Widely recognized as one of the early pioneers of Internet marketing, Mark Joyner is responsible for introducing many of the technologies and tactics used on the Internet today: ebooks, remotely hosted ad tracking, and integration marketing. Having dropped out of high school, he turned his fledgling one-man operation into a multimillion-dollar international corporation with customers in every Internet-connected country on the planet.
Mark is the bestselling author of many books, but is most widely recognized for his breakthrough bestseller Mind Control Marketing, which rose to number one within 48 hours of its release. His free ebook, Search Engine Secrets, which he wrote several years ago, has been downloaded more than one million times.
RIC THOMPSON: Let's jump into this. I mentioned integration marketing. I gave a little tease there. Obviously, I didn't really explain what the heck it is. I figure you're a little bit better at doing that than I am, so do you want to give it a shot?
MARK JOYNER: Yes, you bet. Thanks. Integration marketing in one sense is a strategic way of looking at your business. The touchstone, or the tagline, for the book is 'how small businesses become big businesses and big businesses become empires'. That really captures the essence of what this is all about. As we talk here, we'll talk technically about how that actually happens.
Integration marketing would just be a bunch of fluff if it didn't provide for you a technical, specific way of accomplishing these things no matter what business you're in. That's the context I want to create for people. It gives you a way of looking at the business battlefield, and understanding what moves you need to take that are going to be the most effective.
Specifically, we're talking about being able to identify in a really reliable way the things that take the least effort, cost the least money, and yet simultaneously have the biggest impact. Everyone is probably wondering, "That sounds great, now let's hear specifically what that is." I think it's important to create that context first.
RIC THOMPSON: Sounds good. It's funny. I've actually used this stuff. You're making it sound like this huge concept-and it is, don't get me wrong-but it's also so simple and easy to implement that it's almost like a disconnect for me.
MARK JOYNER: That's the thing. It's interesting. As I've taught this over the years in different forms, I found that when I taught people individual tactics that were really simple and extremely effective, people would walk away thinking that was the be-all-end-all of integration marketing. We'll talk about some of those tactics tonight, I'm sure; like some of the ones that people are using on the Internet now to radically boost their profitability.
Some of these tactics have become commonplace because they really work. The reason why I take it to the conceptual level is because I would really like people to understand that not only can I show you one or two tactics that are going to quickly and easily boost your profitability without, really, much effort, but I also want to show you a way of thinking so you can identify other opportunities like this.
That's because the concept is one that will allow you to have an infinite number of tactical approaches that are equally effective. I really want people to walk away with that way of thinking so that they know that it's not just one thing. It's something that they can constantly grow and adapt with, just by learning to think this way. That's what I think we'll accomplish today.
RIC THOMPSON: Awesome. Let's give some more background. Where did this come about?
MARK JOYNER: It started out when I observed a phenomenon. I can't say I invented integration marketing. This is probably a pompous-sounding comparison, but it would be like Newton saying that he invented gravity. He didn't invent gravity; he just observed the phenomenon and was able to put a label on it. For me, it was observing a class of phenomenon that was described in all sorts of different ways.
I thought, "Wait a minute. I see a common thread here." I would talk to people about this. I would get a big disconnect when I talked to marketing experts. I've been very fortunate to have become friends with just about all of the really great marketing experts alive today, and none of them were really able to describe this concept. When I realized that I said, "This is something I think I can contribute here."
Over time that evolved into a classification system and-I'm going to say this word and people are going to be scared-some mathematical formulas that you can use to determine whether or not a marketing campaign is going to be effective. By the way, these are really simple and easy to understand. I'll show people where they can download a free document that will show them how to do all that in a second.
It's really not that hard, even though it sounds pretty complicated. That's where it started. If you want, we can talk about some of the specific phenomenon that I observed to specifically, I think, illustrate the two general classes of integration marketing really well.
RIC THOMPSON: Yes, absolutely. Let's get into it.
