Internet Marketing Info

Direct Marketing has to be the best areas of marketing.  The results received from doing a mailing can be very exciting.  Few things can compare with opening your mailbox to find a flood of emails or envelopes filled with orders and checks made out to you! Just imagine if you could increase the response to your offer by just a fraction of a percent, you could turn a slight profit into windfall profits.

One of the key questions business owners always ask is, “How do I increase the response to my mailings?”  In this post we are going to go over 25 excellent techniques that you can use to help your mailings pull a stronger response.

Not all of these techniques will work for every mailing you create.  The key is to review the techniques whenever you’re planning a mailing.  Pick the ones that apply to your situation and put them to work.  Your bank account will be glad you did!

1.  Carefully target your audience.

Sales volume can be directly connected to your ability to accurately identify your most likely customers.  If necessary, create different versions of your package tailored to each specifically targeted audience.

2.  Solve your customer’s most irritating problems.

Most customers don’t buy products, but they do buy solutions to problems that plague them.  If your product solves a critical problem, pull out all stops to let your customers know.

3.  Help your customers achieve significant goals.

This is the complement of the prior point.  If you can clearly show that your product or service will make your customer’s lives easier or better, your sales volume should shoot straight up.

4. Focus on your customer’s needs, not your product.

Customers have limited interest in your product or company. But they have unlimited interest in their needs, solutions to their problems, and making their lives better. Concentrate on fulfilling their needs through the use of your product or service.

5.  ALWAYS stress benefits.

Always concentrate on how your product will benefit your customers-both logically and emotionally.  Hit the right hot buttons and your sales will skyrocket.

6.  Repeat your key benefits in the beginning, middle, and end of your email, letter or brochure.

Tell your readers once, tell them again, and then tell them one more time.  Remember, people buy benefits, not products.

7.  Use the “4 to 1″ rule.

Your sales copy should contain four “you’s” to every one “I”  Customers want to hear about their number one priority-themselves.  One of the best ways to convey that you understand your customer’s needs is to use plenty of “you” language.

8. Use a stop-them-in-their-tracks headline or first sentence.

Some letters and emails benefit from a headline while others don’t.  Either the headline or first sentence must be very powerful in order to convince your prospects that your letter is worth reading.

9. Use sub-headings liberally.

Subheads help break up long blocks of copy.  They also act as a “hot point” outline to pull the reader through the key ideas of your email or ad.

10.  Seize the reader’s attention immediately.

Don’t waster space building up to your blockbuster points.  Start with them.  You have only a paragraph or two to convince your prospects to keep reading your letter.  Give them what they need to make sure they continue.

11.  Flatter your reader.

These days people are much more sophisticated when it comes to advertising.  They know that you got their name from a mailing list.  You can turn this fact to your advantage by suing this kind of copy.

12.  Share some “inside” information.

Direct mail offers a perfect opportunity to appeal to a person’s need to feel special.  An ideal way to do this is to share some exclusive information.  Make it clear that this offer is being made only to them.

13.  Issue a personal letter from the President.

People like to deal with the person in charge. Using this type of personal message builds confidence.

14.  Never end a sentence at the bottom of a page in a sales letter.

Always use a broken sentence to carry your reader forward onto the next page of your letter or email.

15.  Feature the offer.

Everyone loves a good deal. Your job is to design an irresistible offer and make it a key focal point of your letter or email. A strong offer can often be the extra incentive that will convert your “maybes” to real live orders.

16.  Give something away for FREE.

Free samples, trials, demonstrations, consultations, or information are all exceptional ways of getting customers to give your product or service a hands-on try.  Sometimes that is all it takes to close the sale.

17.  Run a contest.

Give away a free enrollment in your seminar, a free subscription to your newsletter, or anything else that appeals to your buyers.

18.  Use a special “before the price increases” offer.

If you plan to raise your prices, make your regular customers a special offer at the old price for a limited time.

19.  Repeat your offer.

An irresistible offer can overcome customers reluctance.  State it at least twice in your email or letter, and again on your order form.

20.  Make a time-limited offer.

Offer a special deal for a limited period of time.  And do just that-legally you can’t continue a time-limited offer indefinitely.

21.  Base your offer on a limited supply.

A close-out of your inventory can create strong demand.  A limited supply offer can be used to designate exclusivity and prestige.

22.  Offer a special deal to the first 100 people who order.

Or the first 25, 50, 250 and so on. But remember, the key here is to keep it to a meaningful limit as an incentive for customers to act quickly.

23.  Make a charter offer.

This approach is ideal for new products, subscriptions,and service agreements.  If your product isn’t new, consider starting a membership club and offering charter members special benefits.

