I have a history of reading a lot (getting back into the habit right now).
As part of my reading I take a lot of notes, which themselves become mini-books.
One thing I started doing years ago was to create directives from my notes for each book. Directives are compressed advice. They are a way to summarize the main advice of a book and I thought it would be useful to share and write about them now and then.
Today's comes from Hillstrom's Email Marketing Excellence
Focus on email driving purchases and not list-building.
This cuts through a lot of the noise in email marketing and forces it to pull its weight as a channel (which email can easily do). Who cares about open rates, tell me about how much that email made for you and how you can prove that...
Sure do list-building and try to grow your list, just focus on having the emails themselves drive purchases.
In a similar vein, you should be focusing on the customers who are most likely to buy again. Spending effort on borderline customers can become unprofitable quickly. Repeat Customer Insights can help you figure out who is who.
Eric Davis
Retain the best customers and leave the worst for your competitors to steal
If you're having problems with customers not coming back or defecting to competitors, Repeat Customer Insights might help uncover why that's happening.
Using its analyses you can figure out how to better target the good customers and let the bad ones go elsewhere.