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You to me marketing
By Paul Herbig


One-to-one marketing it is called, a radical rethinking of the way marketers treat their customers. Companies can increase their profits by selling more things to fewer customers. It is wiser to focus more on increasing sales to a smaller percentage of your existing customers than it is to find new ones (estimates are it costs 5 to 10 times as much to get a new customer as it is to retain current ones).

Getting a new customer is expensive. It takes money to get his attention and it takes continuing effort to educate him (interruption marketing is expensive, and so is the
process of winning a customer's trust). It's also expensive for the customer, who has to spend time evaluating and learning about the features and benefits of a product. Instead of focusing on how to maximize the number of new customers, the focus should
be on keeping customers longer and getting far more money from each of them over time.

It's back to the old days, when merchants had a limited supply of customers and worked to get the maximum revenue from each one. Except now, with technology, companies can combine this old world thinking with the ability to dramatically grow their customer base at the same time.

If MCI spends hundreds of dollars to get a new long distance customer, and that customer pays just $20 per month for MCI’s services, then they have to be figuring out other ways to generate revenue through their interaction with that customer, not spending all their energy getting yet another new customer. By selling cellular phone services, home security services and an increasing array of other items, MCI can recoup the expense of obtaining these customers.

Levi's has built the single largest brand of women's jeans in the country. And they've done so without having any jeans in the store. Instead, women have their measurements taken by a trained specialist, who sends them to a computerized factory. There, a semi-custom pair of jeans is made to order. The shopper gets custom fit for a fraction of the cost. Levi's has a huge savings in inventory risk and advertising costs. And best of all, once a customer has given her measurements to Levi's, once she's endured the hassle of all that measurement-taking, once she's worn a pair of custom jeans that fit her to a ‘T” and makes her look like she always wanted, why would she even consider switching brands to save a few dollars?

A company should focus on four things when selling to customers:
1. Increase your "share of wallet." Figure out which needs you can satisfy, then use the knowledge you have, and the trust you've built, to make that additional sale.
2. Increase the durability of customer relationships. Invest money in customer retention, because it's a small fraction of the cost of customer acquisition.
3. Increase your product offerings to customers. By being customer-focused instead of retail-focused, or factory-focused, a manufacturer or merchant can widely increase its offerings, thus increasing its share of wallet.

4. Create an interactive relationship that leads to meeting more customer needs. It's a never-ending cycle. By constantly inducing the consumer to give more information, the marketer can offer more products.

This series of techniques isn't easy, nor is it free. If it were, everyone would do it. It requires a huge investment in scaleable technology, along with the focus and the commitment to do it right. It puts a lot more pressure on your organization, as well, because as each customer becomes worth more, the cost of losing one increases. But with the risks come the rewards.