Piggy-backing on yesterday’s investor-minded vs opportunity-minded buyers lesson:
Besides the reasons I gave yesterday for warding off opportunity-minded buyers like a virgin in Transylvania wearing a garlic necklace to ward off vampires… a gentleman named Michael Fishman (who Gary Bencivenga called the World’s Greatest List Broker) has an even more practical reason to avoid them.
To paraphrase what I remember him saying:
Opportunistic buyers are great first time buyers.
But, they don’t commit.
i.e. they aren’t good repeat buyers.
If you’re building your business for the long term, and wanting to have a solid list of quality people who don’t buy from you just once (the real fortunes in direct response are made on the repeat sales, the first sale is just the first step)…. and who, instead, buy from you again and again and again, for years and decades into the future, using what you sell, benefiting from it, and then bragging to everyone they know about it… avoid opportunity-buyers.
I’m not saying they are “bad” people.
They’re probably fine, upstanding blokes in their own rights.
But, they make for terrible customers to build a list, audience, and business on.
The big direct mailers know this.
But, the mainstream Internet marketing crowd still hasn’t gotten that memo.
Finally:
My way of doing email works (unfortunately) on opportunity-minded buyers.
But, it works even better with the investor-minded types.
And, I’d take 10 investor-minded customers over 1,000 opportunity-minded buyers.
To learn my not-so-mysterious ways, go ye here:
Ben Settle
