A little more than a year ago I left the lead generation industry to start SellUp. The idea came to me while pitching retail clients at SilverCarrot to use our lead generation services. These clients explained to me that while they would like to have larger databases they could not monetize them enough to buy new leads. As a matter of fact many did not even know the LTV (Life Time Value) of their buyer or members.
I started to talk to more and more retailers and heard the same story. Then I started asking the percentage of new vs returning customers and found the number for many e-tailers to be in the low double digits. Their revenue from retention email barely 10%. I started digging deeper – only to find that many basic direct marketing principles such as multi-variable testing and list segmentation were being ignored.
Sellup takes the entire retention marketing program over from it’s retail clients, creative, deployment, segmentation, analysis, everything…I then looked at the reason behind the numbers. Most retailers were short of resources and did not have the budget to finance expansion. It really bothered me – how can you spend money on getting new customers but not afford to keep your exiting ones? This just did not make sense to me.
Most acquisition programs were performance based offering a way to measure results vs spend. Retention programs are generally fixed cost with little measure of expense vs cost.
SellUp charges a performance bounty only on incremental revenue delivered. We do all the work our clients are already doing and only charge them if we do a better job than they are currently doing.The average SellUp client sees an increase in retention revenue of anywhere from 100% – 400%… think of it this way: if your current retention program is delivering $3 million in annual revenue SellUp will deliver up to $12 million.
I am having a blast and making money for a lot of companies!!
By Allan Levy| September 4th, 2008