Marketing Wizdom » Lead Generation

How to make your e-mails deliver ‘the click’

Robert Clay — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 00:18:42 +0000

I’ve just been blown away by what world renowned author and America’s No.1 sales authority Jeffrey Gitomer said about one of my emails in a recent article that appeared in numerous places, writes Robert Clay of Marketing Wizdom.

He told me he really liked an email I’d sent him and that he’d be writing about it in a future book. I had no idea he’d actually written about it until a lovely lady who works for a bank in Iowa contacted me out of the blue citing an article he’d written. I then discovered that it had appeared in many different publications, including:

The Idaho Business Review — How to make your emails deliver the click
Midlands Biz, Columbia, South Carolina — Set the hook, get the email
Crain’s Detroit Business — Set the hook, get the click, capture the e-mail address, and bank the money

Since I don’t consider myself to be a copywriter, it gave me an ego boost. But more importantly, the article makes some very good points about what made Jeffrey “click” on the link in email. So I asked Jeffrey if I could share his article with you, and he kindly agreed. Here’s what he wrote:

I got an unsolicited email this morning that gave me no choice but to read it. My interest had to do with the subject line, the headline, the design of the content, and the copy.

The subject line was: Jeffrey, How to go from market penetration to domination. Ok, I clicked to open:

Then the headline: What one thing determines your success in business, more than any other single factor? Ok, I read it. The very tastefully designed letter said:

Hello Jeffrey,

This is Robert Clay.

If you were asked what one thing determines your success in business more than any other single factor, what would you answer?

Perhaps you’d say it was down to the quality of your product or service, or your people, or trust, or competitive prices, or availability, or profitability, or the number of customers who return to do business with you again.

These are the responses I get all the time. While they’re all good answers, the biggest factor that determines your success in the marketplace is one that is hardly ever written or spoken about … and in ten years not one person, out of the thousands I’ve asked, has been able to tell me what it is.

Perhaps you’ve heard me speaking on the subject in the past, or read about it in my book. The point is, once you know that one factor that makes a world of difference, you can take a few simple steps to move your business from market penetration to market domination.

Just look at Google who now have 85% of the global search engine market; and Apple, now the world’s most valuable technology company, who dominate the market for music players, smartphones, computers priced over £600, and now tablet computers too.

When times are tough you REALLY need to work smart. You need to do what Google, Apple and others have done. You need to know that one factor that can change everything for you.

That factor is explained in my book on Page 10. And you’re welcome to download a copy with my compliments, with absolutely no obligation. Just click here, enter your name and email address, click the confirm link on the email you receive and you’ll be taken to a page where you can download the book immediately.

If you enjoy the book, let me know. If what you learn leads to the transformation of your business, as it has for some, then be sure to let me know!

Click here to get your copy of my book, with my compliments.

Warmest Wishes,

Robert Clay
Marketing Wizdom Ltd

Ok, I clicked, subscribed and downloaded the free book, and immediately went to page 10 to find the answer… Eh, not so fast. That’s not what this lesson is about. The point of this article is for you to see what Robert Clay’s writing was about, what got me to “click,” and most important: how can you use these same elements in your communications – both as email cold calls, and email follow-ups.

The object of an email is NOT to get it opened and read. The object of an email is to get RESPONSE. Positive response.

Here are the “buttons” Robert Clay pushed to make me “click here” to get the free report and the answer to his headline question:

He asked me provocative questions.
He made me curious.
The letter had value-driven engagement.
The message had perceived value to me as a reader.
The letter had a free “hook” offer that promised “value-first.”
The letter had NO offer or obligation to buy anything.
Clay offered new information.
Clay offered success information.
The letter offered something about or for ME!
The letter had the lure of an “answer” about something I want.
The letter met a now-need that I have (timing of the message). I want to know this, or have this, NOW.

The reason I’m sharing this information is not to prove a point, or even to provide an “AHA.” I’m giving you this information and challenging you to take a close look at the way you send emails, and the way they are responded to (or not).

Now that you have seen what makes me click, why not study what makes your customers and prospective customers click. What’s their button? What answers are they looking for? Where’s your value?

Or are you just “checking in” or “touching base,” making a feeble (and obvious) attempt at trolling for dollars.

In today’s world you have no choice but to be seen, known, and perceived as a person of value if you want to differentiate yourself, make the sale, and build the relationship.

Every sales oriented email you send should answer the question, “Where’s the value?”

If you want the answer to the question of what one thing determines your success in business, more than any other single factor? Go to www.gitomer.com and enter the word CLAY in the GitBit box.

Jeffrey Gitomer is the author of The New York Times best sellers The Sales Bible, The Little Red Book of Selling, The Little Black Book of Connections, and The Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude. All of his books have been number one best sellers on Amazon.com, including Customer Satisfaction is Worthless, Customer Loyalty is Priceless, The Patterson Principles of Selling, The Little Red Book of Sales Answers, The Little Green Book of Getting Your Way, The Little Platinum Book of Cha-Ching!, and The Little Teal Book of Trust. Jeffrey’s books have sold millions of copies worldwide.

President of Charlotte, North Carolina based Buy Gitomer, he gives seminars, runs annual sales meetings, and conducts Internet training programs on selling and customer service at www.trainone.com. He can be reached at (+1) 704-333-1112 or e-mail to salesman@gitomer.com.

What have you learned from the email and Jeffrey’s challenge to the way you write emails to achieve a response? Please share your thoughts below.

Brought to you by Robert Clay - Visit Website

Robert Clay is an entrepreneur and marketer who has been growing businesses since age 19. He has studied and mastered more than 200 of the world’s most successful marketing strategies, building-up an unprecedented 1.8 million page knowledgebase. For a decade he conducted an experiment which transformed the thinking of hundreds of entrepreneurs, and has now launched an extraordinary new program that helps aspiring market leaders to create breakthrough marketing results.