MARK JOYNER: The first one was taught to me by a hero of mine who I was really fortunate to have become really good friends with over the years. I have such tremendous respect for this man. His name is Joe Sugarman. If you've ever watched late-night infomercials or QVC, you certainly know who he is. He's an American icon. He stood up to Congress and won. He's just an amazing human being.
He's also one of the great pioneers of direct marketing, having pioneered many of the techniques that people find commonplace these days. For example, he was the first guy to use an 800 number for ordering. Joe is an historic figure. It's funny that I say this. You and I were sitting right next to Joe just a few months ago at a seminar. Years ago when I first got to know him, he was helping me out and I was helping him by showing him the ropes of the Internet.
He said, "Mark, when people call up to order a pair of BluBlockers, they can't order just one pair." I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "We do this thing in direct marketing that we call 'up-selling' and 'cross-selling'." This is not magical, by the way. It's magically effective, but it's a common bit of knowledge. We're leading up to the important stuff. The idea is that when somebody calls up and orders a pair of BluBlocker sunglasses, they will get an offer for an additional pair, multiple additional pairs, or a better pair.
If you order a lower-class version of BluBlockers and you order a more expensive one, that's an up-sell. If you order some BluBlockers and also buy an additional pair or some other type of glasses or complimentary product, that's a cross-sell. When I heard this, I thought, "This is amazing. No one is doing this on the Internet." That company that I was running at the time was the first company to sell ebooks on the Internet.
By this time there were a lot of people who had started selling ebooks. I started experimenting with this. I thought, "When people order an ebook now we give them a page that says, 'thank you', and right after that it says, 'Go on your merry way. Here's a polite pat on the butt. The order is over. Our transaction is concluded'." It suddenly struck me that this is stupid. I don't know how we missed this.
Nobody was taking advantage of that. Simultaneously, another one of the companies that we incubated back then was a company called ROIbot. This was one of the first remotely hosted ad-tracking companies on the Internet. We were doing very well with it, but we started doing a lot better when we integrated an offer for a free one-month trial of ROIbot on the thank-you pages of the sale of some of our ebooks.
This was a watershed moment for us. We're just getting warmed up. I'm going to explain to you. I'm getting ahead of myself because we're dancing around. If I can get people to understand this, they can see the opportunities here and that they're going to have a really simple and easy way to multiply their business by 10- to 100-fold just by understanding a simple concept.
This is why I get a little bit out of breath about this. Still to this day, I remember the excitement of realizing this. We put this offer on there and it started doing amazingly well. We started getting new ROIbot customers at a really rapid clip. Of course, I was delighted. I was delighted. This, by the way, is what I've now classified as one of the types of what we call 'internal integration marketing'.
Just hold that thought for a second. This will make a lot more sense as we carry on. That was really huge for us. Then I made another realization. After we did that for a couple of months, I went home one night. I was walking home and this brainstorm hit me and I thought, "All these other guys are selling ebooks now and none of them have figured this out yet. They don't realize the opportunity.
"Why don't I just go to these guys who are selling ebooks that are in the same target market as mine, and put in this up-sell for ROIbot? I'll pay them a slice of the commission. They don't have to do a darn thing, and they're going to get money out of thin air. We're going to be building all of this new business without having to invest a dime in advertising. We only pay when we get the results.
"It's just going to take a short conversation with these guys and a couple of minutes of technical work where we have to integrate this page in there. It will be really easy." I was really excited and then as the evening progressed, I didn't just get a little excited. I was realizing, "Oh, my goodness. This is huge!" All of the math started working out in my head. I couldn't sleep that night.
I was so 'spazzed out' about this. It was literally like I was giddy. I was shaking. I couldn't wait to get into the office the next day and wait for people to wake up so I could call people up. I went through this with some of my guys and we started calling people and knocking these deals down. Before you know it, we started having streams of new customers coming in.
