is that it really is not that simple.  Cell padding works fine across most clients except in Outlook where it can produce some non-logical results.

Most email clients:

Outlook:

As you can see – Outlook (or rather the word rendering engine in outlook 2007) will take the padding from any cell in a row and apply it to all of the cells in the row.  This could result in some visual changes that you do not want.  You should try to either apply the same padding for all cells in a row OR place an inner div or table (that has padding) within the cell that you would like to have padding.

You should also watch your set width on cells when using padding on any cell in your tables row.  As always I would definitely suggest to test your templates in multiple clients before sending.  Your template can make or break your campaign.

A survey is a method of gathering information from a number of individuals, known as a sample, in order to learn something about the larger population from which the sample is drawn.  Although surveys come in many forms, and serve a variety of purposes, they do share certain characteristics.  In order for the objectives of a survey to be met, the results must reliably project on the larger public, from which the sample is drawn.  A sample can be scientifically chosen so that each individual in a population has a known chance of selection.  This ensures that a sample is not selected haphazardly or uses only those eager to participate.  The sample size for a survey will depend on the degree of reliability necessary and how the results are to be used.  A properly selected sample should be able to reflect the various characteristics of a total population within a very small margin for error.  There are many surveys that study the total adult population but many others that focus on selected populations:  employees, academics, industry experts, computers users, or customers that use a particular product or service.

Some surveys focus on opinion and attitudes while others are more concerned with collecting factual information. Many surveys combine questions of both types.   A respondent could be asked what they heard or read about an issue, what they know about it, their opinion, how strongly they feel and why, interest in the issue, past experiences with it, and also certain demographic information which will help the survey analyst classify the responses (such as age, sex, marital status, occupation, and place of residence).  Questions can be open ended (“What does that make you think of?”) or closed (“Do you agree or disagree?”); they may ask the respondent to rate a product or a service on some kind of scale; they may ask for a ranking of various alternatives.  The questionnaire could be very brief – a few questions taking no longer than five minutes, or it could take a demanding hour or more of a respondent’s time.  A survey is usually rooted in situations where an individual or institution is confronted with an information need and no existing data will suffice. Once the information need has been identified and a determination made that existing data is inadequate, objectives are laid out for the investigation. These objectives should remain as specific, clear cut and unambiguous as possible.

Designing the questionnaire is a critical stage of the survey development process.  The questionnaire links the information need to the realized measurement.  Scaling techniques used for measurement can be comparative or non comparative.  If proper care and attention is not placed on clearly defining concepts and unambiguously phrasing questions, the resulting data is apt to contain serious biases.  Questions used in surveys must be refined to minimize interpretation problems and thus reduce measurement error.  If the respondent is unable to understand a question or fails to comprehend the question the way it was intended then the data is neither valid nor reliable.  A question must use language in a way that makes the intended observer’s meaning behind that question obvious.   In order to do this a survey must reflect an understanding of the population being sampled. For example, many people do not distinguish between robbery which requires the theft to be in the immediate presence of the victim and burglary which can involve breaking and entering without any confrontation.  The National Crime Survey, done by the Bureau of the Census, does not even mention the word “robbery” when it asks questions about robbery victimization.  Rather they ask several questions that use universally understood phrases, consistent with the operational definition of robbery, that when used together are able to capture the desired responses.

Keeping response errors and biases to a minimum factor heavily in designing a survey. How questions are interpreted by respondents must be carefully considered.  Also, you need to consider the length of the survey. If a questionnaire is too long than it can be burdensome to the respondent, inducing respondent fatigue that leads to response errors, refusals, incomplete questionnaires, and can contribute to higher non-response rates in subsequent surveys involving the same respondent.  Memory plays an important role when surveys deal with past events.  For most people the greater the demand a question places on memory, such as being asked to recall trivial details occurring on any given random date, the less accurate the responses and therefore the less reliable the survey data that is collected.  An appropriate choice of reference period should be made so that a respondent is not forced to report on events that happened too long ago.  Grouping similar questions together can reduce the cognitive burden a survey places on a respondent.  The validity of a survey can be put in jeopardy if questions are too sensitive, if they may prejudice the respondent, if they unduly invade a respondent’s privacy, and if the information that is sought is too difficult for a willing respondent to provide.