24.  Make a “last chance” offer.

Last chance at this price, inventory close-outs, and last chance before a model change can all be used to successfully win more orders.

25.  “Buy 1 get 1 FREE” always out pulls “2 for the price of 1.”

Although the savings are precisely the same,  the first format sounds like the customer is getting a better bargain.

Keep in mind as I mentioned earlier, not all of these techniques will work for every mailing you create.  The key is to review the techniques whenever you’re planning a mailing.   Pick the ones that apply to your situation and put them to work.

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Selling services or products over the Internet can be done in two ways. You can either sell through catalog style e-commerce marketing or through direct response marketing.  Catalog style e-commerce marketing involves putting a range of services or products with their specifications, functions and uses before the eyes of prospective buyers.  Pretty easy.  The buyer makes his choices based on the information he sees. But direct response marketing often involves selling only one product or service. The buyer has only two choices - to buy (or take some other form of action the seller wants) or leave. Not easy at all, but immensely rewarding if you can do it well.

In direct response Internet marketing, you must be able to move your reader to take action (often it is to buy your product) simply by communicating through the written word.  Doing that successfully takes a very specific set of skills.  You must be a master at writing eyeball-grabbing sales copy.

Here are three elements of great sales copy.

Firstly, your copy must have an attention-grabbing and captivating headline. It must stop the reader in his tracks so that he reads nothing else except your copy.  There are two ways of doing that. Firstly, you write the main benefit of your product into your headline.  Notice it’s benefit, not feature that you must highlight. Suppose you are selling an automated blog post making software. Writing, “Introducing the World’s Best Software that Makes Blog Posts to Your Blog Automatically” is writing about the feature. But writing, “Discover How You Can Update Your Blog on Autopilot and Never Have to Look at it again for One Entire Year”, is writing about benefit.

Features of your product are important, but not in the headline. The second way to make a captivating headline is by writing something in your headline that puts a question into the mind or your reader. This makes him think that the answer must be in the body of your copy and he will continue reading.  If you read the headline above, your most natural question would be ‘How is this accomplished?’ and you will likely read on.  Once you get your reader thinking like that, then your headline has done its job.  Now comes the body of your copy.

The body of your sales copy must be riveting and engaging.  Every word must be written for the sole purpose of getting your reader to read the next sentence.  Here’s one simple technique to accomplish that.

Think about the old bucket system of dousing a fire.  Each person in the line passes a bucket of water to the next person until it reaches the end of the line and the water is poured onto the fire.  That is exactly what your sales copy must do.  It must move the reader to read the next line and subsequently the next paragraph until he comes to the end.

To do that, your each sentence must lead on to something in the next sentence that your reader wants to know.  And the last sentence of each paragraph must leave the reader with some missing piece of the puzzle such that he is compelled to read the next paragraph.  Look at the last line of each paragraph of this article. They were designed to lead you to the next paragraph.  Can you see how it is done?

Simple, by using certain words like ‘if’ or ‘…you must be a master at…’ (as in the first two paragraphs), you covertly challenge the reader to find out something he does not yet know.  Another way is by stipulating a certain number of points beforehand (as in the fourth paragraph) then your paragraph does not cover all the points you said you would bring up.  The reader then concludes there are more points in the following paragraph and reads on.

Another way to write like a ‘bucket system’ is by using the last line of a paragraph to ‘introduce’ what’s in the next paragraph (as in the 5th and 6th paragraphs).  Yet another way is to pose a question in the last sentence (as in paragraph 8).

Finally, great sales copy must have a clear call to action at the end.  Your call to action must be convincing and compelling enough for your reader to take the action you want of him (usually it is to buy your product). Your call to action can be made more convincing by answering your reader’s objection, favorably comparing the price of your product with another similar product or challenging him to make a change by buying your product instead of remaining the same.

A clear call to action is a big topic by itself which can be written about in another article (can you see the ‘bucket system’ at work here?).

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It seems that there are hundreds of new terms entering our vocabulary each year because of technology.  It wasn’t so long ago that nobody would have understand what ‘go and Google it’ would mean.  The latest craze bringing in a wealth of new terms of its own is Twitter.

Let’s look at how you can increase your chances of meeting the tweeple. (This is just one of those new terms mentioned.  It is so new that spelling checkers still think it is a mistake). Tweeple are simply people using Twitter.  Why would you want to meet people using Twitter? The reason is that there is a potential to reach a huge audience very quickly.  Unlike spam email the people reading your messages (or tweets) have opted in to do so by becoming your ‘followers’.  This raises the possibility for Twitter marketing.

