Posted by:
John Newtson
October 13, 2007
Issue #254
- Why your list may not be as big as you think it is …
- How to increase the volume of sales promotions you put out without ticking off your list …
- Why the ‘blanket blasting’ marketing strategy of so many marketers is costing them money. And the simple alternative making smart marketers rich …
- How to dramatically increase response without better sales copy …
- And much, much more!
Dear Business Builder,
I’m on a lot of e-mail lists – somewhere in the range of 30-40 over my various e-mail accounts. And the lack of sophistication in e-mail marketing from even some very successful marketers is surprising.
Some of them are train wrecks I can’t look away from.
I actually bought one marketer’s product over two years ago and to this day I still receive bi-weekly promotions prompting me to buy the SAME product.
This guy doesn’t know or care who I am as a customer.
Every bit of personalization that goes into his e-mails is lost on me because no amount of “Hi John’s,” will explain away that he doesn’t know he already sold me the product he’s trying to sell me now.
As a direct marketer, you know “the money is in the list.” You’re building a list so you can promote your products to it more efficiently.
E-mail is the tool of choice for most communications with your list.
- E-mail helps you bond and build your relationships with your customers through newsletters, announcing blog posts and delivering valuable content.
- E-mail is a powerful selling tool. Promotional e-mails to your house file will produce more sales than almost anything else you’ll do.
- It doesn’t cost you a lot of money to send e-mails. It’s practically free outside of the basic infrastructure you need to manage your business.
Today we’re going to go over some of the basics of e-mail marketing.
Why the basics? Because without good fundamentals you’ll always leave a lot of money on the table.
So let’s get moving.
First things first:
Your list isn’t as big as you think it is
Let’s clear some smoke out of the room and get a real picture of a critical part of your online marketing.
You, or your clients, have a list of e-mail names consisting of two groups of people:
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Posted by:
John Newtson
September 29, 2007
Issue #243
- How over-hyped sales copy built a $5 million business in 2 years, and killed it in five …
- Why the promotion you THINK is your biggest winner could be the cause of your falling profits …
- This famous marketer’s simple strategy is the key to building long-term, profitable customer relationships …
- And much, much more!
Dear Business Builder,
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
And in direct marketing, your numbers are your eyes.
Without understanding them you could be blind to the fact that the biggest winner you’ve ever had is actually killing your business.
And after months or years of throwing good money after bad you’ll be forced to close up shop, scratching your head and wondering what the heck happened.
Don’t assume you’re immune – it even happens to sophisticated marketers.
Direct mail guru Denny Hatch once revealed how a postcard “control” for a magazine subscription was really a loser from the perspective of a year down the road.
How? Because customers who signed up using the “FREE subscription” post card offer didn’t renew their subscriptions. And what’s the “second-sale” in the subscription business? Right, the renewal.
So getting the first subscription isn’t the money-maker – getting the renewal is. Turns out, postcard subscribers who just had to drop a pre-printed card into the mail weren’t committed readers like the folks who came in through a sales letter.
But marketers, blind to the long-term behavior of the customer, thought that because the post card mailing produced a higher response, it must be better than the sales letter.
Who knows how much money they poured down the drain to get those useless subscribers? And who knows how long they would have kept throwing good money after bad chasing bad customers while ignoring good customers if no one had bothered to check their long term behavior?
Tracking customers can be a huge task. For starters, though, check out David Dittman’s article on How to track an ad campaign.
How over-hyped sales copy can kill your business
Michael Masterson of Early To Rise once wrote about how over-the-top, unrestrained sales copy built a $5 million business in two years, and killed it in five.
Why? Because it wasn’t bringing in quality buyers (they were spending about one-fifth of what they should have been). In this case, Michael explained the problem:
“The reason is simple. Your customers may initially be responsive to bells and whistles, but in the long run what they want from you is honesty, sincerity, integrity, and value.
“Yes, you can make quick bucks in the direct-marketing business by bowling your customers over with inflated claims and exaggerated promises and hyperbolic language – but those bucks won’t keep coming once they figure out who you really are and what you’re really up to.”
Your sales copy, every last bit of it from your customer acquisition to your house file promotions, contributes to the experience your customer has with you and your business.
Direct marketing as a sales channel is a relationship business. You make your money on the second, third and fourth sales. That means the longer customers stay with you, the more profitable your business is.
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Posted by:
John Newtson
September 15, 2007
Issue #231
Dear Business Builder,
In a previous life at a company I used to work for, there was a consultant who lived so far off the beaten path FedEx wouldn’t guarantee next-day delivery to his house.
He used to be a highly successful executive at our company, then one day he just up and quit.
Why? In his words, “I always told myself I’d never stay at a job I hated for more than a week straight. And I’ve already broken that rule because, as of today, I’ve hated working here for two weeks straight.”
And with that, he packed up and moved to his vacation home in the Rocky Mountains.