A web survey is one of five general ways research is typically conducted using surveys.  Surveys are also given using mail (the kind that requires postage), telephone, in-person interviews, and intercept surveys (respondents are “intercepted” as they pass through a heavily trafficked area).  The web survey most closely resembles the type of surveys which were traditionally mailed out.  Only this time you’re using email to send a link that takes you to an HTML form that is designed for completion and submission through the computer.   Information is collected quickly because as soon as your respondent has finished taking the survey, their responses are immediately submitted.  Web surveys can also be embedded on your web site using what is known as an Iframe.  An IFrame is an HTML element that makes it possible to embed an HTML document inside of another HTML document.   You can also create a Pop-Up survey on your web site so that when a site visitor visits a page the HTML form pops up from their web site.   If they have pop-up blockers enabled then this method will prevent them from taking your survey so you can also create a link to the survey which you can display on your web site.

The web survey is a cost effective way of administering a survey that allows you to collect large amounts of information without having to pay for interviewers, paper supplies or postage, and does not require separate data entry for responses to be processed.  The rise in web based surveys is due in no small measure to the increasingly widespread availability of computers.   Particularly in organizational or professional settings, the ability to receive a questionnaire and complete it at home or in the office on a computer is very convenient for most people.  You can expect to wait at least a few weeks for a questionnaire that is mailed out to a respondent to be returned.  A web survey allows you to rapidly collect data in a timely manner.   Information can be collected and processed in just a few days.    It also allows respondents ample time to carefully consider response selection and to enter in text for open ended questions.  If factual information is required then the respondent has enough time to consult their records.

You can increase response rate to web surveys by sending respondents a pre-notification of the intent of the survey.   This lets your respondents know what the survey is about before they invest any of their time into taking it.  You can also send follow-up reminders to respondents that have not completed the survey. This can be used in a situation where a respondent must complete the survey within a given date range.  Web surveys assume a minimal level of computer literacy so keeping your surveys simple can also help your response rate.  The technical nature of online surveys make them ideal for specialized or well defined populations that have access to an email account and/or a computer.  Coverage bias may result when targeting populations where computers or internet access are not widespread.  Determining an appropriate type of survey to administer to your respondents must take the population that is being measured into consideration.

In order to control the future you must control the past.  While you cannot rewrite the past in order to take over the future you can use it to predict it.  The past allows you to learn more about your subscribers so that you can then target your email marketing approach toward them.  When it comes to understanding your customers there is no better predictor of future behavior than the past.   Purchasing behavior is a response to an object of interest.  If behavior is recent then its more likely to happen again.  Perhaps that object of interest is a song you recently heard when you were around an acquaintance.  You really like the song when it’s played but you do not know who its from.  You spend the entire next day trying to remember who the song was from.  You would purchase if you only knew.  You completely forget about the experience the next day.   As an object loses its recency interest fades over time.

However,  if a positive impression is initially formed it can lead to purchasing behavior later.   This is why its important to work on forming good impressions with everyone you meet.  You had a positive impression of your acquaintance because they had something to offer you in the form of good music.  This did not translate in a purchasing decision the first time around but let’s see what happens when you run into the same acquaintance again.  By the time you run into them you are no longer interested in finding out who played the song you liked.  You do however trust their opinion so you can say they have established credibility.  When you are around them this time you hear a different song that you are impressed with.   This time you get your acquaintance’s number in case you forget the name of the song when you go out to purchase it tomorrow.   You become friends with your acquaintance and the more time you spend with them the more likely you are to go out and purchase music.  Interest peaks when exposure is recent.  Your subscribers are more likely to purchase from you in the period immediately following a mailing.   The longer they do not respond to a mailing the less likely they are going to.  You have a window of interest but after that they will forget about you completely.  One way of measuring purchasing behavior is by measuring when the purchase was made.  Before you met this person you were not exposed to music so recency was low.   Now that you are friends recency has increased.

