Many e-book business owners intuitively understand the value of a appropriately laid out business plan. In fact, without such a plan many feel that they are lost. For the idea behind it is to constantly inspire the business owner to grow his business. In other words, it is a map how to find new customers.

So when we say that we want to grow our e-book business, we are almost certainly talking about an increasing number of customers (although other factors may be there also). For the more customers we can generate, the more profit we will be able to obtain.

But we are not just talking about any type of customers. What we want is satisfied and returning customers that purchase again and again from our pool of products and services.

In other words, from a long-term business point of view, it not adequate to be able to track down a few new customers and be getting a few new sales; we also need to make sure that those who previously have bought from us will do so again.

What Are Your Plans for Those Who Visit Your Site?

Now let us look at your blog or site. If we assume that you have lots of traffic to your website, what do you do with your visitors? Do you let them get away with not buying any ebook from you, and never return to your site? Or do you have some method of knowing who they are?

The question, in other words, is this: Can you afford to let non-buying visitors go? And, even more essential, can you afford to let buying visitors go? After all, since they have already demonstrated that they are prepared to buy from you, why not put together a marketing system to cater to those users?

Unless your uncle owns Google, all traffic you get has cost you something, either in money or time. So why let your visitors escape if you can stop it? And you can stop it, to a large degree, by using one or several opt-in lists.

Getting your visitors on that opt-in list will let you have them at your fingertips: you can now email them at any time with information regarding the products and services you provide, and step by step build a long-term relationship that will be mutually beneficial. And as soon the potential customer is certain that you are an expert in your niche, he will buy from you, providing you have the right products to offer.

The Email List: Our Ebook Marketing Plan In Action

So my idea is this. The most intelligent thing to do, from a business point of view, is to invest some time in preparing an e-mail opt-in list for your company. By collecting email addresses we are, so to speak, building a map of the territory and our customers. In other words, this list of potential customers may be seen as real proof that our ebook marketing plan is working.

The argument can, of course, be made that we don’t need an opt-in email list of potential customers to verify that our business model is working. After all, these people are not necessarily the real customers anyway, since they have not necessarily bought anything yet. So it is no signal of that our ebook business plan is working. If there are no sales yet, what good is it for? So a better indication of that our business plan is working would be to just look at the sales figures: if there is more sales, then it is working; if there isn’t, it’s not.

The skeptic does have a point here: the number of potential customers on the opt-in email list does not indicate any current sales figures; so when estimating the current situation, the sales figure alone may be the best gauge. However, it is reasonable to expect, especially for large numbers of people on the emailing list, that there is a correlation between the number of email addresses and the number of people who will buy from our company in the future.

So if we may accept this proposition as true, then we could say that a growing number of people signing up to our opt-in email list surely might indicate that our business model is working, and that our future looks bright. The power of the list lies therefore not so much in the idea of being a gauge of the current state of our business, but is more of a measure of how our sales are going to manifest in the near future.

Opt-in Lists: Also For Customer Behaviour Analysis

But email lists are not solely about getting an estimation of how your future sales is going to be. One may also use them in different ways to understand your customers better.

One way to use the opt-in e-mail list sign-up information to understand your potential customers better is to note the date and time when they signed up. This may be essential for different reasons. One example may be that you just have launched a special AdWords advertising campaign, and you observe that the sign-up happened when that advertising campaign was live. By investigating also other aspects on the site, with for example Google Analytics, you may conclude that this, indeed, was a result of your AdWords campaign. By investigating all such occurences, you may get a nice picture of whether or not your ebook advertising campaign was successful.

Another way to analyze information from the opt-in procedure may be the following. Let us say that you have various types of opt-in forms on different pages of your site. So when the user signs up, you can straight away see which page and form he has used. This may tell you more about this customer’s preferences and interests. Also, this information may be gathered from many customers sign-ups, which then may be compiled to a report on which forms work the best — statistics which in turn may be used to redesign or tweak certain aspects of your website.

Implementing an Opt-In List Is Excellent E-book Marketing

The bottom line, however, is this. You have got to build an email opt-in list for your ebook business. Whether or not you carry out the analysis of the customers’ behavior to further enhance your business is, of course, up to you. But in any case, you should seriously think about setting up your email responder to maximize your ROI. By using a professional opt-in list for your business and doing some serious email marketing, you can continuously communicate with your subscribers and gradually build their trust. And when the trust is there, and the products are there, there will be sales.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Johnny Jones currently contributes to the EbookBrothers.com website, where he writes about ebook marketing, and on particular topics such as the opt-in list: hot or not? etc. For a free subscription to the EbookBrothers.com Newsletter (with free e-articles and tips on how to succeed with your own ebook plans), be sure to visit www.EbookBrothers.com today, before the free offer expires.