Most businesses invest a lot of resources into acquiring new customers. While avenues like search engine marketing can be cost effective ways to bring in new customers, many customer acquisition methods are quite expensive. Because of their focus on this task, a lot of businesses forget that they already have a great source of customers.

This source is the clients or customers they’ve already served in the past. One of the hardest parts of getting prospects to actually pull out their wallet and do business with you is reassuring them that they’re going to get great value for the money the spend. But with past customers, they already know that they can count on you to do a good job. Since this hurdle is eliminated, all you have to do is give them a compelling reason to place another order from you.

If you like the idea of focusing more on your past customers but don’t know how to pique their interest, there are a couple of methods that are quite effective:

Many businesses want to attract visitors to their website and convert them directly into customers. While it’s great if you can convince visitors to pull out their credit card within a few minutes of visiting your website, this isn’t always a realistic option. It can be especially difficult for businesses who sell higher priced items to convert visitors directly into customers.

If you’re frustrated that your conversion rate is much lower than you’d like, the good news is there’s a simple way to convert more of the people who visit your website into potential customers. An email newsletter may be exactly what you need to get better results from your online marketing efforts. Although a newsletter may seem like an old school marketing tool, there are several reasons why it can be extremely effective:

Whether you've just started a blog to help promote your business or your employer has been speaking with you about launching a company blog, it’s absolutely true that a blog can help a business grow. Otherwise, I wouldn't be writing this post right now!

While blogs have long since passed their stage of being nothing more than personal journals, there's still a lot of confusion about how to blog the right way. This is especially true for businesses who want to get on board with blogging. To get the most out of the time you spend blogging, make sure you avoid these common business blogging mistakes:

In my last post, I explained to you how to notice when you brand is dying. I told you how I define the term and pointed out the key symptoms of a sick brand. Now that you know how to spot a dying brand, you need to know when the best time to take action is.

At first glance, the answer seems obvious. You take action as soon as possible. And while that’s usually the case, sometimes it’s not so cut and dry.

See, what normally happens in respect to brands is one of the following:

I received a great direct mail piece from marketing strategist Michele Pariza Wacek, who wrote an interesting article about common flubs business owners make with their marketing campaigns and sent it through the mail. It was essentially a blog post, delivered by post. Not something we've ever thought to do at our Internet marketing office here in Houston. It was actually pretty cool. According to Michele, most unsuccessful campaigns can often be traced back to one of these three missteps. Has your team committed any of these marketing cardinal sins?

1) Your Target Market is Too Broad

Good marketers identify a niche and pursue that one until they've saturated that small market. Then, and only then, do they pursue another one. Even if you sell a product that everyone can use, you'll wear yourself out and waste your money trying to sell to everyone. Pursuing everyone leads to "media waste," reaching people you don't really want or need to reach. Narrow it down however you can — gender, age, ZIP code, household income or people who support nonprofits, buy green products, or enjoy art festivals — to focus your marketing campaign.