If you’ve enjoyed this post and want to be notified when other new articles come up, just click here. To get your free copy of Robert's well regarded book “Learn how to grow your business … in just two hours: An introduction to low risk/high-return marketing strategies that will help you transform your business”, click here. If you would like to share any of your personal experiences, observations or the results you’ve achieved using these or similar tips, please leave your comments and/or thoughts below. We always love to hear from you:

How to Self Publish Your Book

Robert Clay — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:46:27 +0000

Writing a book is a fabulous way of establishing your expertise. If all your competitors give out a business card when they visit or communicate with their marketplace, and you give out the book you’ve written, which of the two competitors is your prospect more likely to choose?

Are they more likely to choose the one that doesn’t look as if they’re an expert or the one who does? Writing a book gives you an edge and a distinction. It positions you head and shoulders above your competitors. And it’s fun to do. But where do you start? One of the options is to publish your own book.

Here in this guest post our good friend Dee Blick describes how she wrote and self-published her first book. Dee is an award winning marketer; Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing; and speaker and weekly columnist for the Financial Mail. She is also author of the best selling self-published book: Powerful Marketing On A Shoestring Budget For Small Businesses:

I remember as a little girl being asked what I wanted to do when I grew up. My response? I wanted to write a book. I loved writing, still do and the thought of a person reading my work and being inspired to take action and improve their business is what drives me to this day.

And so, 40 years later and here I am with my first published book and number two waiting in the wings. If your dream is to write a book and you’ve never quite made it I hope that my story inspires you to turn that dream into a reality.

How did I start?

I made the decision to self publish my first book and I’m doing the same with my second book. Don’t think of self publishing as a poor cousin. It’s come on in leaps and bounds in the last few years and with digital print on demand it’s environmentally friendly and cost-effective. An increasing number of literary agents are now advising authors to self publish, simply because to land a publishing deal, you either have to be very lucky with a strong link to a publisher or, you have to fall into that dubious category of celebrity, cashing in on either your fleeting or long-standing fame. Why tout your manuscript around publishers suffering the ignominy of rejection when you can self publish? What’s more with Amazon now levelling out the playing field between self published and traditionally published authors, it’s open to all of us. (By way of illustration, I recently came back from holiday to find that Amazon had e-mailed thousands of people recommending five business books, with mine being at number one and incidentally the only self published book out of the five)

I appointed a specialist self publishing publisher. I wanted to focus on writing my book, not on having to organise the entire publishing process. In the event, it cost £1,000 which I recouped at my book launch. Because my book is about marketing the costs were classed as a business expense. The great thing about self publishing is that your royalties tend to be higher than if you go down the traditional publishing route. Because I sell many books direct at signings and events as well as through Amazon, I have managed to make a healthy profit on my book and it has paid for itself many times over.

So, having made the momentous decision to self publish the biggest challenge lay as you would expect, in the actual writing. I have been very fortunate in that I have won many national media awards for my marketing articles in the last 26 years. I naïvely assumed that writing a book would be as straightforward as writing an article for a magazine and so initially did not allow sufficient time. I had to pull out all the stops to get my book to the publishers on time. However much time you think you will need to write your book, double it.

I found that having an editor; a person with the balls to actually pull me up on grammar and punctuation and to question my integrity on content was vital. My book went from being very good to great simply because my editor was not afraid to challenge me. With the best will in the world, you will have days when the writing simply flows and it’s a joy. On other days, it’s like pulling teeth!

I also learned that with the right positive mindset I could move mountains. I discovered strength within me that I didn’t know existed. I wrote my book whilst also running a very demanding full-time marketing business and having to handle chronic repetitive strain injury in my arms and shoulders. Don’t talk yourself into not writing your book simply because you don’t think you have the time. If you’re driven and tenacious you will find it. I used to visualise myself signing hundreds of books at my book launch and reaching the bestselling ranks on Amazon. These thoughts motivated me on days when the idea of mooching round the shops was more attractive than tackling a challenging chapter. At a practical level I motivated myself by organising my book launch and giving my publishers a fixed date for my final manuscript. Set goals and visualise your success.

It has been a rollercoaster of a ride. I’ve spent more hours than I care to mention self promoting my book but it has been worth it. Four months of initial hard slog, sending my book for critic reviews and finding any PR opportunity to hang my message on. I have been interviewed by the Financial Times, Royal Mail, The Mail on Sunday and countless business magazines and had some amazing critic reviews. I now write a weekly marketing column for the Financial Mail and no end of positive opportunities are now being laid at my door simply because I’ve written a book that has become a modest bestseller. But nothing, absolutely nothing compares with the feeling I get when receiving an e-mail from a reader who has bought my book and they’re writing to tell me how I have benefited their business. That really is, to quote the advert, priceless.

So where are you now with your book?

Brought to you by Robert Clay - Visit Website

What the Pecha Kucha?

Andrea Pickerin — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 07:21:34 +0000

Pecha Kucha is a presentation method, developed in Japan, that is reputed to improve audience attention, writes Andrea Pickerin of Marketing Wizdom.

The post that follows is a piece I wrote for Edinburgh Training Centre’s monthly e-newsletter, It was well received, so they’ve kindly given us permission to reproduce it here. Enjoy:

What the Pecha Kucha?

Is this just a fad or a universally fabulous method for addressing conferences that will stand the test of time? Can the concept be integrated into training techniques?

Have you heard of it? Have you used it? Is it like Marmite – do you love it or hate it? Please email to let us know your experience and views of this acclaimed end to “Death by PowerPoint”

What is it?

Pecha Kucha, usually pronounced pe-chak-cha or pet-shah coot-shah depending on who you talk to, is a method of presenting that ensures both content and length are kept short and to the point, hence the claim of ending the nightmare we’ve all experienced – death by PowerPoint.

