Your ROI is Not the Only ROI That Matters

Return on Investment is one of the most talked about concepts in the realm of online marketing. Blogs and discussion forums are devoted to helping businesses learn how to judge the ROI of their search campaigns, their email campaigns, their paid search campaigns and every other type of campaign. What often gets overlooked however, is what your customer's ROI is when they shop with you.

Yes, your customer DOES have an ROI, even if you've never thought about it in those terms before.

Matt Bailey explains:

In his post, Matt mentions a conversation we had about calculating customer ROI. It was sparked when I told him about Mango's Place, the drop-in day care center that I've started using for my kids two days a week. I mentioned the fact that I was now dropping $40 each time I took the kids to the center. ($13 an hour for three hours.) Matt laughed at me and asked what the value of kid-free work time was.

He had a good point. In fact, I'm sitting in Panera Bread working on their free wifi as I type this. I need to leave in ten minutes to pick up the kids, but in the three hours I've been here I've caught up on email, IMed with several people about an upcoming conference, edited and posted a guest article, written a 2100 word article of my own and am hoping to wrap up and publish this blog post before I leave.

How many hours would all that have taken me if I'd been doing it at home with a 2.5 year old, a 10 month old and a needy dog competing for attention? Most likely it would have taken the entire day.

That $40 fee is looking pretty good right now.

What are you doing to sell your customers on the positive ROI your product generates for them?