Selling to new customers is just so costly

We all know the old adadge that selling to new customers costs a lot more than selling to existing ones, so perhaps we should just stop chasing new ones - in these austere times that might make sense.

However, as I've mentioned here before (Customer Acquisition vs Customer Retention), it does seem that going after these expensive new customers is much more attractive than some boring direct marketing to exisiting ones. However, this blog is not about urging you to spend more time on your existing customer marketing (I'll leave that for another day - as Chad Bauman says, "Want to get into trouble? Concentrate on new audiences" - so we'll come back to that), but about how you should approach your new customer acquisition.

Just marketing to exisiting customers is a non starter - old customers go away or die and if you didn't replenish the existing customer pot, you will soon run out of people to sell to. Remember, your existing customers were new customers once.

Part of the problem is that we think of marketing as a cost, something we have to spend money on and as such something to cut when times get tough. Marketing, done properly, is an investment. You are using some of today's money to generate an income stream in the future. And that is the key and like all investments it needs analysis and decisions.

It is not enough to compare the cost of a sale to an existing customer to one to a new one. On a campaign basis that is always going to lose. What we need to look at is the lifetime value of a customer and use that information to identify the best source of future exsiting customers.and what ongoing activity is going to maximise the return. So get out those spreadsheets and start looking at your best existing customers and where to get more like them.

Lifetime Value is the key to good new customer marketing.
... oh, so I was talking about marketing to existing customers after all

Is the web finding it's feet?

Social media is finding it's feet. As I have mentioned in previous blogs it takes a long time, years, for something to establish its own identity and not just be a fancier (and maybe more useful) copy of something that has gone before. Social media is perhaps the start of the web moving into it's own personality.

The growth of social media has been as unexpected as it has been fast. Each day the scope changes as more and  more people move the platform into areas others haven't even considered.

From a marketeer's point view this is both exciting and frightening - more opportunities, but a very different way of approaching the concept of marketing.

From the consumers' perspective (or those on line at least) all this interactivity has become a new adjunct to, if not a new way, of life. It is now so much easier to keep in contact with friends and family, share news, photos and film. To keep up to date with what is going on in areas of interest - as it happens, no longer waiting for the newsletter or even email newsletter - is that a change or what? The email newsletter was a step forward but it is already looking antiquated.

And all this for free? Surely not.

Birmingham Royal Ballet website - generated with Repertoire

Birmingham Royal Ballet published their planned productions for the Birmingham Hippodrome today and you can find the listing here.

What is great, for us, about this is that it shows some of the new features in Masque Repertoire (our content management system for the performing arts), allowing all the information about a production to appear on one page together with links to the booking pages on the theatres web site. Take a look at the Romeo and Juliet page to get the idea.

This is just the first phase in our redevelopment with lots more features being added. We have worked closely with BRB for several years to develop a system that is easy to use and quick to update when you have more information to impart.

From a technical point it has been a fascinating challenge to get the underlying database structure correct and then to build the web program to bring this all together into the web pages - depending on what's coming up performance wise this might generate 1,500 pages or more - and is handling about 5,000 page views a day.