Using this format, presenters are limited to 20 slides, each of which can be shown for no more than 20 seconds. This is strictly adhered to using a combination of slide-show and automated timer functions on your computer, and limiting the entire presentation to 6 minutes, 40 seconds!

Where has it come from?

It was created in 2003 by two architects living in Japan – Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham – to give young designers a venue to meet, network and show their work in public. Their intention was to find a way of improving audience attention (manna from heaven!), whilst increasing the total number of presentations that could take place in one event, and even encourage those more shy presenters to actually take part.

The term “Pecha Kucha” is Japanese for the din of conversation, like chit-chat and it has been described as forcing the presenter to talk from their heart, as people used to do before PowerPoint became a crutch.

The real world

Can this format turn the traditional PowerPoint presentation on its head and stimulate a more engaging, passionate and memorable experience for conference and training participants? We have struggled to find examples of use outside the creative industries and would love to hear from you if you’ve used it yourself or would like to trial it within your organisation.

Julia Middleton, chief executive of leadership development organization Common Purpose is quoted in Personnel Today as saying that the organisations that will come out of the recession first will be those who utilse creativity to best advantage, being first to bring good ideas to market, adapt to new circumstances and go from idea to reality most quickly.

Could Pecha Kucha play a part in this drive for more creativity in the workplace?

If you need a training venue in Edinburgh, we can certainly recommend Edinburgh Training Centre and have used their facilities many times. Located right at the centre of the old city, it is just a few steps away from the Royal Mile that Links Holyrood House and the Scottish Parliament to Edinburgh Castle.

Brought to you by Andrea Pickerin - Visit Website

Andrea Pickerin worked for several years in sales and management in the travel and tourism industries in the UK and USA. She then joined Churchill Insurance where she progressed into marketing before co-founding Marketing Wizdom. She has Institute of Direct Marketing qualifications and looks after the office. The mother of two small boys, she also provides marketing consultantancy to a select group of clients.

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Create an avalanche of qualified leads

Robert Clay — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:45:26 +0000

Identifying prime prospects for your product, service or expertise can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. But that’s an easy challenge to overcome when you employ “Packaged information offers” in an effective manner, writes Robert Clay of Marketing Wizdom.
Packaged information offers are one of my all-time favourite low-risk/high-return strategies for generating an avalanche of high quality leads at low cost. Essentially, it is the concept of offering information as an inducement to get your prime prospects to raise their hands and identify themselves to you.
This will typically be the same information that you give away free of charge every day of the week when prospects call you, contact you, interact with you in person or go to your website. It’s information that demonstrates that you know what you’re talking about and that you have expertise in your field. That information can easily be packaged into a booklet, audio CD, DVD, special report, bulletin, guide, white paper, e-book … or indeed many other forms.
This information is probably common currency in your business, which means that it costs you very little to package it. At the same time it is likely to be very valuable and useful to your prime prospects, who probably know little about your product, service or expertise. When they’re in the market for what you offer they’re seeking guidance to ensure that they make the right choice, deal with someone they can trust, who is competent … and can deliver to them the outcomes they’re seeking.
Once you’ve packaged your information, you should advertise or promote it. This is a very effective way of generating qualified leads. Generally, the only people who will raise their hands and send for your information will be those who are in the market right now for what you are promoting.
In other words they’re qualified prospects who are seeking answers right now to a problem or need that you can potentially satisfy. By responding to your packaged information offer they’re communicating a keen interest in what you’re offering and that they’re ready to do business now or in the near future. These are the very people you need to focus on right now to maximise your chances of success … and they’re raising their hands and identifying themselves to you. It doesn’t get much better than that!
One of my clients was a recruitment company who specialise in finding jobs for the cream of the 16-24 year old school and college leavers. They were short of good candidates at one time, so rather than advertise each individual job, we persuaded them to offer a packaged information booklet titled “How to win at an interview.” The headline of the ad was “School leavers guide to success” and the body of the ad explained why the booklet would be valuable to any school or college leaver who wanted success. Instead of their normal 3-4 responses per ad, this ad generated 160 enquiries the first week it was placed … and continued to generate similar respones each week it ran. And everyone who responded was a school or college leaver who wanted success.
