Chapter 15. Retaining Customers

In This Chapter

• The Importance of Customer Retention

• How to Build a House List

• How to Create a Successful email-Marketing Campaign

• How to Create and Use email Newsletters

• Community Used as a Retention Strategy

Too many online businesses think that when you've attracted visitors to your site and made the sale, the business is a roaring success. Not necessarily. Unless a company retains those hard-earned customers, there is a very good chance that it will eventually lose revenue and, more important, lose market share.

Although the Internet is largely filled with hundreds of millions of users, there is not an infinite supply of customers for your business. You need a retention plan as part of your marketing plan to grow your business not only with new customers, but also with those you already have. Besides, in terms of dollars and cents, it costs 10 times more to acquire a customer than to retain one. Let's look at the third letter in the concept of PARM: the basic retention strategies you should use in marketing your Yahoo! store.