Excellent article, Doug–I’m going to tweet a link. To your six, I’d add one more: Evangelists or Ambassadors: those who not only purchase from you, but encourage others to do the same. Since it costs 5-10 times as much to bring in a new customer through traditional means as to bring back an old one or have that old one bring a referral, that’s a very important segment (I discuss how to create them at some length in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, BTW). Businesses that embrace a mission to create evangelists are likely to see greater profitability.

Since you mention AR accounts, one feature of most ARs that I think is vastly underutilized is the ‘unsubscribe from’ feature. This is where you can automatically unsubscribe someone from a list when they are added to another list.

I use this all the time to automatically keep my lists segmented.

For example, before I launch something new, I will create a ‘Prospect’ list from my existing autoresponders. I do this by selecting all of the lists I think are likely to have a need for my offer — and I add all of these people to a new list called xProspects (with x being the name of my new offer).

Now, when someone buys or opts-in for that new offer, they are added to a new list and I use the ‘unsubscribe from’ feature to remove them from the xProspects list. This way, I know that when I send an email to my xProspects list, I know that I am sending it to people who have *not* purchased the product.

I completely agree with those numbers, but some portion of that 90% are also prospects — they have a need for your product, but not a *current* need, so they aren’t ready to even think about buying your product, yet they probably will buy your product (or someone else’s) at some point.

This 90% is the audience that is best served with free content (blogs, newsletters, special reports, etc.)

One of the philosophies we have in our Charitable Trust is to meet people at their point of need and lead them out of their valley, rather than shouting from the mountain tops that this is where they need to be.

That is very similar to the sales process we need to find out where a person is at and then lead them from that point to the place where you can make a sale if you have something that will meet their need. It involves having integrity and only selling what actually helps rather than selling for the sake of it. This builds reputation and trust.

All this involves interaction which is why I believe that social media is key.

By breaking “people” down to the lowest common denominator you have given us something more to think about. It is much easier to sell to someone if you know where they are in the purchase decision.

What you explained above is the exact reason we have different autoresponder accounts for different prospects or customers. As marketers we must give the right message to the right person in order to sell them anything.

Thanks,

Rick