Another client, a photographer, uses a packaged information offer in his Yellow Pages ad. He offers a “Free guide on how to get the most from your portrait sitting”. Who is likely to respond to that offer? Right … someone who is in the market right now for a portrait. So when they respond he knows who they are and exactly where to focus his attention and future marketing activities.
As a result of that offer, for the first time in his business history, people started booking portrait sessions over the phone, without first visiting his studio and taking up his time. Not only that, but his average sale increased from £110 to £498 in a matter of months. He ended up doing twice the business at almost five times the price. Nearly ten times what he was achieving before.
When we promoted a packaged information offer by direct mail for the UK’s most successful financial adviser, we achieved over sixteen times his normal response. A single mailing achieved over 1,200 responses, every one of them a prime prospect for his services.
The recipe for effective packaged information
The first step in creating your packaged information is to identify precisely who you want to target. Who has the capacity, desire and motivation to buy your product, service or expertise right now? Who already uses or is familiar with your type of product or service? These will be your prime prospects.
Next, identify what information these prime prospects are seeking. They want to make an informed decision, so they’re very likely seeking information and hard honest facts that will give them unbiased answers to their fears, frustrations, concerns, issues and uncertainties about buying your product, service or expertise. Your packaged information should satisfy that craving.
As such, it should contain, in an easy to read style, all the questions and answers a prime prospect would want to ask. It should also contain all the thought provoking questions they may never have considered. It should be completely unbiased and packed with solid answers. It should explain how to avoid potential disappointments or disaster. It should educate your prospects on the vital issues in their decision making process, and alert them to things they wouldn’t otherwise have known, thus positioning you as an authority in your field, and someone who is on the customer’s side.
Consider adding a key questions checklist so that your prime prospects can compare competitive offerings. Don’t lay it out as an ad for your product, service or expertise. People are astute. They can see through a thinly veiled ad a mile off. When you give people an unbiased, factual, thought-provoking package of knowledge, they value it. It should be so useful to your prime prospects that they will want to keep it, use it and refer to it well into the future.
Isn’t that exactly the sort of information you crave when you’re in the market for a product or service? If someone offered you information like that, wouldn’t you be much more drawn to them than you would be to their competitors? That’s why this is such an effective strategy.
Never forget that whilst what you know may be everyday currency to you, it could be of immense value to your prime prospects. So even if you offer this information for free, I recommend that you put a monetary value on it. That will make the information even more desirable and stimulate even greater response.
Overwhelming benefits
The benefits of using packaged information correctly are immense. It is a terrific lead generation tool. You can use it to dramatically boost response to your ads, sales letters and email campaigns. It qualifies and flushes your prime prospects out of the woodwork. It tends to produce better quality leads at a fraction of the normal cost. It rapidly builds a database of names, and not just any names, but the names of prime prospects who raise their hands because they want what you offer.
As well as educating and informing your marketplace, it positions you as an authority in your field. It also induces the law of reciprocity, which states that when you give something useful and valuable to people they feel obliged to reciprocate.
Correctly done and positioned, it can put your business ‘on the map’ as never before. The media can often be persuaded to share your knowledge and expertise as public service information. They will sometimes do free write-ups on your business that would cost you £ thousands had you bought the same space as an ad. It can even result in you becoming an industry spokesperson, invited by the media to comment on issues relating to your industry.
Packaged information is therefore one of the most powerful marketing tools you’ll ever use to create immediate results. We use it all the time with clients in every industry you can imagine. Done correctly, it always works, and if you’d like to explore how to use this strategy effectively in your business, please contact us now.
Brought to you by Robert Clay - Visit Website
Robert Clay is an entrepreneur and marketer who has been growing businesses since age 19. He has studied and mastered more than 200 of the world’s most successful marketing strategies, building-up an unprecedented 1.8 million page knowledgebase. For a decade he conducted an experiment which transformed the thinking of hundreds of entrepreneurs, and has now launched an extraordinary new program that helps aspiring market leaders to create breakthrough marketing results.
If you’ve enjoyed this post and want to be notified when other new articles come up, just click here. To get your free copy of Robert's well regarded book “Learn how to grow your business … in just two hours: An introduction to low risk/high-return marketing strategies that will help you transform your business”, click here. If you would like to share any of your personal experiences, observations or the results you’ve achieved using these or similar tips, please leave your comments and/or thoughts below. We always love to hear from you:
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The key to profitable long-term business right now

