Internet Marketing Tell All

That one thing is probably follow-up.

Picture this.

You have a sales letter that converts at 3%, and your profit is $75 per sale. 1000 people see it. You make 30 sales. $2250. Congrats. You da man.

What if you had a follow-up series that also converted at only 3%. But the sign-up rate to the series was 50%. You have the original 30 sales.

Watch this. Sign up to the follow-up is 500 people. 3% of them convert at $75. That’s another 15 sales. Another $1275.

An hour extra work giving away a couple of excerpts or articles that you’ve already written or setting up the autoresponder series. 50% increase in sales.

I would call my initial lack of follow-up my single biggest marketing mistake ever. Follow up is not just for signing up the people that didn’t buy on impulse the first time they came to your site, it’s for selling upsells to people who are already sold.

Once I started marketing to customers I already had, I kicked myself every day for about a year.  I don’t even mean newsletters. I mean listening to your clients really well. When they send you testimonials, really study what they’re saying that they liked. Be anal, keep a database of comments and who said what.

I started to keep the people who had bought from me separate from those who didn’t. With their permission, I offered them upsells about four times a year. Once I had a 100% conversion rate.  I had sold 100 people an ebook and listened to their suggestions. All 100 of them bought the multimedia version. $9700 for a day’s work.

How much are you leaving on the table?

Don’t have a list of people to market to? What if you can’t go back and write individual emails asking your customers to sign up to your special offers list (Bait works. Offer them 10% off if they buy during the first week a new product is out.)?

Ask a fellow marketer. You probably have a friend who was a one-hit wonder in internet marketing and can’t figure out what to do next. Pitch them the idea and sell to their customer list in exchange for a cut in the profits.