If you've been making money on eBay for any length of time, you are probably already familiar with some of the more effective marketing tools that you can use to reach new customers. However, are you aware of the fact that you may be missing out by ignoring the customers that you already have?
Before we get into the details of this problem, and how to solve it, we need to define a couple of terms.
LTV or Life Time Value
The amount of profitability of any one of your customers. If you were to sell only a single product to a customer and then they never buy from you again, they would have a very low LTV.
On the other hand, if you have a customer that comes to your eBay store once or twice every month and buys a product each time, then that customer would have a very high LTV. The overall profit that you have gained from this customer is very high. Maintaining a high LTV for all of your customers is a great way to create a consistent profit stream. Once your customers become used to shopping with you, they will come back over and over, and you won't need to spend as much time on marketing.
Sticky Markets
These are product categories that result in high LTVs for your customers. Products that customers will buy frequently, such as pet food, makeup, batteries, etc. are all great examples of Sticky Markets. These products are much likelier to result in repeat sales than products such as plasma screen TVs or coffee makers. After all, how many coffee makers can a single person need? Probably only one. Hence: no repeat sales. (Learn more in the Easy Auction Business video course).
Now that you know which types of products result in a high incidence of repeat sales, I'll outline some advanced tactics that you can use to ensure that you can keep the LTV of your customers as high as possible.
Keeping Track of your Customers through Aweber.com
Creating a list of your customers that includes details about their shopping habits is an essential component to increasing repeat sales. To save time, you can have this done automatically through Aweber.com. This tool will automatically upload your customers to a compiled list every time they buy something from you. In addition you can program it to send out promotional emails to all of your past customers automatically!
Send Out INSTANT Follow up Emails!
Use “Selling Manager Pro” to send emails to your customers automatically during the final stages of the buying process (i.e. after auction completion, after payment, etc.). You can (and should) include a preset message in this email encouraging the customer to purchase additional items in the same order. If you offer a shipping discount, this will help the customer to save money, and will increase your profit at the same time.
Use Discount Cards
A lot of eBay sellers send special offers to their customers inside their packaged orders. This is a good idea, but if you only send a paper flier the customer might just throw it away. Instead, you should send out a discount card. This looks a lot more professional and creates an impression of real value.
For this reason, the customer is more likely to put the card in his or her wallet than throw it out. Print your logo on the card as well as the customer's full name (if possible) to give it a personal flair. This way they will remember your company, and if they don't use the card today, they are sure to use it eventually.
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