01/26/2005: "Some Marketing Tips to Help You Convert More Prospects . . ."

Some Marketing Tips from Susanna . . .

The first tip sounds simple. But you'd be surprised how few people use it. Know this. Less than 5 percent of your visitors will become buyers. Fact is, most sites sell from less than 1 to 2 percent if they're lucky.

Why is that? Simply put, most people don't buy the first time they're on your site. It takes several
visits before they decide to buy in most cases.

So if all you have is your site, you've lost 95% of your visitors without any hope for a sale. That's a
very bad thing.

But they're still, in most cases, available to you to sell to if you build a relationship marketing strategy.
You need a relationship with your visitors who have shown an interest in your product or service.

So what can you do?

Offer a report at no cost to all who give you their name and e-mail address on your Home Page first thing. Then your autoresponder follows up with the report and a sales message.

Then you send out a sales message at least once a week. No more than that. But no less either. This is called relationship marketing and it is the heart of all ecommerce.

Your marketing doesn't end at your Web site.

The second tip is this:

Find out the "real" reason people buy your product or service. There is a famous company who sells pillows on television. When they first started out they had a list of things they considered benefits and features. But guess what, none of them were the real reason people bought the pillows.

Sales weren't good. The company knew it had to do something.

They did a survey of people who bought and discovered that the majority bought because they had pain in their necks. Nowhere in their advertising did the company even mention this benefit.

So they changed their advertising and pushed the pain in the neck benefit and started selling pillows faster than they could make them.

So you need to do the same thing in your advertising and marketing. Find out the real reason people buy. Not why you "think" they buy or why they "should" buy but why they "really" buy. Then sell to that.