Cost Effectiveness Review Procedures

There are many more online-marketing techniques than this book has covered, although the book includes the major ones applicable to eBay businesses. When presented with new marketing opportunities, you need to keep some procedures in mind. Here are some guidelines for evaluating marketing schemes:

1. Never purchase or contract to set up a marketing scheme on impulse. Always take at least a few days to carefully evaluate the offering.

2. Carefully evaluate how much of your time, effort, and money will be required to set up and run the marketing scheme effec- tively.

3. Once you determine how much of your time or an employee’s time it will take to make the marketing work, decide whether it’s worth it.

4. Compare resources. Time and money are your two primary resources. Any decision to inaugurate a new marketing scheme should not only carefully evaluate each but then compare. For instance, a proposed marketing scheme may cost nothing. But if it takes a lot of your time, it may be unworkable. Likewise, a marketing project may not take any of your time. There are plenty of vendors who will do it all for you. But if the price is outrageous, it may not be financially feasible for you to put the plan into effect.

5. Ask for referrals. Then use the referrals. Talk with other eBay retail businesses—preferably ones similar to your eBay business —about the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of the scheme. This can often be an eye-opener.

6. Go back to #2 and re-read “set up and run” and ponder its significance. It’s all too easy to evaluate what it takes to get some

thing set up and ignore what it takes to run it . Often the maintenance (the ongoing operation) is the biggest part of the job. If you have more schemes than you can maintain effectively, that in itself can derail your marketing effort.

7. Be judicious. Don’t try to run a contest, run a sale, offer points, and take a survey all at the same time on the same website. You will either confuse your potential buyers and existing customers, or you will give them a case of marketing fatigue. Or both. Try marketing techniques one at a time, and evaluate each carefully to see how effective it is.

8. Measure. If you can’t measure how effective a marketing scheme is, you will be speculating. You might as well play the commodities market.

The considerations above will add some realism to each scheme that comes your way. And realism creates a solid basis for making good business decisions.