To decide which customers should receive a particular offer

Okay, so here you are sitting pretty on top of a big database of customers and their detailed history of interactions with the various departments at your company. What do you do now? What next? The answer is you never stop looking for ways to delight the customer, by sending them more specific and targeted offers for your product or service. The main idea is to reuse your existing data by selling, up-selling, and cross-selling....

To identify prospects

Unless you are satisfied with spending $3 million dollars for 30 seconds of television time during the 2009 Super Bowl XLIII in Tampa Bay, let's stay away from the mass marketing approach. Instead, dedicate your marketing budget towards a more focused effort of identifying your potential customers. What usually happens is you generate sales leads by advertising your product or service to a specific group of the mass population (to your target market, not mass...

Perhaps you've heard of intimidating terms like datamining and data warehousing, but there is nothing to be afraid of when you realize these are simply ways to effectively use database marketing. The big draw these days is how many followers you have on Feedburner, how many subscribers you have to your electronic newsletter, and how many members you have signed up on the restricted portion of your website. It's not enough that you build an audience. It's what you do with the data you've collected...

How often do you put yourself in the shoes of your potential customer? If you're not in the habit of doing this with any regularity, you're potentially losing sales. Here's what I mean. Take a moment to visit your own website, and pretend that you're someone who is mildly interested in the eBook being sold. After all, your prospect wouldn't be on your website if they weren't at least somewhat interested in the topic of your eBook.

For the purposes of this article, let's assume that...

Right now, in bedrooms across the world, people like you and me are sitting in front of blank computer screens. These people desperately want to make some extra money by writing and publishing their own eBook. Are they nuts? No, far from it. There is great money to be made by creating and publishing information products in the form of eBooks.

The dilemma faced by most people is that they want to write about something that interests them. At some level, that makes sense. Who'd want...