Not only were they coming in at one time, they continued to come in because as those guys were building their businesses, we were building our business. Once we set that deal up once, it stayed in place. This was the single biggest thing that we did to grow that particular company. No other tactical play that we had was as powerful as that. We were really successful before that, but this is the thing that really catapulted us onto a global stage.
It was happening invisibly behind the scenes. Nobody knew that this watershed moment had happened to us. They were wondering why suddenly we were getting bigger and bigger. It was invisible to our competition. Not even the guys who we were doing the deals with really figured out the depth of it. This, by the way, is what we call 'external integration marketing'.
I've been talking too much, and I think you might have some questions, but I would like to tell another story at some point during this to explain to everyone just how big this concept is. It sounds really simple, and a lot of people think that's all integration marketing is. If I can tell one other story at some point during the call, I think it's going click something in people's minds where they'll say, "Oh, my goodness! I see now that this is not just something that will allow a small Internet marketing company to become big. It will allow, also, for a big company to become a global, historic empire."
RIC THOMPSON: You talked about how this was basically the inside secret that really catapulted the results. How large did that company get?
MARK JOYNER: We were doing millions upon millions of dollars in sales. When I closed it down, we were running a pretty lean operation of about 40-plus people in Hollywood, California at the time. I closed that company down in 2003. There was no doubt that we were the dominant force in that space. Anybody who knew anything about eCommerce knew what we were doing.
We had customers in every Internet-connected country in the world. We were pretty much the first company to do that. At the time that company was a household name on the Internet. You could not go anywhere and not see the stuff that we were doing. There were a lot of other integration marketing plays that allowed that to be true. That's what that turned out to be. That allowed me, for example, to build up marketing assets.
We had lists of customers so that it was easy for me to turn a book that I wrote into a number-one bestseller within 36 hours. Part of the secret of that was that I was able to build up lists of subscribers and customers who were, at that point, in the millions. If you have an asset like that, you can turn anything into a global number-one, or at least a top-ten, hit on just about any list if you have that kind of pool. That pool was largely built based on integration marketing concepts that we're going to be talking about more here.
RIC THOMPSON: I just wanted to make sure we really drive home the point of how many results can come out of this. Of course, as I talk about my example and what you've been talking about, each little instance of applying this is minutes or hours at the most. Each time you use this tactic it's simple, it's fast, it's easy and it's a nice, awesome stream that keeps going over time.
We've talked about internal integration marketing. We've talked about external integration marketing. Probably the next best point would be to give us some examples of specific places or integration points that we can start leveraging in applying integration marketing. Does that sound good?
MARK JOYNER: Yes, absolutely. I think this is a really good point for me to read the technical definition of integration marketing now. I think if I had said this earlier, we would have lost a lot of people because it sounds very technical. People will begin to understand it. To describe these ideas-because this was a coined phrase that didn't exist and was a naming of a class of phenomenon in a whole new way-we had to invent language.
I think once we can understand what these words mean, the idea will become more solidified in our minds. Here's the technical definition: The integration of a unit of marketing value. The unit of marketing value, by the way, can be a brand message, an offer, a sale, a store or anything that adds a marketing impact to your business. It's the integration of a unit of marketing value into an existing integration point.
That's it simply, but I want to point out also that an integration point can be inside of a traffic stream or a transaction stream. We'll talk about that in a second. Let me just read that one more time: The integration of a unit of marketing value into an existing integration point. That's it. It sounds very simple, but as you start to understand the meaning of those words, there's a ton of nuance here that becomes extremely empowering, because it allows us to start to see a lot of opportunity that we didn't see before.
Let me give a really common frame of reference that people can use. This is one of the early stories that I was telling about integration marketing years ago, and was based on McDonald's. I am half-loathe to give an example after seeing a movie like "Super-size Me," but McDonald's Corporation is putting out a lot of healthy food now. That's cool. I'll tell you, they're a genius organization in a lot of ways.
You would do well to study that company. The specific examples that I would like to give are of internal and external integration marketing. Internal integration marketing is when you order a hamburger and they say to you, "Would you like fries with that?" That's a cross-sell. A cross-sell, again, is when you're offering a complementary product or a different product that you would be interested in.
