What is more important, the mailing list or the products?

The other day I was having a teh-tarik session with a close acquaintance. We were trying to establish as to what was more important in internet marketing – the mailing list or the product offered?

A musician has the product range but who would be the customers?

If having to make a decision on a single option, I would stick to the available marketing list (assuming this list to be updated and of reasonable quality) as the more important item. In my mind, product range is not that important simply because we are more abled to source for them. But, where are we going to get our customers? This has to be from our ready or available listing of contacts….

If we have the customers, we can always post or email some sort of offerings to them to interest them. Even if there are limited positive replies from the customers in the listing, it is still not a major problem. We can still rework our strategies by calling upon them, or we can also use outsource tele-canvassers to do the follow up.

The other good thing about the available listing is, it provides you with ample opportunity to develop a following on your internet website or any social networking sites. This “following”, even if there are still limited sales concluded, can still be very important source of traffic or audience to your sites. That’s why some of the blogging sites have nothing much to sell but earned reasonable income from advertisements, especially those coming from Google Adsense, Nuffnang and Advertlets to name a few. Blogsites having sizeable traffic per day, perhaps in region of 5,000 hits per day are targeted by advertisers for specific advertising activities. Thus, you have some sites, eg. kennysia.com blogging about functions and features of tele-communication gadgets for some prominent brand, earning a handsome sum in return…..

The conclusion, at least from my thoughts, is the mailing list or the listing of potential customers should outweighs the product range, at least in this teh-tarik discussion.

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Tags: Business-2-Consumer, internet marketing

This entry was posted on February 14, 2010 at 12:07 am and is filed under e-Commerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.