As rare as a lightning strike

Last week some heavy thunderstorms rolled through Portland.

They freaked out the kid because she heard that lightning will hit tree and knock them onto houses.

We explained to her how rare that is and not to worry about it.

Well...

About a hour later we heard reports of lightning hitting a several trees in the area.

And one fell onto a house

Rare.

But not impossible.

Lightning strike events happen all over the place in business too.

One day you get a surge of traffic, but then it dies off the next day.

Or a post goes viral, but no one sticks around.

Or there's a mention of your product that breaks your sales record, followed by no sales for the rest of the week.

Lightning strikes make the news (both the 10 o'clock and the blogs) but they don't create a repeatable business.

You can try chasing them and a handful of people succeed doing that. The majority of them don't make it though. You just don't hear about the failures, no blog wants to write about the 17 Business Promotions that Failed, You Won't Believe #6.

That's why it's important to have repeatable strategies and tactics that you do day-in and day-out. Let the lightning strikes act as boosters but don't bet on them.

One repeatable strategy is to build two marketing campaigns: one that target your brand new customers and one that targets your long-term customers.

Using Repeat Customer Insights you can get lists of both of those automatically.

Eric Davis