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Why is it that although every marketing book / article I’ve ever read tells me with authority that it costs 5 (or more!) times as much to get a new customer as to sell to an existing one, so few companies understand this?

Do their executives and marketing people not read?

I know you’ll have many examples of such wasted opportunity, and I’d love to hear those that stand out in your mind, so to get the ball rolling, let me give you a couple of – to me – amazing ones…

Newsweek is top of mind at the moment as I have just received my annual renewal notice. This ongoing piece of optimism on their part really baffles me as the renewal fee is almost exactly TWICE what I would pay to take out a new gift subscription, and that excludes the (admittedly dubious) value of the little extras they send with gift subscriptions.

When I queried this with the “Customer Service” people at Newsweek a couple of years ago, all I got was a rather terse note saying that the renewal price is the best available offer for my country. This in spite of me providing them URLs to prove otherwise in my original query… So, each year for the past several years I’ve allowed a subscription to lapse and taken out a new gift one, saving myself a tidy sum in the process.

This is, of course, a lot more expensive for Newsweek: apart from the trinkets, they always allow a lapsing subscription to run on for a few issues while they send out several reminder letters.

Why not just give subscribers the same deal (without the trinkets) and save on the letters, too?

Another great example is that of Consumer Electronics stores – full disclosure: I love gadgets and electronics stores. The opportunities they miss to get steady repeat business are legion! Let’s face it: they have my information as I invariably pay by credit card and they could easily ask me to sign up for a “loyalty card” or just permission marketing.

But they don’t.

Each time I visit, I’m treated as a brand new customer (not a great experience in most cases to be honest). They miss opportunities to sell me upgrades or add-ons for products I’ve previously purchased (unless that’s the purpose of my visit). They don’t keep records of what sort of things attract me so I can be carefully guided by the marketing people to buy more. In fact, they have no idea who I am at all – and yet the company executives that I’ve come to know from some of these stores are searching for extra sales, especially in these tough economic times…

When are companies going to wake up to the real, lifetime value of their customers?

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