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Inner Circle Roundtable of 21st Century Marketers |
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Chapter Eight Sites That Sell
By Ben Hart
After you capture your lead and deliver the valuable free gift you promised, you will then want to take your leads to your sales presentation – which can look very much like the good old fashioned printed sales letter.
In my case, I construct the entire site to look very much like a traditional physical direct mail sales package.
With printed direct mail, there’s the main cover letter, an order form, and perhaps some enclosures. The equivalent of the enclosures on your sales letter website are your tabs in the index. You’ll find one of my sales letter-style websites at www.MarketingRocketFuel.com.
On my website I include an audio message with my sales letter. In this case my audio message is fairly lengthy – about 25 minutes. It’s really more of a lecture.
I do this because I am selling a course, and I want to give my prospect a taste of what they will be getting in the course. As with sales letters, audio messages can be long or short. Length depends on its purpose and how much you have to say. As with your sales letter, it can be long if what you are saying is interesting.
My audio message plays automatically for anyone who lands on this page.
Whether or not you have your audio message play automatically depends on the purpose of your site. I want to get the attention of and make an impact on my first-time visitor.
But it would be annoying to have your audio message play every time on your general business website, or on a website that you want and expect your customers to return to over and over again. If you are running an online magazine that is updated with news everyday, or a portal that you’d like to be the home page of your customers, you would certainly not want to have an automatically playing audio message or video.
Your automatically-playing audio message is more appropriate for those who have never bought from you – that is, for your prospecting sales letter website, or for your site that is specifically designed to sell one and only one thing.
I have found that audio usually significantly boosts sales on this kind of site.
But I have also seen audio depress results. I guess the audio was not compelling or people did not like the sound of the voice. So it’s not automatic that audio will increase response. you will need to test your landing pages and sales letters with and without audio to make sure.
If the content of your message is not compelling, it won’t matter how your message is delivered.
The most important concept in marketing is “test.”
As in direct mail, a sales letter site should sell one and only one thing.
With my sales letter at www.MarketingRocketFuel.com, I am asking my visitors to test-drive my Inner Circle marketing coaching and training program for 14 days for a cost of $1. So this is a prospecting sales letter website. “Prospecting” means, I am speaking to people who have never bought anything from me before.
This is a website designed for strangers, people who know nothing much at all about me except they filled out the sign-up form on one of my landing pages to get the free book.
Many of the rules for a successful direct mail sales letter apply to your sales letter website. For more on this, read my book How To Write Blockbuster Sales Letters.
My sales letter website also has many hidden pages – pages that are not in the index and that you can’t see. Some of my emails to my opt-in subscribers (prospects) will take my readers directly to the main offer on the home page. But most of my emails will promote a new article that’s on a hidden page – a page that can only be accessed by a link in the email. Or sometimes I will take my op-in subscribers to an audio seminar or even to live webcast I’m conducting.
Even though the article is hidden (except to those who have the link in the email I send them), the article is connected to the site. So the site’s index can be seen by readers of the article, and they can hit the home page tab in the index and read the main sales letter. At the end of the article, I will also encourage readers to go to the main sales letter with a line that says something link this: “Now click here if you are really serious about growing your business exponentially by improving your marketing.”
What I am doing with the articles is giving a reason for my opt-in subscribers to come back to my sales letter website. This is how I create repeat traffic to my site from my opt-in subscriber list. Many who read the article will then hit the “Home Page” tab or a link in the article to the home page (the main sales letter) to read and hear my sales presentation.
After about 21 days, I will stop taking my opt-in subscribers to this sales letter site if they don’t bite on my offer. I figure if they don’t buy within 21 days, they aren’t interested. I will then take them to another one of my sales letter websites that’s selling something else.
If that fails, I will take them to my Marketing Blog that contains Google AdSense ads and ads offering products that are not mine, but where I earn a commission as an affiliate marketer.
Here are some more examples of sales letter or sales presentation websites:
http://www.marketingrights.com http://www.mattfurey.com/furey_inner_circle.html http://buildit.sitesell.com/main/home.html http://winninginthecashflowbusiness.com http://www.newsmax.com/blaylock
Dual Purpose Sites – Capture Lead and Sell at the Same Time
Some prospecting websites try to sell and capture the lead with the same site.
I, myself, don’t favor this approach. I prefer my prospecting sites to do one and only one job. My #1 goal for my visitors who have never bought anything from me or filled out any of my sign-up forms, is to get them to fill out a sign-up form, so that I can get them on my list and put my prospect into my follow-up and cultivation program.
In fact, the instant a visitor fills out the form to op-in, my main sales letters comes into view.
It’s a question of sequence and timing. Goal #1: get my visitor on my list . . . because I know if I have someone on my list, I will have many opportunities to sell something to my prospect. I will have many bites at the apple. But if I fail to get that visitor to sign-up and get on my list with the free book offer, then I know I will lose that person almost certainly forever. I’ll never have another chance to sell to that person. It’s much easier to get people to say “yes” to your free offer than the offer they must pay for.
In direct marketing, about 70 percent of all sales are made with two-step or multi-step marketing, 30 percent with one-step marketing. Two-step or multi-step marketing is capturing the lead first and then following up with valuable free information mixed in with sales offers.
One-step marketing is hitting your prospect right away with the sales pitch.
