The Best Starting Point for Re-marketing — Build Your Customer List

Here's a fun fact: most startups rely on email to let customers know about the new services and products they're about to launch.

And here's another one: there are plenty of cases where an author who emails their existing customers to promote a new book finds that 30% of the orders come from those existing customers.

Buying ads simply means you pay upfront just to earn a baseline amount of website traffic.

In an earlier article, we pointed out that only 3% of your prospects have an immediate need for your product. If you also run a discount promotion and offer a price that's genuinely hard to resist, you might squeeze out a slightly better return on investment.

In the real world, you may well be catching the perfect moment, selling a service or product that everyone is excited about. If you can break even inside a sales-funnel model — meaning your daily cost is HK$50 and you also earn HK$50 back on the front-end page — then you're actually doing pretty well.

But if you can go one step further, capture your customers' email addresses and convert them into buyers, that's a whole different story.

Once you have those email addresses, the ongoing long-term communication becomes the nurturing process. It's easy to keep delivering value to customers at close to zero cost, because the expense of each email is truly minimal — hardly worth calling a cost at all.

Your email list is an asset you own outright, so you never have to worry about a platform suddenly changing its rules or algorithms and wrecking your marketing strategy. On top of that, unlike other paid media, there are almost no restrictions on how you use it — you can even craft personalized, tailor-made messages to communicate with your customers. And the return on investment from email is, in fact, remarkably high.

The process of continually sending high-quality emails to your customers is called the "value ladder." If you want to understand why the value ladder is so critical to your business, you must read our other article, Why 90% of Startups Don't Survive Two Years.

This article focuses on why you need to build your own email list

First, when it comes to return on investment, email performs exceptionally well. Its nominal cost really is low — so low that you can send an email for just HK$0.02. If that marketing email brings in an order, you can imagine just how high the conversion rate can be. Once you've built your own customer email list, we're confident you have an excellent chance of sparking the interest of large numbers of loyal customers and prompting them to place orders.

Think we're just making this up? Then consider the following data and judge for yourself:

• Email is up to 40 times more effective than social media at acquiring new customers.
• Because email can be personalized, it's easy to show customers a distinctive kind of respect. They can feel that your brand works hard to look after its customers, which naturally gives them a sense of being valued. As a result, personalized emails generate, on average, 6 times more order transactions than non-personalized ones.
• You probably already know that the reach of a Facebook post is less than 5% — meaning that if you have 10,000 followers, fewer than 500 people will actually see your post. Email, by contrast, reaches every single customer in your entire database directly, for a reach of 100%.
• On average, from a cost perspective, email delivers a return on investment as high as 3,800%.

Beyond its exceptional ROI, another reason to build your own email list is that you're building your own asset!

Social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube are forever changing their ad algorithms, constantly disrupting the marketing strategies and ad budgets you prepared well in advance. What's more, as noted above, social media reach is very low. Just think about it: even if one of your short videos racks up a million views, how many of those viewers come from your own database? Can you even do re-marketing to them? Do you know who these viewers are? Do you know what they want?

We always say that social media is great for attracting traffic, but you still need a solid plan for how to get those people to leave their contact details, join your database, and become your asset. Smart brands typically offer an irresistible incentive to entice users to sign up in exchange for more value. With the email addresses and mobile numbers in your database, you can build your own communication channels and start personalized conversations with your customers. Even though email and SMS aren't the latest technology, they remain among the most reliable channels for boosting sales.