Thursday, April 26, 2012

Having a 5 page, 20 page or a 100 page website can cost you a fortune and generate little or no leads for you


Here’s what you can do about it…


I’ve discovered that a tiny 1 page website is far better for selling your products than a large, beautiful and fancy website with flash, music, bells and whistles.

Why?

Well firstly, a big website will cost you a lot of money to set up and maintain. Perhaps double, triple or quadruple as much compared to a smaller one.

In return, the big website is built mainly as an online brochure for displaying goods and not selling them. 

How so?

Well as you’ve probably noticed a large website has many buttons, tabs, windows and options. This distracts the prospect from doing the single most important and lucrative thing he or she can do when visiting your website. And that is…

Giving you their contact information. Getting your prospects contact details is almost as good as getting a list of buyers.

So imagine having a list of a 100, 500 or a 1000 people who are pre-motivated, pre-qualified and pre-disposed to do business with you. I’m talking about people who will raise their hand and indicate that they need your service. How hard will it be to market and sell them something if you know they are already interested and eager for your products and services?

Not that hard at all. In fact, it would be easy wouldn’t it? (Just email the list of buyers, ‘hey I got this, here’s the payment details’ and some of them will buy).

And here’s how to do it:

Set up a simple 1 page website where you give away something for free. It could be an assessment, a lucky draw, a consultation, a brochure or something similar. However, in order for a prospect (your customer) to gain their free gift – they will have to give you their name, phone number and email address. 

And the point is…Only the people interested in a lucky draw of your product will give you their email. This means, the people that do give you their contact details are interested in your products.

Even if they don’t win the lucky draw, you will still have their email to advertise your products to them for FREE. Pretty neat huh? How do I know this works? Simply because…

An entire industry is based upon this model. Almost every business that sells over the internet captures the name and email of a person. From Norton Antivirus to Amazon and now even Google is starting to use emails to generate sales.

Oh and the best part is… Once you have gained the prospects contact details you can promote to him again, again and again without advertising. See advertising is once off. You pay for the ad, it runs, you generate something here and there. It’s over. Then you must pay again to keep the sales coming in.

However, if you have a lead capture system such as this … You can simply email the entire list of prospects of any special offer you decide to run – all automatically. Yes, you do not have to type emails one at a time. Simply email a 100 a 1000 or even 10 000 customers all at once. You can even indicate to the system at what day and time in the future your emails will be going out.

This means:

You can literally type all your emails in a day and have a whole year’s worth of automated selling ready … so that you don’t have to worry so much where the next sale is going to come from.

Is this the end all, be all of your marketing? Nope. It’s the beginning. You still have to (at least initially) promote this lead capture page either online or offline. But once you capture your leads, treat them well, give them some free industry information, a discount here and there, a thank you and so on, they will stay with you and eventually buy from you.

Soon your email list will grow from a few people to a 100, 200, 500 or more happy customers. Then you don’t have to advertise as much to get more prospects, because you would already have a large list of buyers. This way, you’re working smarter not harder.

If you would like a quote for a lead capture system for your business or just a no pressure chat about this, simply contact me on my office number 016 366 7032. Or email me at info@leanmarketing.co.za

To Your Continued Success,

Raymond H. Smit

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

10% Response Rate on My Direct Mail Package YES :)

I never thought sending a letter through the mail and getting a phone call back could be this exciting. A few moments ago a little lady phoned me from Potchefstroom saying she wanted to see me and help her guesthouse get more guests. Awesome :)


The letter was one page long, sent via fastmail (it's a bit expensive now though R4.60 'n pop, eish). So the cost of the mailing was around R50 - I sent about 10 out and got an appointment. So the cost of the appointment is 50 bucks BUT I might get a client out of it. The client could very well spend many thousands of rands with me and give a great testimonial and referrals in the future. Damn I'm excited.


[I love direct mail for being so scale-able]


And if the numbers work out I could just take this mailing to another market and test it there. Oh about the copy of the mailing - I think what did the trick was a rappore hook. Let me explain.


I knew sending out just a plain salesletter without warming up to the person would plummet response. I felt it in my bones. So I put two letters in brackets at the end of the letter to indicate that we are familiar to each other (ever read that study that showed 80% of people married others closest to them? Something about "proximity"? I think it has huge business & marketing applications).


When she called we actually had a real easy conversation, because it felt like we were familiar to each other, like we knew each other already. Anyways, the letter was just 1 page long (so much for long copy) - with my main biggest benefit in the headline of the direct mail piece. Oh and another thing ...


Gary Halbert mentioned that these small post offices in a tiny town are the best to use for direct mail. And I'm finding that to be true. 


Anyways, direct marketing is such a fun way to generate leads (I've got a feeling that using direct mail for lead gen + in person follow up is a great way to sell high ticket items), man I can't wait to experiment more and give you (my dear reader) the findings, applications and TESTED KNOWLEDGE so you can go out there and make mucho fungolas for yourself.


Or something like that.


Arrivederci!