Category Archiveemail marketing
email marketing &viral marketing Martin Lee on 29 Jun 2007
Vonage Email Marketing Disaster
A couple of days ago, I was reading a post on my email autoresponder provider Aweber about an email marketing campaign by Vonage that went awfully wrong.
I’m sure you would have seen those “tell-a-friend” forms being used on many websites. These forms look innocent enough. You refer your friend to a website that you like using the form and your friend gets an email telling them about your recommendation.
Of late, marketers have been using incentives to get people to fill in those forms in an attempt to create a viral marketing campaign. Even I myself was using that.
And that should be the end of the story. Any website using those forms should not make use of the email addresses that were provided to them in any other way. But no.
email marketing &reviews Martin Lee on 18 May 2007
Hypnotic Marketing by Joe Vitale
Over the past week, I have been bombarded with many emails on Joe Vitale’s Hypnotic Marketing formula. Unable to resist a good marketing promotion (and price), I bought it today to see what it is about.
The basic strategy has three steps:
1) Hypnotic publicity
2) Hypnotic website
3) Hypnotic emails
This can be summarised into one statement: Using publicity to generate traffic to your website where you collect their email address and then follow up with them consistently with regular emails.
Jay Abraham once told Joe Vitale: “The real secret to making money online isn’t in websites. It’s in email.”
How true.
Joe expands on these three steps and provides you with concrete case studies of how other people have done it and how you should approach it.
As part of the 8th anniversary promotion, the book also comes with a ton of other bonuses. I particularly like the hypnotic writing swipe file which provides us with proven phrases, commands, words, questions, etc that we can use in our salesletters.
I am also looking foward to the 2 free months of Hypnotic Gold Monthly Audio CD and Print Newsletter that will be mailed to me.
All in all, with the whole lot costing only $27 (while the anniversary promotion is running), it’s a pretty good bargain.
email marketing &Risk Reversal Martin Lee on 21 Jun 2005
A Strategy I Learnt From Jay Abraham
Back when Jay Abraham was promoting his super summit, he actually gave away a series of free reports. Needless to say, I downloaded and read them. One of the strategies that he taught was that of risk reversal.
In any transaction between two parties, one side is always taking more of the risk. If you, as the product or service provider, can remove most or all of the risk from your prospects, then you would have a much greater chance of them becoming your clients. One method that you can employ is that of a money back guarantee. A low percentage of people might abuse the offer but that’s ok. Why should you worry about losing 1-2% of revenue when your baseline revenue can be multiplied 200-300% just by offering that money back guarantee?
One thing you need to take note though; your product or service must live up to it’s claims! Otherwise you will get a high percentage of refunds. I tested out this strategy on some items that I was selling in auction sites. Sales improved significantly and I had no problems with refunds.
Some site updates. I have put up a contact form on the site. One thing that I have learnt is to never put your email address directly on any web site. Some bots surf the net frequently to collect email address. If they find yours, then you can be sure you will start getting a lot of spam.
After thinking for a while, I decided to use my trusted Aweber to implement this. I was already using Aweber for most of my newsletter and subscribers database. Using it for my contact form would make tracking of queries a whole lot easier and save me lots of time. It will also allow me to follow up with these prospective clients from time to time. Anyway, my basic subscription to Aweber allows for unlimited campaigns at no extra cost so why not make the most out of it?
I will discuss about the use of autoresponders and follow-ups in more details at a later date. For now, just remember that when you are building a business, you would want to automate or outsource most of the menial tasks and use your time on business growing activities.
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