Robert Clay — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 12:22:24 +0000

The concept of acquiring new customers at a breakeven or slight loss sounds crazy to some people, writes Robert Clay of Marketing Wizdom. Why would you even want to do it? After all, staying in business requires you to make a profit on every sale … or does it?
Acquiring new customers at a breakeven or slight loss, in the right circumstances, can be an extremely cost- and time-effective way of achieving substantial business growth. It is also one of the most overlooked and under-used methods of business growth available to you.
While this strategy shouldn’t be used by businesses that make one-off or infrequent sales, it can come into its own if a substantial portion of your sales and profits occur when your clients return to make repeat purchases from you over months, years or decades.
Simply put, you won’t start to benefit from any of that profitable repeat business unless you first get people to make their initial buying decision.
Get new customers started sooner rather than later
The idea then is to get as many prospects as possible into your buying stream as quickly and easily as you can, even if the initial sale is made at breakeven or a slight loss. The sooner you can get people to make that initial buying decision, the sooner you will start to benefit from all the repeat business, add-ons, referrals, and ancillary products and services that represent the bulk of your profits. And that’s where this strategy starts to make sense.
To make this strategy work you need to make it as easy and irresistible as possible for your customers to start doing business with you. Many companies have been catapulted from obscurity to market leadership as a result.
Here’s an example that illustrates how a struggling startup company used this strategy to run rings around huge established competitors, overcoming massive odds to became a giant in its own right in the corporate world.
The AOL Story
That startup was AOL, and back in the mid-’90s it’s CEO, Steve Case, faced overwhelming competition in the race to dominate the internet. His competitors at that time were the likes of CompuServe and Prodigy who were owned by wealthy corporate giants like Sears, IBM and H&R Block. They could have obliterated AOL at will had AOL even been on their radar.
Prodigy spent $500 million launching their online service. They were selling their software through 500 Sears stores for $39.95 and charged $9.95 a month for their service. They were also spending $20 million a year on advertising, and had signed up 500,000 subscribers. The other big player, CompuServe, had around a million subscribers at the time and were the world’s largest online service providers.
There was seemingly no way that AOL—which by this time had 300,000 subscribers, annual revenues of $40M, and needed more investors—could compete with these big spending giants.
That was when Steve Case decided to shift AOL’s focus away from trying to make a profit on the acquisition of new customers, and instead decided to make their real profit on all the repeat purchases that resulted from those new customers.
Millions of disks
His strategy was to unleash the fury of millions and millions of AOL computer disks on an unsuspecting world. These disks allowed you to install AOL’s software on your computer free of charge and you could also connect to AOL for a month free of charge.
AOL initially just wanted to discover how many people would use the disks to log on and become paying subscribers if they gave them away. They spent $250,000 distributing the disks as computer magazine cover disks in a sealed plastic bag. They found that for every 100 disks they gave away, 10 people became paying subscribers. With that kind of response they could easily afford to distribute more and more disks … until the disks were being distributed everywhere.
If you bought a computer magazine, you got one of AOL’s free disks. If you bought frozen supermarket steaks you got a free AOL disk. If you got a bag of peanuts on some airlines, you also got a free AOL disk. If you ordered certain mail order goods, you got a free AOL disk. If you attended certain sporting events you got a free AOL disk, and so it went on … You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who didn’t get dozens of free AOL disks in the mail. Indeed some people could probably have re-roofed their house with them.
Before this strategy was unleashed AOL’s giant competitors didn’t even think it was a serious contender. It was beneath their radar … and they certainly didn’t see what was coming.
When Steve Case pushed his marketing button in January 1994, AOL gained 70,000 new customers the same month. Eight months later it had signed on more than a million, and over the next few years this number grew to 33 million.
Within two years of implementing this strategy AOL’s revenues had grown from $40 million a year to $298 million a MONTH! And this, remember, was from a company that wasn’t even taken seriously by its competitors.
The strategy was so successful that AOL were overwhelmed for the next twelve months and had to fix a range of customer service issues to ensure that its rapidly increasing body of customers could even get online when they wanted to. It was a struggle to keep up, but they eventually fixed the problems because they had all this new cash rolling in each month.
Had you been been working at Compuserve or Prodigy when this strategy was unleashed, you’d have thought that AOL had gone nuts. These companies had spent fortunes trying to persuade you to buy their software so that you could spend still more money using their services, whereas AOL just said “Just stick this disk into your computer and try it. You’ll get free email and the first month’s usage for free. You can go to a computer store and buy a competitor’s program for $39.95 or you can have AOL for free, which will you take?”
Market explosion
This strategy didn’t just result in an expansion of the online market, it resulted in an explosion, and AOL quickly took the lion’s share of the market. As its subscriber base grew, it freely stole customers from its competitors and eventually absorbed Compuserve. Prodigy disappeared and within a few years and AOL became powerful enough to gobble up Time Warner, creating the world’s largest media company.
While the AOL Time Warner merger turned out to be one of the worst mergers in corporate history, the fact that it happened at all is testimony to the power of this strategy. So it really wasn’t a crazy strategy after all.
Book, CD and DVD clubs have used the same strategy successfully since the 1920’s to generate revenues of £10’s of millions a year from customers to whom they initially sold at breakeven or a slight loss; Credit cards offer interest-free balance transfers as an inducement to switch; Printer manufacturers virtually give away their inkjet printers and make their money on the expensive ink cartridges you’ll be buying for the next few years. Tetra Pak make € billions a year supplying reels of their packaging materials to thousands of packaging companies who use their machinery to make over 100 billion cartons a year … and I can give you many more examples.
Free strategic planning day
I know a highly regarded firm of accountants who were offering a strategic planning day with one of their partners free of charge. At the end of the day they suggested that if the day had been valuable you should just pay them what you thought it was worth. Most people put a value on the day of around £1,500, which they paid. But more significantly, every time they ran one of those days they picked up an average of £10K in extra business, most of which continued for years to come.
Being accountants, there were some partners who just couldn’t comprehend why they should offer anything for free … and of course those partners missed out big time. Ironically, even when the results were there for all to see, they still couldn’t see that they were losing out!
So what would it be worth to your business if you added 10, 100 or 1,000 more customers this month and every month, if you didn’t make a penny on the initial transaction, but made enormous profits on all the repeat business you did with them over the months and years to come?
If the numbers stack up for you, your first step in using this strategy should be to identify and understand just how much combined profit a customer represents to you for the life of their business relationship with you. This will tell you how much time, effort and investment you can afford to invest upfront in acquiring each customer … and whether or to what extent you can afford to make all of your profits on the repeat business.
Brought to you by Robert Clay - Visit Website
Robert Clay is an entrepreneur and marketer who has been growing businesses since age 19. He has studied and mastered more than 200 of the world’s most successful marketing strategies, building-up an unprecedented 1.8 million page knowledgebase. For a decade he conducted an experiment which transformed the thinking of hundreds of entrepreneurs, and has now launched an extraordinary new program that helps aspiring market leaders to create breakthrough marketing results.
If you’ve enjoyed this post and want to be notified when other new articles come up, just click here. To get your free copy of Robert's well regarded book “Learn how to grow your business … in just two hours: An introduction to low risk/high-return marketing strategies that will help you transform your business”, click here. If you would like to share any of your personal experiences, observations or the results you’ve achieved using these or similar tips, please leave your comments and/or thoughts below. We always love to hear from you:
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Build a superior lead- or sales-generation machine