It is not a good idea to blatantly advertise in twitter – even though many do.  Apart from the fact that people may stop following you, they are also a lot less likely to click on any of your links. A better method is to tell a story.  For example, you could send a tweet that said something like ‘You’ll never guess what happened to me at the shops today – find out the full story [link]’. This would arouse curiosity.  The link would send readers to your blog or website where you could include an interesting pre-sell story.  Not only would you get more clicks, you are likely to get higher conversions.

Of course, none of this is going to happen if you don’t have followers.  There are some simple steps you can take to increase the likelihood of others following you.  The simplest is to make good use of your twitter profile. You should include a picture of yourself in order to appear personal and approachable. If you have a website then you should include the URL in the profile. Twitter allows you to add up to 160 characters for your bio. This is an area you should put some thought into. As well as introducing yourself you should add something about the niche you are targeting.

An advanced tip is to change the profile background.  Most people couldn’t be bothered doing this so this one small change can help you stand out from the crowd.  Not only can you change the background color, you can also add a picture.  This could be a picture of yourself, your product or one that just sets a theme.

If you set up your profile well and provide useful tweets that add value you are likely to build an army of  followers as well as make some extra sales and get increased traffic to your website along the way.

Flipping websites is a business model that many online marketers use to generate quick cash. Frankly, it is not as easy as that may sound, but once you have worked out an established process for getting the site, establishing its value and marketing it in the right market, it can be a money maker.

This online business is not limited to flipping just websites.  The business model can include selling blogs, Squidoo Lens and Hubpages.  The upside of building a Squidoo Lens, Hubpage or say a Blogger Blog, is that the site can be built and sold with just the investment of time, with no cash out of pocket.

If the business model was to use Wordpress.org as the site building tool, the cost can be kept to a minimum.  The benefit is that the site can be built on a specific domain name and on hosting that you control.  A site built for the price of a ten dollar domain name and a faction of a monthly hosting fee, then sold for $50, puts nearly 40 bucks in your pocket or Paypal account.

Building your own site and selling it is only one way online marketers use flipping as one of their multiple streams of income.  Another method can be compared to the real estate investing strategy of “rehabbing” properties.  In this case, the investor buys an existing site that has some established profit making history.  After that the site is tweaked or rehabbed so it gets more traffic and/or converts sales better.  Once a the statistics reflect the better profit performance, the site can be sold again for a profit, hopefully a large profit!

One of the trickiest things with flipping websites is determining the value of a site before you buy it or sell it.  As with the flipping of domain names, there are services online that will provide you an estimated value report on the website.  If expense is an issue, checkout a free service like www.dnscoop.com to help you determine a price for your site.

Another challenge in flipping websites is finding someone to buy it from you.  Just starting out in this business model, the best and easiest way to both create interest and market your sites is on eBay.  Once you have a value estimate for your site, set up an eBay auction with a minimum bid that assures profit and then see what happens.  Once you establish a reputation for marketing quality sites, your auctions will be an ongoing source of revenue for your online business.

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Many new internet marketers are happy to simply generate traffic to their offers. However, it doesn’t take long before they realize that conversion rate is a more important measure, particularly if they are paying for traffic. Some give up at an early stage. However, others begin to recognize the need for testing.

One of the most powerful forms of testing is split testing. This allows you to compare different parts of your campaign. The simplest form is A/B testing where two different components are compared. This could be two different landing pages, two different ads or more simply two different headlines. Some systems have in-built split testing. For example, if you are advertising using Google Adwords, it is an easy process to compare both the click through and conversion rates of different ads. After a certain number of clicks it becomes obvious which ad is the better performer. The other ad is dropped and replaced with another one to test and the process is repeated. Over time, this results in having an ad which generates not only more clicks but more sales. More advanced marketers make use of split testing techniques, such as Taguchi testing, that compare multiple variables at one time.

By those in the know, split testing is a given. However, this is not the only type of testing that can increase the bottom line. Pay per click advertisers can use hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of keywords in a campaign. Some of these keywords will provide a good return on investment. However, many of them will be a drain on the advertising budget. While attracting clicks they may result in few, if any, sales. This can turn a potentially successfully campaign into a failure. The novice marketer pulls the campaign because it is costing money, not knowing that by tracking the conversion rate of individual keywords it could easily be turned into an on-going source of passive income.

An additional twist is to measure the average amount of time visitors spend on a site for each individual keyword. This gives information relating to the AIDA principle, which suggests that potential customers go through stages of Attention, Interest, Desire, and finally Action. The theory is that the longer a visitor stays reading a sales page the further along this process they are. Those keywords which result in visitors staying longer on the landing page are more likely to be winners. In this way, poor performing keywords can be identified quickly without having to spend a fortune waiting for a large number of actions such as sales.

Those who can use testing successfully are much more likely to be successful financially. Aspiring marketers should look not only to split testing, but other forms of analysis on which to base decisions.

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