Advertising and Marketing blog

If ever there was a lazy way to easy profits in mail order it has
to be the concept of letting someone else do all the work for
you.

In theory, it works like this:

You send a camera-ready circular or ad to someone who advertises
a print/mail service and they will print and mail it (along with
many others) to 1,000 to 25,000 names on their own list. You
simply pay a one-time charge while they do all the work. Now,
multiply this by 5, 10 or more such services and you could (still
theoretically speaking, of course) have several thousand of your
offers in the hands of prospective buyers within a few weeks.

The problem, is that it doesn’t work that easily, at least not to
the point of making it profitable for the dealer who expects to
become delunged with orders. Even the very best mailers in the
business can produce only a small percentage of return for their
clients, so you would have to have a very high markup on your
offer and reach millions of people if you hope to make it
profitable. If you already have a test-proven offer that produces
about 3% return when you mail the offer by itself, you will be
lucky to get one-half of 1% when mailed by a mailer along with
hundreds of others.

Yes, some offers can produce a profit, even with such a small
percentage of return, but they are extremely few and far between.
First of all, you would most likely have to be the high markup
that is required. If the offer calls for $10 and you can produce
it for $1 reality is: That’s 5 orders per thousand…50 orders per
10,000. Some offers might be able to survive on this, others
cannot. You will have to do some figuring to determine whether
it’s worth trying.

On the down side of this practice, there has been quite a bit of
speculation about such print/mail services as to their honesty
and quality of their services. Many of them offer poor
printing, often smudgy or in various shades of gray instead of
crisp black and white; some of the lists they use are so
overworked, they have become virtually worthless. Even the best
mailers use primarily “Opportunity” lists, so merchandise offers
would hardly be appropriate. Another flaw in this idea that some
crooked mailers are out there who simply don’t mail the quantity
they claim. It seems they print and mail only hundred or so, but
claim to mail in the thousands. This is very difficult for anyone
to prove or disapprove, so the entire idea of using a print/mail
service is precarious at best.

Copyright 2004 by DeAnna Spencer
This article may be freely reproduced on the Internet as long as the
resource box remains intact.

DeAnna Spencer is a virtual assistant that helps entrepreneurs run a successful business by providing affordable administrative help. She also publishes a blog for small business owners. Visit this small business resource today.

One marketing technique may work wonders for someone, but that doesn’t guarantee that it’ll do the same for you. The only way to really know what works for YOUR products and YOUR target audience is to experiment. Testing and experimentation are crucial to increasing your profits.

1. Try using the occasional pop-up window to get more subscribers to your newsletter. Some people *really* hate these, so use them sparingly. For example, you could have a window pop up only the first time someone visits your site … or you could have one appear whenever someone leaves your site. Try different scenarios to see what works best.

2. Change the price of your product and see what impact it has on sales. Even if your sales drop, you may still come out ahead when it comes to profits. Note: your sales may not drop at all; I increased the price of my own booklet from $12.95 to $19.95 and sales stayed the same. You never know until you try.

3. Test different sales copy on your website and in your autoresponder. Should you come on strong, be subtle, be extremely detailed? Does long sales copy do better than short copy, or vice versa? Do you get more sales by spreading your sales copy on multiple pages, or by putting it all on one page? Be sure to make backups of your previous work; if you find the new copy kills sales, you can always restore the previous version.

4. Track your advertising. There are a number of commercially available ad tracking packages that can help you see which ads are working well and which aren’t. Discard anything that doesn’t work, and try to improve on ads that appear to work well.

5. Experiment with the navigation of your website. For example, change the number of clicks required to get to your ordering page, or change the flow of navigation so that your visitor always ends up at an ordering page.

6. Test different types of links. You might try short ads in the margins of your web pages vs. text links within the context of an article, for example.

7. Test response rates between direct links to your sales page and the use of a follow-up autoresponder. Sometimes people just need an extra ‘push’ or a reminder to order. (make sure your autoresponder has an easy way for your prospect to unsubscribe)

About The Author

Angela runs several successful sites dedicated to helping beginners profit from the Internet. Her new web magazine, Online Business Basics, features step-by-step tutorials for eBusiness ‘newbies’. To take the guesswork out of starting and building an Internet business, click over to http://www.onlinebusinessbasics.com

Having been in the Franchising Industry and set up franchised units in 23-states and 4 nations, which did business in 450 cities and 110 major markets, we learned early on that once we had set up the initial marketing “Bonzai and Blitz” mission that most of our franchised outlet’s business came from word of mouth, not on-going advertising.

This is why I have always said that you should; Fire Your Marketing Consultant, as most of your on-going business will come from Word of Mouth. Now then many of the most disreputable marketing consultants who write three or more books on Marketing will call this true observation into question. They will tell you that referrals and word of mouth business is not what brings in the majority of your clientele and that you must buy their books, tapes, go to seminars and even hire these scoundrels as consultants? Not so.

Oh they say things like; “I would be skeptical of Word of Mouth and its benefits to your business; you must market and advertise if you want to maximize your potential”

Look I hate to brag, well, actually now that I am retired and could care less what anyone else thinks, I guess bragging does not bother me too much; but we literally creamed our competition in every friggin market and laid them out for the count and we rarely advertised at all. We asked for referrals and we had people following our service units around town, honking to pull us over and give us accounts or business on the spot. So, let me tell you anyone who says that; word of mouth is not all it is cracked up to be is full of horse dung. Consider all this in 2006.

Lance Winslow