If you order a combo meal and they say, "Would you like to super-size that?" that's an up-sell. They're up-selling and giving you a higher level. There are a different number of ways that you can use those types of tactics. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of little tactical approaches to do that type of internal integration marketing. We talked about traffic streams and transaction streams.
That is the integration of an offer inside a transaction stream. You're already conducting a transaction. What we did with ROIbot was also a transaction stream. You had just completed a sale, and inside the process of it we asked for something more. I want to point out something subtle here before I give the other example. Notice that this was on the web. We already had someone's money, and on the thank you page for it we said, "Here's an offer for something else."
In the context of giving that offer on the web, if I had said something like, "Wait! Before you complete this order, here's another decision for you to make," notice that the psychology is different. Here's what's really interesting about the dynamic of the web. What's important for people to understand here is that every integration point has a different nature.
You would do well to understand the nature of the integration point, because when you can understand it at a deep level, you can get inside the mind of the consumer and give them what's appropriate in that moment. If I were to give someone an offer before consummating the sale on an Internet offer, we are there in front of our computers and we're distracted by a million-and-one things.
The Instant Messenger is going off. The phone is ringing. Your spouse is calling you for dinner. The dog is barking. The kids want help with their homework. If you have genius kids like Ric does, they want to come in and help you with work. All of those things distract the completion of the order. I found that in most contexts online-and of course, there are some exceptions to this-giving that kind of offer works best after the order is consummated, because I want to make sure that we consummate that order.
We have somebody who is interested. They say, "That's all done," and now I say, "Here's another offer." At McDonald's, you're in line. I would say that it's one in 1,000 guys who get in line at McDonald's and leave without ordering. You're there because you're hungry, and you want to place the order right now. It's very unlikely that you're going to leave. It's very easy for them to say, "Let me bump this order up here in a number of different ways."
I just want people to be cognizant of that. Be aware of the nature of the integration point that you're dealing with, and integrate things that are appropriate. There's a lot more that we can say about that, but I think that's good for now. The other example I want to make here is an example of external integration marketing. You might find that when you go into McDonald's they say, "Would you like a Coke with that?" instead of, "Would you want fries?" Does McDonald's make Coca-Cola?
RIC THOMPSON: Not as of yet.
MARK JOYNER: Not as of yet. That's right. Give them another couple of decades and they might, right? Here's the interesting thing. Coca-Cola is not the McDonald's company, but you have McDonald's here, one of the largest corporations in the world, hands-down the single most spectacular display of restaurant success in the history of the world. They're selling someone else's product. Isn't that interesting? There's something else interesting that you'll notice. Tell me, Ric, have you ever seen a Coke store anywhere?
RIC THOMPSON: No, I sure haven't.
MARK JOYNER: Interesting, right? I think there are a couple of Coke stores, but they're selling Coke memorabilia; they're not really there to sell Coke. When you want to buy Coke you go to a fast food joint, a vending machine, a corner store, a gas station, a supermarket, or you can go almost anywhere. That's because Coke has integrated the offer of Coke all over the place. Everywhere. They are in traffic streams and transaction streams across the whole planet.
You would be hard pressed to find a place in the industrialized world, and even in parts of the Third World, where they are not selling Coca-Cola. That is the power of external integration marketing. I will also go on to say that external integration marketing can explain most of the greatest fortunes that were built in the history of the world. I can give, at some point in the call if we have time for it, another case study as well, that proves that is the case.
RIC THOMPSON: You already have my attention on that one. Is it a short story that we can jump into right now?
Want even more tips and tricks? This article was just a small portion of an hour long interview. And this interview was just ONE of 24 top interviews conducted by Ric Thompson for Internet Marketing TNT. If you’d like to get your hands on ALL 24 interviews, simply click here and check out Internet Marketing - Very Important Profit Systems.
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