Robert Clay — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:26:35 +0000

As Google celebrates 10 years in business, it’s amazing to consider what the company has done in that short time to change the way we interact with each other and with the world at large, writes Robert Clay of Marketing Wizdom.
Google started out as a better way of searching for information on the internet, and while they now offer an array of different products and services, their prime focus has always remained on search, and on making the whole search experience ever more valuable and relevant for users.
Today nearly one billion people around the world use Google search to connect them to an untold range of topics. It has become so essential to the day to day lives of hundreds of millions of people, that many now feel lost without it.
With that many regular Google search users, it’s hard to believe that any other advertising medium on the planet could be capable of drawing such a vast crowd on a day to day basis.
From an advertising perspective, almost anyone looking for your product, service or expertise will perform a Google search, either to find specific sources or to research who and what is out there in the marketplace. In industry after industry we now find that after personal recommendation, Google search has become one of the most important sources of leads and prospects.
That being the case, you’ll be at a severe disadvantage if you do nothing to harness the power of this amazing medium. If you’re unfamiliar with the way it works, here’s a basic explanation.
Google AdWords basics
You need to start by carefully considering what keywords or phrases people might use when performing a Google search for your product, service or expertise. Once you’ve listed all the possibilities, you can use those keywords—and any others that may emerge out of subsequent research and testing—to set up one or more Google AdWords campaigns.
By splitting your keywords or phrases into logical groups, each of your campaigns can contain one or more of these groups of keywords. These are known as ad groups.
You then create one or more ads for each ad group (i.e. for each group of keywords). To maximise your response these should be tailored to the keywords you will be using in each ad group. Your ads will then appear alongside the search results every time someone performs a search using one of your keywords or phrases.
If you use several different ads in each ad group, your ads can be shown in sequence whenever the specified search terms are used. Whenever someone clicks on your ad, you pay, and they will be taken to whatever landing page on your website you specify.
The position of your ad on the search page is determined by two things. Firstly, the relevance of both the ad itself and the landing page you specify. Secondly by the amount you’re willing to pay for each click. That’s because AdWords works on an auction system, and you can bid different amounts for each keyword or phrase. You can also set a daily limit on how much you spend.
The relevance of your ad and landing page are the most important factors. Google measures relevance by the percentage of people who click on your ad. The more who click on it, the more relevant it is considered to be. Google, quite rightly, is paranoid about quality and delivering the best possible experience to its users. They want to avoid anything that could put someone off using Google again.
If your landing page, or any of the products or services it promotes, are in any way suspect, your ad will be disabled. The more relevant your landing page, and the better the products and services it promotes, the higher your ad will rank.
If you have a highly relevant ad and landing page, you will pay a lot less for a top position on the search page than if you simply try to outbid everyone else, but have a less relevant ad or landing page. This rewards anyone who takes a quality approach to what they do and penalises the cowboys, sharks and suspect operators of this world. It is a brilliantly elegant system that ensures that you only see relevant results when you search with Google … and is one of the reasons why Google is one of the world’s most trusted brands.
Why use paid search?
Many people believe that it is better to reach the top of the organic search listings using a search engine friendly website and search engine optimisation than to use the pay-per-click model on which Google AdWords is based. And if it were easy to get to the top of the listings with all the search terms that people are actually likely to use, I’d agree.
But with anything from thousands to millions of other websites out there competing for the same users, it can be a daunting, time consuming and knowledge-intensive task to get your website anywhere near the top of the organic search listings. And if and when you do, Google only has to change its algorithm, which it frequently does, and your search listing could disappear out of sight, only for you to have to start all over again. In other words, you’re leaving a lot to chance, and you also have to be very good to be better than all of the other sites you may be competing with, some of whom may be throwing £ millions a year into getting to the top of the listings.
In that context paid search has a massive role to play if you want to develop new leads, prospects and clients, or you want to test your marketing messages and assumptions, as mentioned in my previous article. For a very modest investment you can generate a constant flow of leads. I have clients who spend less than £10 a day to develop a high percentage of the leads they need. I also have clients who spend more than £100K a month on AdWords. It can produce excellent results at either end of the spectrum, depending on the scale of your business.
Advantages of paid search
You can, to a considerable extent, control where and when your message is displayed. You can display your message to prospects who are likely to be interested while showing nothing at all to those who are not, i.e. you’re advertising in a highly targeted manner that is entirely relevant to the person who has just typed in a search term that contains or correlates with the keywords or phrases used in your campaign.
You don’t have to engage in the “spend and hope” that applies to most other advertising, or console yourself with merely achieving exposure. Results from AdWords are totally measurable and you only have to pay for what works. The minute an ad stops showing a measurable return on investment you can shut it off … while leaving the rest of your ads running if they are performing well.
You can choose your own pricing, campaign duration and a host of other campaign elements, at any time of day, from any location; You can change your ad copy on the fly if it isn’t performing well or if you simply don’t like it; You can carry out direct response testing on a much more rapid cycle than traditional media.
Above all, you can build a superior lead- or sales-generation machine for identifying and attracting targeted customers.
Brought to you by Robert Clay - Visit Website
Robert Clay is an entrepreneur and marketer who has been growing businesses since age 19. He has studied and mastered more than 200 of the world’s most successful marketing strategies, building-up an unprecedented 1.8 million page knowledgebase. For a decade he conducted an experiment which transformed the thinking of hundreds of entrepreneurs, and has now launched an extraordinary new program that helps aspiring market leaders to create breakthrough marketing results.
If you’ve enjoyed this post and want to be notified when other new articles come up, just click here. To get your free copy of Robert's well regarded book “Learn how to grow your business … in just two hours: An introduction to low risk/high-return marketing strategies that will help you transform your business”, click here. If you would like to share any of your personal experiences, observations or the results you’ve achieved using these or similar tips, please leave your comments and/or thoughts below. We always love to hear from you:
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Get your share of 61 billion online searches a month

Robert Clay — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 09:54:34 +0000

