I got some advice from my good friend George Mosher the other day.  It should have been obvious to me but it wasn’t.  He said “Your best customers are the ones you have already sold to.”  You see this a lot in all sorts of businesses.  For example GoDaddy sends me coupons every 3-6 months to buy another domain.

Ikea sends catalogs.  Yahoo sends postcards reminding you to use their advertising program.  All 3 of these companies know that it is easier to convince an existing customer than find and convince a new customer.

Another cool thing that GoDaddy does is they constantly up sell you.  Here are the things they have tried to up sell me:
– 2 years of hosting (instead of month to month), if I say no to 2 years they say “how about 1 year”, if I say no to 1 year they say “how about 6 month”
– Purchase 10 years of domain ownership all at once
– SSL certificates

The lesson I learned from George was this: Don’t ever give up on customers you have already sold to.  Email/Mail/Call them every 3-6 months with some sort of offerring or a friendly hello.