How Many Customers Can You Afford?

One of the numbers you have to calculate when marketing an online business is how many customers you can reasonably afford. Back-of-the-envelope calculations can vary wildly, depending on what variables that you consider and how conservative your estimates are.

On the one hand, no one marketing an online business “out of the gate” wants to turn away customers or see sales flag due to rebuffed business. On the other hand, you simply can’t afford to manage more than X number of customers during a given business cycle.

A faster, more secure, more automated web site might help you put inventory orders through quicker. You might even be able to network with B2B distributors to keep pace with the site buzz. But at the end of the day, high volume traffic can overwhelm your web server, swamp your customer service agents, and run you out of critical catalog items.

More subtly, a highly successful ad campaign can create a certain laxity among your associates. If you experience success when you are marketing an online business, you tend not to prepare for times of scarcity. Thus, if you do measure a sizeable increase in volume, it’s important to keep everyone on your team “hungry” and awake to creative possibilities for even more powerful salesmanship.

It’s all well and good to know that when you are marketing an online business, you don’t want to “over-market” (or market to the wrong types of people, consumers who only want information and don’t want to buy and or undifferentiated web traffic). But how do you know when enough is enough?

One idea is to scale up your marketing models to gauge your maximum load. Another way to go is to check out a concomitant web business’s financial ledgers, history tends to repeat itself in terms of online marketing. Finally, you can create a kind of circuit breaker for your marketing platform, if you get more than X traffic volume, this breaker automatically goes off and shuts down your PPC and PFC campaigns to give you a chance to manage the customers who have already arrived.

Don’t overlook the “embarrassment of riches” problem, prepare accordingly, and you’ll be able to grow faster and more efficiently towards your goal.

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