Since Google AdWords was launched in 2002 the face of advertising has been changed almost beyond recognition, writes Robert Clay of Marketing Wizdom. Using AdWords it’s possible to achieve things today that could hardly be imagined just ten years ago.
When Google was founded in 1997, the “big boys” in internet search like Yahoo, AltaVista and Inktomi were already well established. Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had little idea at that time how their company would make money.
Unlike so many other players on the internet they weren’t concerned with “spreading hype” about their product, or “locking users in” or “making their site sticky.” Instead their mission was to build a better mousetrap — in their case a search engine that would give people exactly what they were searching for, and as rapidly as possible.
If you were searching for car rental in Birmingham, or Geneva, or Seattle, they wanted to give you the very best and most popular car rental websites on the very first page of results.
They developed an amazing mathematical formula for figuring out who visited websites and why, and used that information in their search engine. Their entire focus was on improving their web search technology … and word soon started spreading about the quality of Google’s search results, the lack of clutter on the page, and the speed with which relevant results were obtained. It wasn’t long before long the world beat a path to Google’s door.
By June 2000 Google had indexed more sites than any other search engine, and from that point they never looked back. Today Google Search is the leading online destination in virtually every country in the world. According to Comscore, a leading internet marketing research company, some 61 Billion searches are conducted worldwide each month, with each user conducting around 80 searches a month.
We increasingly see the effect of this when carrying out customer surveys for our clients. In industry after industry Google Search is increasingly the first port of call when people search for a new product, service, supplier, job, home, car … or almost anything else. In some industries we have discovered that up to 85% of initial research is carried out through Google searches.
If you’re not geared up to benefit from this effect then you are probably losing out in a big way.
Since the introduction of Google AdWords in February 2002, Google themselves (as well as millions of businesses who use this form of advertising) have benefited massively from the vast volumes of online traffic generated by their quality approach to internet search.
Quality has always been the driving force at Google. So when they started selling their Google AdWords “Pay per Click” advertising programme, they were extremely concerned that the advertisers who would benefit the most would be those who also put out the most relevant messages.
With that in mind Google rewards you for being relevant, and they establish relevance by letting the people vote who are searching for your type of product or service. If people click on your ad it’s relevant. If they don’t, it isn’t.
If too few people click on your ad, Google eventually disables it. The higher the percentage of people who click on your ad, the less you will pay for the position you want and the more traffic you will receive. This creates a “Darwinian” effect, a deliberate natural selection process that weeds out bad advertisers and rewards good ones.
The bottom line is that both your ads and the content of your website must be relevant to what searchers are looking for. To harness the power and the business volumes that Google is capable of delivering to you, you need to understand the issues that your prospects and clients want to solve, or what they most desire … then show them how and why you can solve those problems and/or give them the outcomes they are seeking.
So, when someone types in “car rental in Birmingham,” you need to understand what they are really thinking. Figure that out and present it to them both in your Google AdWords ad and on the pages they will land on on your website, and you’ll beat your competitors by a country mile.
To develop the best possible AdWords ads, you need to test several alternative ways of putting your message across. I’ve come across instances where reversing two lines in a Google Ad, i.e. using exactly the same words but with the contents of the third line transposed to the second line and vice-versa, produced more than twenty times as much traffic for the same investment.
Unless you test the alternatives in this way, you’ll never discover what really motivates people to do business with you and how much potential you’re leaving on the table. Testing alternative approaches not only pushes your cost per click down, it simultaneously pushes your traffic up … AND you’ll be able to use the winning approaches you uncover to develop compelling offers, copy and high-performing headlines for any other media you may be using, from direct mail to print advertising and brochures etc.
As a case in point, we recently launched an email marketing campaign for a client who had used the same medium with reasonable success a number of times before our involvement. The campaign we develped produced very good results … Although the percentage of people who opened the email was virtually the same as before, the number of hot leads produced by the campaign per 1,000 emails jumped by 560% and at around 20% of the previous cost.
The new message, which was based on research into what really mattered to our client’s prospects and clients, was obviously much stronger than anything they had used before, and therefore was not worth tampering with.
To push response rates up further, it was therefore necessary to get more people to open the email in the first place. This entirely depends on whether or not the subject line compels more people to open the email. To discover the most effective subject line then simply becomes a matter of using Google AdWords to test 10-20 different possibilities. Within a matter of days it’s clear which headlines (or subject lines when applied to an email) are most appealing to users.
That established, you simply discard the lower performing alternatives, and focus on variations of the highest performing ads. Using the highest performing version in the subject line of the email should then drive up opening rates, which in turn should generate many more hot leads. The winning AdWords ads can also be used in dedicated AdWords campaigns to drive additional traffic to your website.
Best of all, once you test your messages via Google AdWords, then apply your findings to everything else you do, you should achieve a lot more response for the same investment in every other medium you use.
Getting responses is one thing. Converting that response into business is another. The better the copy on your website, meaning the better it demonstrates an understanding of the prospect or client’s problems and issues and the better you manage to address those concerns and provide the proof that you can do so, the more highly Google will rank you, the more traffic will be converted into business and the more revenues you will generate without spending a penny more on leads.
Best of all, you can use Google AdWords as a way of testing all sorts of assumptions so that instead of spending fortunes developing products, services and ideas that nobody wants, you’ll only ever have to invest a few £ hundred — or in the worst case a few £ thousand — to discover what people really want.
Harnessing Google’s power by approaching your marketing in the quality manner that Google rewards, allows you to obtain solid marketing results more quickly and easily and at much lower cost than virtually any other alternative. No wonder Google is such a phenomenal success!
Brought to you by Robert Clay - Visit Website
Robert Clay is an entrepreneur and marketer who has been growing businesses since age 19. He has studied and mastered more than 200 of the world’s most successful marketing strategies, building-up an unprecedented 1.8 million page knowledgebase. For a decade he conducted an experiment which transformed the thinking of hundreds of entrepreneurs, and has now launched an extraordinary new program that helps aspiring market leaders to create breakthrough marketing results.
If you’ve enjoyed this post and want to be notified when other new articles come up, just click here. To get your free copy of Robert's well regarded book “Learn how to grow your business … in just two hours: An introduction to low risk/high-return marketing strategies that will help you transform your business”, click here. If you would like to share any of your personal experiences, observations or the results you’ve achieved using these or similar tips, please leave your comments and/or thoughts below. We always love to hear from you:
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Taking the mystery out of list buying

Robert Clay — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 21:58:51 +0000

