Clayton Makepeace is a highly regarded copywriter with 8 years of experience in creating direct mail, internet, and print advertising promotions. He is also the publisher and executive producer of The Total Package.
At the ETR boot camp, I talked to other copywriters who were really struggling in virtually every niche. Response rates are low, but we're not experiencing low response rates. Actually, we're experiencing a continual increase in responsiveness on our files. There's a reason for that. I believe that the reason is the strategy that we use when we approach our prospects and customers on my clients' files.
We started developing this approach-we call it the Online Multiplier Approach-4 ½ years ago. Every month since then, we have tested new things, and we've refined it. We now have a result of four years of fine-tuning and sharpening. We'll look at a lot of the reasons why the approach works so well. I'm not going to ask you to take anything on faith today.
At the end of this session, you will leave with a comprehensive overview of the strategy that is driving response rates higher, driving average sales higher, keeping our customers and prospects with us longer, and, as we'll see in a moment, helping us build our file very quickly with highly qualified prospects who converted in very short periods of time.
With that, let's get started. When I talk about how profitable this campaign strategy is, I want you to know what that means. All of us know that any kind of sales campaign online needs several things. It needs a list of names to send the campaign to, a good product, a good offer, and good sales copy; but there's something more than that.
It's the overall strategy of how you unveil the product to your prospects and customers and how you go through the sales process. That's what this is. This is the framework within which you create your sales copy and your actual promotion. When we say it's profitable and the response rates are high, what do we mean? Early last year in 2009 is the first example.
Early in the year, the economy was still declining and growing weaker. Those of you who keep track of such things know that it wasn't until March that the economy started stabilizing a bit and the stock market started moving a little higher. In February and the earliest part of March, before that happened, we used this strategy to pull in $2.5 million dollars in sales in just 24 hours.
Over the next 30 days, we pulled in another $16 million in sales. That is huge. That's on a list with about half a million names. That's huge at a time like this. The total revenue this thing is pulling out of our files is up to $37 for every prospect and customer name on that file. Let's round it off and say $35. With 100,000 names on a file, that would be $3.5 million.
That gives you some idea of how profitable this can be. I need to say that not all of our promotions have been that productive. Some of them pulled in as little as $15 per name last year. I also want to say that the file I'm referencing that we went through with this was a file of both prospects and customers. Probably 80% of the names on it were prospects, people who had never bought anything from us before.
It was a mixed list. These were not all high caliber customers who loved us and would buy anything we offered them. In addition, after each campaign we were able to repurpose the emails, the sales pages, and all the materials from the campaign to use as affiliate promotions. We also used pay-per-click and other paid online promotions to generate new email names to build our list.
We're doing that right now. We're generating up to 100,000 new names every quarter or every 90 days. Those names are highly qualified because of the quality of the campaign. They convert. They make enough purchases to pay for the cost of pay-per-click in 63 days. Last year and the year before that, it was taking us up to six months to convert these names and to break even.
Now we're doing it in 63 days on average. The customers in our file steadily upgrade themselves because of the strategy. They stay with us longer. They are more engaged. They're more involved. They enjoy our marketing. They're not offended by it. Obviously, you'll always find somebody who's offended by anything you do, but they weren't offended overall. Customer lifetime is improving. It's off the charts compared to anything I've ever seen.
As we all know, exploding a business is no mystery. To build a business and make a business larger and more successful, the things you need to do are fairly simple and easy to understand. Doing them that gets a little tough something. First, you need to attract more qualified prospects. Secondly, you need to transform more prospects into paying customers and do it faster.
Thirdly, you need to help your customers buy more often. For each customer on your file, instead of buying three times a year, you want them to buy six times a year. You need to convince your customers to make ever larger purchases. You can see how these are not additives. If you help your average customer move from two purchases a year to four, you've doubled your revenue.
If at the same time you've convinced your average customer to spend an average of $200 with you instead of $100, what is that? I think it's an octuple. You're increasing your sales revenues by an order of magnitude. These are not merely additives. Finally, persuade your customers to stick with you longer. One of the reasons why this program works so well is that it leverages five of the big advantages that the Internet gives us.
The first one is that the web can be an emotional medium...
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 outInternet Marketing - Very Important Profit Systems.
Member comments together with Member Names may be used by
InternetMarketingTNT.com for promotional or other media efforts.
Comments that include profanity, or personal attacks, or antisocial behavior
such as "spamming" or "trolling," or other inappropriate comments or
material will be removed from the site. We will take steps to block users
who violate any of our terms of use. You are fully responsible for the
content that you post.
Comments (0)
We invite you to be the first to post a comment regarding this article.