I believe your one and only goal with your first-time visitor should be to persuade that visitor to request your free book or other valuable free offer by filling out your sign-up form. Your first goal is to build your list of leads.
That’s the classic direct marketing model: Build your list first so you have qualified leads you can sell to.
But other very good marketers prefer the dual purpose prospecting site – a site that makes a sales pitch to buy and also a free offer aimed at getting visitors to fill out the sign-up form.
Some of these sites stress the offer you have to pay for. Failing that, a pop-up, pop-under or hover ad comes into view when you hit the exit button saying something like : “Wait! Before you leave this page, fill out this form to get your FREE___________.”
Some stress a free offer to capture the lead and make the product you pay for the sideshow.
One of the best examples of the hybrid site is American Writers and Artists, Inc’s site at www.awaionline.com. This site is aimed at primarily at writers, and showing writers how they can use their writing skill to maximize their income with their writing skill. This site primarily emphasizes the free offer (lead capture) with its ad that pops up over its main sales letter site. This is an enormously successful online business that sells educational programs and information products.
The advantage of a hybrid prospecting site like this (that attempts both to capture leads and sell at the same time) is that it will make more sales to first-time visitors. So this site will generate money quickly.
The risk of the hybrid dual-purpose site is that your readers become distracted and are more likely to end up giving you nothing – no money, no email address.
The www.awaionline.com site is worth studying. It’s skillfully done.
The reader is hit first with the pop-up lead generation ad that hovers over the site.
The reader is likely to click the “X” button before filling out the form in order to first read the general presentation. Many will want to read all the information before filling out any forms for the free newsletter offer. The site does include other prominent opportunities on its site for visitors to fill out the form for the newsletter. But getting readers to fill out this form is not the sole purpose of this site.
Though I have no test results to prove it, my bet is that this site is not capturing as many leads as a site that is focused on that one job alone – like my own site at www.FreeSalesLetterBook.com
The downside of my site is that less money comes in with my initial contact. Actually, almost no money, because my entire marketing effort is to get my first-time visitors to fill-out the sign-up form to get the free book.
With this approach, very few people will buy from me until they have received the free book as promised and had a chance to look it over. What I am counting on is to impress my visitors by OVERdelivering on my promise. My goal with this first contact is to so exceed their expecations, that my prospects say “Wow! This is incredible what this guy has just given me for free. If this is what I get for free, I wonder what I’ll get if I actually buy something. I think I’ll go ahead and try his marketing training program for $1 for 14 days.”
Then if I exceed expectations again by the same wide margin with my $1 trial member offer, I know that most will become full members, paying $38 per month.
Indeed, this has proven to be the case.
As I write this sentence, I now have more than 2,000 entrepreneurs paying $38 per month.
Of the people who try the program for 14 days for $1, 92 percent make it at least to the first month. 85% make it through three months. Those who stay for three months are almost all permanent members, barring some life-changing situation.
I believe strongly in multi-step marketing. Ask for just one action at a time.
The marketing process is similar to dating.
If you are a man who sees a beautiful woman walking down the street, how do you think you would do if you ran up to this stranger and asked her to marry you?
Probably not well. Mostly likely she would try to get away from you as quickly as possible. Might even call the cops.
You must first find a way to get a casual conversation started, a conversation that is not threatening, a conversation that requires zero commitment on the part of the women.
If you manage to get conversation started, the next step is probably not to ask her out to dinner. You would be moving much too fast. The next step, if the conversation is going well, might be to ask her if she’d like to grab a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
So you must start a casual conversation and begin to build some rapport until you can move the relationship to the next step – which might be that cup of coffee at Starbucks.
Your marketing in your business life is no different than marketing in your social life.
First you must find a way to get a casual conversation started.
Once you have built some minimal level of rapport, your next step is to see if they will accept your free offer.
Once you have crossed that hurdle, you try to move the relationship to the next level by seeing if they will make some minimal purchase.
I believe you achieve much better results if you cultivate this relationship by taking it one step at a time, slowly ramping up the level of commitment over time.
That’s why I believe a site should be designed to achieve one and only one job. It should be designed with a specific narrow purpose in mind – unless it’s your general company brochure-style site which is designed more to build image than to close sales.
I want my lead generation site to be only about capturing the name and email address of the lead. I then follow-up up with offers that cost something later.
The first offer that comes at them right after they fill-out the sign-up form is the 14-day Inner Circle trial membership for $1 offer.
This actually happens a few seconds after they fill out the sign-up form to get the free book.
Yes, I realize that this is moving the relationship along fast. So it’s not exactly analogous to dating. You do need to factor in the speed at which people hop from site to site, grabbing free offer after free offer from marketers who are doing exactly what I am doing.
15 minutes later, even if they have grabbed my free book, they will have forgotten about me and my site if I don’t come back at them again quickly.
So I do want to hit them with my $1 offer seconds after they have signed up to get my free book. If they turn that down, 12 hours later or so, I will send them an article I’ve written, no strings attached – just a valuable, useful article on some subject in marketing.
I will do that, in part, because maybe with some I tried to move the relationship along to quickly by coming at them with my $1 offer seconds after they signed up to get my free book.
So I will retrench a bit. I will try to reestablish rapport by sending several articles before I come at them again with the $1 offer or some other offer that requires payment.
That’s my business model in nutshell.
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