The right mailing list can be worth a small fortune to you. The wrong list can cost you a fortune in the blink of an eye.
To keep your business going and growing, from time to time you probably need to look outside your own customers and clients for more prospects or potential buyers. In these circumstances it is common practice to acquire mailing lists of potential buyers.
But there are mailing lists and mailing lists. The right mailing list can be worth a small fortune if it gets your message into the hands, the eyes and the minds of enough of the right prospects for your product, service or expertise. The wrong mailing list is a recipe for spending a fortune in the blink of an eye and getting little or nothing back.
Whilst the mailing list is just one of many variables that can affect the outcome of a mailing, it is still THE single most important factor in the success or otherwise of your direct mail campaigns.
A lot of people think that buying a mailing list is simply a matter of buying a list of x thousand names then sending your mailing to them all in the hope that enough will respond to make the exercise worthwhile. Frankly, the chance of that working is minimal at best … yet that’s exactly how most business approach the exercise.
So how do you acquire mailing lists that can transform your fortunes instead of costing you a fortune?
Your prime objective when sourcing lists should always be to find that one list that will garner more customers for you than any other. But with thousands of lists to choose from it’s not such an easy matter.
Know your ideal client
To have any hope of success you need to start by understanding your ideal customer or client in as much detail as possible. The more precisely you can identify their characteristics, the better your chances of finding a mailing list that is just right for your purposes, and the more easily you will be able to reach your prime prospects.
Start by working out what your ideal customers have in common. What magazines or newspapers do they read? What organisations or associations do they belong to? What do they participate in? What do they listen to? What do they watch ? What else do they like to do? What else could interest them? What are their career needs? What is their level of education? What is their income or turnover level? What are the common factors in their lifestyles? Where are they located?
If lots of your ideal clients share similar characteristics, there’s a good chance that other people who share the same qualities will also be good prospects for your product, service or expertise.
Go through a free association and brainstorming exercise to discover the common factors and build bridges to other people who share the same or similar characteristics. It may be necessary to carry out a customer survey. If you do so—and I would recommend it—explain that you’re trying to improve your product or service and would like to know more about your buyers so that you can serve them better.
With this information you can create a profile of your ideal customer or client and you can start searching for lists that fit your profile. So where do you find these lists?
Types of lists
Besides your own in-house list, there are two main types of mailing lists available to you: Compiled lists and direct response lists. Compiled lists can be derived from many sources such as: Business and trade association memberships; Car registrations; electoral register; Newspaper and magazine subscribers; Promotion respondents; Public records; Requests for information; Seminar, conference, exhibition or trade show attendees … or many other sources.
Direct response lists, in contrast, are derived from people who have previously purchased certain products or services. In other words they are the in-house customer lists of other companies. Everyone on these lists will have a proven history of responding to direct mail, advertising, catalogues or offers. As such, direct response lists will normally perform much better than compiled lists, where only a percentage of people on the list may be responsive to your mailing.
Compiled lists are good for gathering large quantities of names and are less expensive than direct response lists. But compiled information also ages rather quickly and response rates are usually much lower than for direct response lists. In addition, because you will be mailing to large numbers of people who have no proven history of being responsive there is massive wastage because you still have to spend considerable sums on writing to, handling and mailing large numbers of people who are unlikely ever to respond … which can be a very expensive exercise.
Although more expensive, there is much less wastage with direct response lists, and people on those lists who have a track record of buying products or services like yours are the most likely to make such purchases again. You will therefore always be better off using a direct response list as long as you can identify one or more that have proved to be responsive to the type of offer you will be making.
How do you obtain these lists?
You can research list availability at most business libraries using directories like “List and Data Sources,” which describe thousands of lists and where they can be obtained. You can then obtain those lists direct from the company, association or organisation that generated the list; or from their list managers; or from specialist list brokers whose business is to match direct marketers with list owners.
You don’t pay list brokers for their services because they’re paid a commission by the list owner. Although this can cause some bias, good list brokers can still be worth their weight in gold because they should know where to find lists that meet your criteria, including many that would otherwise be hard to track down. They will also negotiate your use of the list with the list owner or manager, manage the transaction and oversee the whole operation.
As a point of clarification, you normally rent lists, you don’t buy them. Most lists can be rented for a single one-time use. Annual unlimited use rentals are available from many list owners, and you can also sometimes negotiate alternative terms, e.g. multiple use of the list or alternative uses such as for telemarketing. A good list broker can help you with such negotiations as well as help you make effective choices.
Choosing a good list broker
List brokers can vary enormously, just as the lists themselves do. A good broker should be an experienced marketer who knows and understands your industry; they should know what your competitors are mailing and what is or isn’t working; they should be well connected in the list management community; they should be able to find out who has used any given list in the past and what results were achieved; they should also pass on their honest judgements to you and save you from making costly mistakes.
Ask other direct marketers which list brokers they would use and recommend. Contact the Direct Marketing Association for further suggestions. Ask each broker for client references you can call. Once you have thoroughly briefed each broker on your company, your products and services, your target client groups and the outcomes you’re seeking, ask each broker to submit proposals to you on what lists they would recommend and why they have suggested those particular lists.
Learn all about each list
With those recommendations in hand, classify each list as likely, marginal or unsuitable. You then need to learn everything you can about each likely or marginal list, things like: the original source of the names; how the list is refined; how often it is updated or cleansed; who else uses the list; what selections are available; how recently people on the list have responded; how much they spent etc.
There are many other factors that you should consider when buying lists, but this is all I have space to cover in this post. If you would like to discuss any of this further, please feel free to contact me.
Brought to you by Robert Clay - Visit Website
Robert Clay is an entrepreneur and marketer who has been growing businesses since age 19. He has studied and mastered more than 200 of the world’s most successful marketing strategies, building-up an unprecedented 1.8 million page knowledgebase. For a decade he conducted an experiment which transformed the thinking of hundreds of entrepreneurs, and has now launched an extraordinary new program that helps aspiring market leaders to create breakthrough marketing results.
If you’ve enjoyed this post and want to be notified when other new articles come up, just click here. To get your free copy of Robert's well regarded book “Learn how to grow your business … in just two hours: An introduction to low risk/high-return marketing strategies that will help you transform your business”, click here. If you would like to share any of your personal experiences, observations or the results you’ve achieved using these or similar tips, please leave your comments and/or thoughts below. We always love to hear from you:
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