He started a consultancy and never looked back.
I was thinking about him the other day and remembered this one-question quiz. It’s a fairly easy way to see if you’re really living life on your own terms:
If today were the last day of your life, would you really want to be doing what you’re doing today?
And if you answer no to that question too many days in a row – you’ve got some thinking to do. It’s certainly something I think about.
Do what you love to do
Back in 2005, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer, gave students graduating from Stanford some of the best advice I’ve read anywhere:
“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.
“And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.
“As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”
Copywriting and direct marketing give you the ability to work in almost any market you want. Whether it’s writing for those markets or building your own business in a field you love – you’ve got the tools.
Maybe you’re not sure what you love to do yet. That’s okay, but set aside some time to figure it out. Simply chasing income will only get you so far and won’t guarantee you happiness.
There are plenty of rich, miserable people. Fortunately, with your skills you can find a way to be a rich person who’s doing what you love to do.
And, besides doing what you love to do, why not …
Choose to live your dream lifestyle?
Several years ago, before becoming a copywriter, I was hanging out with a buddy on a beach in the Pelion region of Greece where I have a lot of family.
He was asking me about where I lived in the U.S. How much I paid for my apartment. And how much money I made. This was back before the Euro was adopted and the Drachma was still coin of the realm in Greece.
When I told him, he converted the dollars into Drachma and his jaw dropped. I tried to explain to him that it wasn’t a one to one comparison because the cost of living was so high in the U.S. relative to Greece.
He didn’t buy it and you could see the envy in his eyes. Then something dawned on his face and he smiled, pointed to the beach and said, “Yes, but in Greece, we have good food, beautiful women and the sea. What more do you need?”
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Posted by:
John Newtson
September 1, 2007
Issue #219
Dear Business Builder,
When Clayton and Wendy asked me to move down to North Carolina almost a year ago to work with them full-time, I jumped at the chance.
My wife and I sold our house in record time, packed our bags, grabbed the cats, put some Jimmy Buffet on the radio and headed south to the Great Smokey Mountains.
I knew right away that working with Clayton everyday would give me a world-class education in both copywriting and direct marketing. And these last eight months have put my learning curve into hyper-drive.
And now that I’m hip-deep in the numbers behind multiple marketing campaigns on a daily basis, I’ve developed a new appreciation for basic math.
For the simple reason that …
Your ability to generate massive amounts
of new customers
is directly determined
by your ability to do simple arithmetic.
Warning: For a mathematician, I’m a great copywriter. But I had Pete – über web guy and actual mathematician – check my numbers. So if anything doesn’t add up, Pete’s messing with me.
Let’s look at this in terms of return on investment. For this example, we’ll use an online new customer acquisition banner ad campaign that looks like this:
Prospects see the banner ad and click on it. This takes them to a squeeze page offering several free reports and a free subscription to a newsletter. Once they opt-in, they are redirected to a landing page selling a product.
This is just one way to successfully run one of these campaigns. It’s not ALWAYS appropriate to use a squeeze page. Sometimes it’s better to use a product landing page that has sign up options, but that’s for another article.
So you run those ads on four sites you think perfectly target your prospects.
Unfortunately, the margins from one media placement to the next are very different:
- Site #1 hits it out of the park with an up-front ROI of 250%
- Site #2 pulls break-even with 100% ROI
- Site #3 gives us 50% ROI
- Site #4 a mere 25% ROI
For the sake of argument, let’s say each one of those cost you $3,000. And each one gave you the exact same number of new customers, say 300.
So the numbers look like:
- Site #1: $3,000 at 250% ROI = $7,500 (for a $4,500 profit). 300 new subscribers generated at a profit of $15 each.
- Site #2: $3,000 at 100% ROI = $3,000 (for a $0 profit). 300 new subscribers generated for $0 each – they’re FREE!
- Site #3: $3,000 at 50% ROI = $1,500 (for a $1,500 loss). 300 new subscribers generated for a cost of $5 each.
- Site #4: $3,000 at 25% ROI = $750 (for a $2,250 loss). 300 new subscribers generated for a cost of $7.50 each
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Posted by:
John Newtson
August 18, 2007
Issue #207
Dear Copywriter,
Your clients aren’t looking for spectacular sales copy.
Your clients aren’t looking for eye-popping headlines, or killer sales logic.
Your clients are looking for results, or rather, what those results mean to them. The tip of the iceberg includes:
- They want the cash to plunk down on the expensive car … the bigger home … the exotic vacations …
- They want to spend more time with their families, friends or spend more money on their passions …
- They want the personal satisfaction of building their business into a multi-million dollar cash-cow – without having the life sucked out of them in the process …
That’s just for starters. And great sales copy is just one mechanism to help them make more money, faster.
Let that kick around in the back of your head for a few minutes.
Consider for a moment, the basic ways you can make more money as a copywriter working for clients (excluding selling your own products, which is a big subject in and of itself):
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