My Best Wishes For a Fruitful New Year

The tribulations of 2008 are soon behind us and looking forward there will be many challenges and opportunities in 2009. How will you handle them?

Plan now to be proactive, be extra helpful. Remember we serve our customers and now even more than before we must provide value, service and advice to help add stability in these uncertain times.

Live the Golden Rule in your marketing life as well as your personal life. Be the best you can possibly be and the rewards you “earn” will follow.

Wishing you great successes,

List Building Tips new year wishes

Hard or Soft, Which Squeeze Page to Use?

Using an opt-in or “squeeze” page as it is sometimes called is a must for building your list.  You can build a list only from actual buyers (and that is one great list!) but what about those visitors who didn’t buy?  Well if you are using an opt-in page and incentive to collect their names you can change at least some of them to “didn’t buy, yet”.

The object here is to get their contact information for follow ups and continue to market to them until they do buy ;-)  The “hard” opt-in page is like a funnel that narrows the focus of attention to your purpose, collecting their contact information. You briefly describe some benefit they can achieve, the more irresistible the better, and then offer only two options.  They can either submit their information to get your benefit (and it needs to be an instant benefit) or they can click away.  This is the “hard squeeze” for you offer no other choice but sign up or go away.

The soft squeeze has a couple of choices.  The popular opt-in box on the sidebar of your website or blog is a soft squeeze, and generally has the lowest lead capture percentage.  Another is similar to the hard squeeze however you give out more helpful information and begin the informational part of the selling process by describing a benefit in greater detail or identifying a “solvable” problem and then “set the hook” by teasing about the answer.  Now they must submit their contact info to get the rest of the story about the benefit or learn how to solve that problem you so artfully brought to a focus.

Which method works best? Both under different circumstances.  The only choice we have as marketers is to set up both types and drive traffic to each one separately and measure the results.  A marketer is always testing to try and improve results, at least in major markets.  Once you have a baseline of results that becomes your “control” and you can continue to work on improvements to increase opt-ins versus visitors.  Whether you go hard or soft is completely up to you. Which works better (after testing) is up to your individual market circumstance.

List Building Tips opt-in page, squeeze page

Why Should Your Prospects Listen to You?

Have you ever stopped to look at your marketing materials from your prospects point of view?  When you decide to pursue marketing you do research, study copy writing techniques and all the other things necessary to get your idea or product “out there”.  Since you have put so much work into it, you know it through and through but you need to stop right there and ask yourself if you didn’t know anything about this miracle (product or idea) would you care?

A very common mistake marketers make is looking at marketing from only one side.  If you’re going to look at it from only one side, then choose to look at your offer from the customers side.  To reach your prospects you need to answer these five magic questions.

Who are you? - If you are going to profess some expertise and offer your super beneficial “widget” that solves all the worlds problems, or at least one specific one, then you must explain who “You” are.   If you have years of experience or a degree in a relevant field then maybe you’re worth listening to.  Perhaps you’ve overcome some significant struggle and now you can share your success story with others.  Whatever you particular reason is you have to explain that relevant point to your prospect, otherwise why should they listen to you?

What do you want? - Why are you bothering me?  If you’re hear to tell me how wonderful you are, then you can save your breath.  If you have a purpose for taking up my time then get to the point.  Make it clear that you have important information that is worth sharing.

Why should I care? - How does this apply to me, does it make a difference to me?  You have to explain why this concerns “me”, not just everyone but “ME”.  I don’t care about anyone else other myself so explain very directly why “I” should listen to you.

What’s in it for me? - If I am interested in what you have to say then how does this benefit me?  Will this help me or at least help me avoid something I don’t want?  If there is a worthwhile benefit in what you’re pitching then make it clear as a bell.  Don’t be vague or wishy-washy if it will help me then make that undeniably clear.

What do I do now? - So you may be some kind of expert, and you have a reason to tell me about it, you’ve explained why I should listen and even explained what this super widget will do for me but what do I have to do to next, what’s my next step?  It may seem obvious to you (looking from the marketer’s side) but do I fill in this form and click submit?  Do I call this 800 number and schedule an appointment?  You have to make these steps clear and simple.  Do not assume anything and explain how to respond to your “call to action”.

Whatever you are marketing, physical products, services or information, if you answer these five questions for your prospects you will now be pushing the right buttons.  They want to know who, what, when, why and what next.  Don’t make your prospects guess these questions.  Look at all your marketing materials through the eyes of your prospects, you may be surprised at what you see.

List Building Tips marketing tips