The frequency with which an action occurs in the past can be used to measure interest.  You are now purchasing more and more music with greater frequency as a result of your friend.  The frequency of your product purchases is directly proportional to the amount of time you spend with your friend.  One other way of thinking about frequency is how it relates to exposure.  Have you ever played a song that you really liked over and over again until you got sick of it?  If you’re frequently exposed to a song then it sticks in your head and this is a good thing or a bad thing depending on what you think of the song.   The fact that you’re voluntarily playing the song over and over again means you are interested in it.

Notice what is happening here.  When your friend was merely an acquaintance they did not force their music taste on you.  They gave you a good experience by exposing you to what they considered good music.  They established trust with you.  When you later ran into them they were able to repeat the positive experience.  Credibility began forming and this led to a purchase decision. As your relationship progressed your acquaintance became a friend.  You begin basing your purchasing decisions on their judgment.   You do this because they demonstrated reliability.  Which led to an increase in frequency of purchases.

A good newsletter does the same thing.   It exposes subscribers to something that’s worth having.  The newsletters you send should be of interest to your subscribers.   If you are able to demonstrate how your newsletter is of interest you will establish trust.  From there you establish credibility by repeating the positive experience without being too aggressive.   Your subscriber is an acquaintance that is just getting to know you.  When you are able to demonstrate reliability to your subscriber they will begin relying on your judgment when forming the basis of their decisions.

Now an emerging need for treating different customers differently is apparent.  You’re not treating some customers better than others.  You are treating them like people and using their past behavior to govern your future behavior toward them.  Which of your customers recently purchased from you?   How many times did they do it.  How much did they spend on individual purchases?   You are asking yourself questions in order to learn which of your subscribers are your best customers so that you can target your marketing approach to them.   In the process you are attempting to turn acquaintances into friends by showing respect for the relationship.  A healthy relationship grows because it is mutually beneficial to both parties.

Now let’s consider monetary value and what it means to be a best customer.  Some of my favorite albums of all time have been concept albums such as Wilco’s A Ghost Is Born, The Decemberists’ The Crane Wife, Radiohead’s OK Computer, and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon.  The beauty of a concept album is that you are not listening to it just for one song.  You have to purchase the entire album to appreciate the concept!  Every song is made fuller and richer by the songs that surround them.  They also have a powerful emotional component. Perhaps you’ve heard a song that you really like that led you to purchase an entire album.  Once you purchased the album that led you to purchase other albums from the band until you owned their entire music catalog. You then tried to turn your friends into fans of the music so that you wouldn’t have to enjoy it alone.  If you have then you would be that band’s best customer.  You would be one of the true fans that the band relies on to make a living.  Once you have a best customer you can market to them differently because they have demonstrated through their purchasing behavior that the relationship demands it.

You would market to a best customer for a band such as Pink Floyd differently than you would for a weaker customer.  A best customer may be interested in owning all of their albums in CD quality,  having all the original vinyl copies as well as digitally remastered CDs, box sets, concert recordings, T-shirts and posters, DVD footage of live concerts as well as documentaries, Nick Mason’s Personal History of Pink Floyd, and solo albums from the band members. Marketing all of these products would be of great interest to a devoted fan of Pink Floyd but would be of lesser interest to a fan who simply wants to have MP3 albums of their most seminal work.  Here you could use a newsletter to turn a casual fan into a best customer by giving them insider information on the band in order to strengthen the relationship that fan feels toward the band.  Meanwhile,  you could keep the devoted happy by offering them exclusive opportunities for material that would only be of interest to the band’s most ardent supporters.  One purpose for the newsletter would be to track live performances from surviving band members.   A best customer would not let money be an obstacle for going to see a live performances from David Gilmour or Roger Waters.  You could offer these subscribers the first chance to purchase the best seats available.  At the same time you could keep all your subscribers happy by offering all of them an opportunity to win free tickets.  The best part of having a best customer is the word of mouth advertising they provide.  A Floyd head will try to turn their friends into fans as well.   Perhaps some of these friends may later turn into best customers.

The marketing approach of your newsletter should address the needs of all your subscribers separately.   You are going to earn most of your revenue from your best customers.  So your challenge is to turn good customers into best customers and weak customers into good customers.