If you haven't figured out that "making the customer happy" and "understanding their needs", and "how to make them use your website more" you haven't taken Marketing 101. Please go back and learn banal marketing notions before continuing.

For several years our retail website manages the search engines to generate sales, both single sales and bulk orders. Since we specialize in city souvenirs our ability to reach the demographic interested in such a product line is very carefully keyed to being in front of customers at the time of their interest in making a purchase. A vast majority of customers make one purchase, maybe returning at Xmas, but not a continual purchase stream.

Markets of this type appear to be self limiting in size, without regard for the number of distributors: just slice up the pie. The limiting factor in limiting the size of the market is the inability to convert the customer to a repeat customer. I'm sure we have customers purchasing various city snow globes as collectables, yet it's the exception, not the norm. The market, so amorphous and thus too costly to reach via non-time related branding style advertising, self regulates its size.

We have never found print advertising to work. Even when I ran a large tourist information website print did less than good, it just cost money until we stopped. For single use sales, you have to be there at the moment of need, and certainly not expect to be remembered the next time of need. And that's what search engines do: very reactive, but concentrated and always available. The trick is to make yourself available when the search engine makes something available. Print, in our case, never reaches enough concentration of purchasers to beat the percentages, around 1-3 sales completion per 100 visitors.

The market, being so small, requires honey to attract purchasers. That's why the organic search listing are so important. Obviously, if you have no prior experience with a vendor, you are going to make a choice, what link to click, based on something. What other sweets can a retailer use to attract business? How sweet do you make the offer without losing money?

Conclusion 1: Smaller markets where you cannot reach customers with a profitable marketing program to make them new or repeat customers limits the size of your market. Your products are sold to a one-time customer while your calculations are about cost-per-sale, not cost-per-customer-acquisition.

Here's a very simple of a more mixed market: small but with easy access to purchasers. For instance: comic books and antique books. A larger market with many similar characteristics is golf. The easy access to purchasers means aggressive branding capabilities. Additionally, you know exactly what the demographic wants to hear.

Conclusion 2: Limited markets with customer access add two more media to the marketing mix to the first segment: print/branding and social circles. Your products are sold to repeat customers so you calculate in terms of cost-per-customer-acquisition and lifetime of a customer.

Your type of product contributes to the type of marketing. Let's look at the market for doll houses versus the market for dolls. The doll house makers don't even benefit greatly through increase in doll collector market size: one new customer equals one doll house (linear relationship) but many dolls (exponential relationship). The doll maker certainly can afford much more advertising, especially for the repeat customer who hopefully is an adduct/collector.

Conclusion 3: limited markets exist in normalized states with small short term variations and slow long-term rise or fall. So not only are these markets self-limiting, they also provide predictability.

And, while the internet increases the market size of many of limited markets, they still remain limited. And this continues through the physical stores as well as over the internet.

Finally, as I have to finish up, the limited market where gaining new customers is difficult, such as in our new website for gifts for all occasions. Where would people find us on the search engines? Candles, hobbies, fishing, basketball, books and so on. None of which have significant distinguishing characteristics to separate out us from our competition. Other methods such as print and direct marketing are what brings customers.

Once a customer is acquired, added importance is placed on the customer's lifetime value since you have no easy way to replace lost customers.

Conclusion 4: Repeat customers who are hard to find need to be treated very well to establish the branding that makes purchasers remember you.

Conclusion 5: Having the lowest price is not necessarily the best branding method for limited markets.