The long term thread. Customer lifetime value

behnk01

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Sep 23, 2009
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I know generally this is a short term volatile business. Are any of you thinking long term?

I know someone is going to come out and say, "Yeah, I promote rebills." That's not long term. You are baiting and switching.

Check this out. It's from Harvard so I don't wanna hear it.



The bottom line is, if you have a site or are driving to traffic to a site unlike many of the offers on many of the networks, your operating costs incurred from marketing, time your spending, and managing your campaigns goes down. Yr 1 to yr 2, your profits are up 140% on just 1 customer. Imagine this across 10000. This obviously can be broken down to a per month basis as well.

This also leads into cookie duration and how you keep that initial click coming back to your site. I know that amazon partners only get like 48hrs on a cookie or something. I am part of a couple mail order affiliates who utilize 120 day cookie duration. You may be saying noone will come back to a site after so and so amount of time if you don't have a content site, blog whatever. Well deal of the day sites keep people coming back and you would be amazed how fast they grow and how often people will come back to the site. I've had sales 31 days out from initial click because they finally see something they want and then they're buying. These are on average $95 purchases for a certain site.

Who here dabbles with deal of the day? Anyone else thinking more in the long term and use long term cookie duration?
 


Al Gore hadn't even invented the internet before that chart was made. Furthermore, it was Harvard grads who fucked up this economy so.... GTFO.
 
He's got a point, which you guys are clearly missing, or willfully ignoring.

Getting customers to return to your site time and again, buying different shit each time, and potentially even referring friends on is worth more than selling rebills, because you only get that shit once off for hte most part.
If you're "lucky" and find a rebill that pays out for lifetime of the referral, you risk them fucking it up after a few months and it being worth less in the long run.

Think of sites like ThinkGeek.
It's basically a dropshipping site, and it's way more expensive than getting that shit from elsewhere, but people keep going back to it, and referring friends to it. Hence, it reaps insane profits and can afford to have it's own (basically 2nd tier) affiliate program.
 
Who here dabbles with deal of the day? Anyone else thinking more in the long term and use long term cookie duration?

I think most folks have a concept of lifetime value when dealing with PPC. In ecommerce it's pretty common to break even or lose money on the first sale for the opportunity to acquire them as a potential repeat customer. For recurring stuff it's even more obvious.

Anyone grabbing email address is "thinking long term" too. Many PPC management platforms support arbitrary cookie lengths as well.
 
Agree with cindua about the e-mail addresses. Subscriber list is a huge part of the valuation of any web business.
 
As far as I know it is highly recommended to put in an opt-in form for LPs that convert.

Since an LP is usually not so heavy on info, you can capture the essence of "return customer profits" by providing and building value with your customer or prospect through an opt-in list. That way, even after the sale you can keep the relationship going with a (calibrated) good mix of valuable info and pitch lead-ins.

That's how I see it anyway.