One Thing At A Time - March 2007
One Thing At A Time!
Many, many moons ago (and I mean many), when I was setting up my first direct response business, I was given one piece of advice that has stayed with me throughout the years. That advice was as follows:- “Only ever give your customers one thing to do at a time”.
At the time I wasn’t quite sure about this, but, ask yourself, what are you like as a customer? Yes I know we all want quality service and think we are discerning consumers, but….. and you know this is true, we can all be pretty stupid on occasions. And, yes…I do include myself in this bracket!
This entire matter was brought home to me very firmly recently when I was
having a chat with one of my colleagues in this great industry of ours. He’d just set up a new website and had two very similar domain names to make sure he caught all customers who tried to type in the variations or had mistyped the URL.
I thought this was very sound marketing indeed.
However, after a while, he changed the offer on one of the domains to something different. Now I think he thought he’d just like to test a variation on the offer, however….
This is what happened. On the Monday morning, the ‘phone became red hot.
Ahh, good you might think. However, people were looking at both and trying to compare one with the other. So, the ‘phone was hot, but with questions like:-
“What’s the difference?”
“Which is the best product?”
“Which product would be better for…?”
“Why is A more expensive then B?”
And so it went on, question after question after question.
When my colleague finished, totally exhausted many hours later than normal that day… sales had slumped through the floor. Very few sales had closed, but web site hits were great. Not good marketing!
The bottom line?
Well, my friend had loads of prospects ready to buy, but they had got confused about the nature of the offer(s), so being unsure, they ordered nothing at all.
So, the message has to be, once you want a prospect to take action, make it as easy as humanly possible for them to do so. Tick this box here, put this
information in there, click this link - sale done!
Make it as easy as possible. As soon as you add some twist into the process
prospects fall out of your sales funnel at an alarming rate.
I remember from my sales days, a saying we used to employ – K.I.S.S.
It stands for Keep It Simple Stupid.
In other words, make it EASY for your prospects to buy from you. Make forms as easy to follow as possible, put instructions in words of few syllables and make sure they have all the information they need to make the right decision. Reinforce the sales message (benefits) at the point of sale.
My friend knew all of this, but thought he would be clever and try to give himself a little sales boost. It backfired badly and is a timely reminder to every one of us in this wonderful business of ours. Always keep K.I.S.S in mind!
By the way, I’m not advocating that you shouldn’t test. You should…but always make sure the tests are separate and you always have a control to refer back to. However, this is a different subject that I’ll cover in a future newsletter. It is also the subject of an entire DVD in our upcoming Copywriting product, more on that later though.
I mentioned last month that the APD Portal should have been live by now.
Unfortunately, it’s still not quite made it. This is the price you pay for trying new technologies – well new to me anyway!
We’ve been trying to build the portal in something called PHP-Nuke. It’s a great tool for building websites that need to hold a lot of information, but…it’s a bit of a law unto itself. The problem has been getting the PHP-Nuke environment onto the APD domain. It’s been quite a challenge!
Anyway, we’re very nearly there now, and I hope to be able to announce the
launch in a few days time. Perhaps another timely reminder to K.I.S.S!
On a different subject entirely, despite my lack of time this last month, I just had to have a dabble with some of the Day Job Killer methods. I am pleased to report that without dedicating that much time or effort, I have managed to mount three campaigns.
I’m still waiting for the sales to complete on two campaigns, but they do look
encouraging. The first campaign made just over £30 in one day. OK, that may not sound like much, but if you tune the methods more finely and get them exactly right, that £30 could easily be £60 or £70. And..if you multiply that over numerous campaigns as suggested, that quickly becomes an awful lot more.
The DJK manual actually suggests that you should be running approximately 100 campaigns at any given time. Each takes between 1 and 2 hours to research and set up. I reckon if you average out at £45 / day over 100 campaigns that would be £4,500 / day. (Maths GCSE you see).
£4,500 per day for, say 150 hours work, residual type income as well. That
sounds like very good business to me.
I’m not sure if it would deliver at that level day in / day out yet as I’m still testing, but the figures do look good.
So, once I’ve got the portal up and the Copywriting product launched, guess what I’m going to be dedicating some time to? I’ll give you three guesses, I reckon you’ll only need one!
If you want to have another look, here’s the link again.
Day Job Killer - Click Here To Find Out!
I’ll make sure I keep you posted with my progress on this one.
If you want to contact me about anything in this newsletter, please feel free to drop me a mail on derek@apd-marketing.co.uk I look forward to hearing from you.
OK, that’s it for March, more next month.
Until then, cheers now and have fun.
Derek
Derek Armson
Internet Marketing From APD
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