Mail Order in the Internet Age by Ted Ciuba - HTML preview

cold feet, without ever forgetting

certain. Fire up and mail more mail!

an important point, without ever

flinching when a customer gives

This optimization principle has taken many a man from rags

them a difficult retort, countering

to riches... It’s smart business. Pure leverage!

every objection, and delivering

the perfect close

Gary Was A Normal Guy

. - Jay Abraham

Gary Halbert started with a product idea, and the certain

knowledge that other small frankfurters before him had succeeded BIG overnight in mail order.

He knew he wasn’t breaking new ground...

In his case, he did a mailing and received results. But he did not cancel the project calling it a failure. This is what the ordinary person might have done. ‘I tried mail order once, and it didn’t work...’

It was not a failure.

Gary himself will tell you his story. He starts with a question, and ends with a statement of true grit:

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What should you do if your test mailing does not get good (profitable) numbers? It’s

up to you. What I did is, I tried over and over until I got it right. Where do you get

the money? I got it by not paying my rent and not paying my gas, electric, and water

bills. (I’m serious.) You know, it gets down to a very simple truth...

You Either Will Or You Won’t Do What You Have To Do!

He changed different elements of the mailing, until he hit. And, boy, did he hit bigtime! It was his famous coat of arms letter. Some people say it’s earned over $700 million! Others place it well over $1 billion. Even Gary doesn’t know for sure. (He sold the rights to a company which doesn’t ‘brag’ about their results.)

But, that’s not all. The numbers are so big it’s like the ‘Over 99 Billion Served’ sign you see at McDonald’s. It’s hard to visualize that kind of money. Also, like that sign, the figures are growing every day!

With slight modifications - optimized, remember! - they’re still mailing this letter! To the tune of millions of dollars EVERY YEAR!

P.S. When I talk about the 2 greatest sales letters in the world, this is one of them!

What other business offers you this kind of leverage?

Gary has become pretty good at this process, doing it over and over again. Anytime he feels moved to it, he writes a new letter and does a test mailing. He then rolls out to the tune of a quick millionaire’s fortune.

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As Gary says it. “You Are Always Only One Good Sales Letter Away From Having All The

Money You Need!

And that’s both offline and online -

What if Gary hadn’t risked? What if, after one meager mailing he’d confirmed his suspicions that this mail order stuff was all a rip off, and that the only people who get rich in mail order and on the Internet are the people telling others how to do it?

He’s earned hundreds of millions! Of course, he could have played it safe and kept his j.o.b.

Heck, after all this time, he’d be up to $45,000 by now! ...Yikes! I just remembered! With his personality, he’d have been fired a dozen times... If he’d depended on the establishment he could be homeless now!

True!

Indeed, the greatest risk is not risking.

Can you risk that?

Optimization In A Single Mailing

Now let’s take a look at the results of a single mailing.

When you decide to market like a professional, you’ll discover that the easiest things to test - and the most effective - are the design/teaser copy on the outside of the envelope, the headline of your

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sales letter, and the type of guarantee and bonuses you offer. These are your greatest leverage points.

Online, of course, you don’t have teaser copy - so your headline - either on your web site, or in the subject line of your e-mail - is your first component.

Any one of these individual items can dramatically alter your returns. Together, the results are exponential!

Look closely at the following figures to see how optimizing the different elements of a sales letter can boost your returns. These are relatively modest figures. Let’s say your optimized teaser raises response by 25%, the headline by 70%, the guarantee by 50%, and the bonus by 120%.

Each of these improvements in and of itself is significant.

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However, when you measure the effect of all four of these factors working together, you see you’ve ended up with a supercharged synergized 600% increase!

Control Teaser Headline Guarantee Bonuses

Improvement

125% 170% 150% 220%

# of Letters

10,000.00 10,000.00 10,000.00 10,000.00 10,000.00

Response

5.0% 6.2% 10.6% 15.9% 35.1%

# of Orders

500 625 1,062 1,594 3,506

G. Profit

$207.04 $207.04 $207.04 $207.04 $207.04

Total

$103,520.00 $129,400.00 $219,980.00 $329,970.00 $725,934.00

From $103,520 to $725,934

These fantastic differences are easily achievable - going from $103,000 to $725,000. Exponential gains from the combined effects of optimizing key leverage points.

So there you have it... My confession that there are risks - and that the biggest risk you’ll ever run is not risking. Another paradox. It meant a career in the case of Gary Halbert, a life, prosperity instead of failure. It meant $622,414 on a single mailing of 10,000 pieces. It can mean the same thing for you.

Truly one of the greatest things about the direct response marketing business is that you leverage all these additional dollars out of the same finite investment in printing and postage.

You get these differences with NO additional expenses, taking NO additional risks!

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It’s leverage that every world class marketer strives to optimize... Copy success!

A Guaranteed Winner

Don’t cheat yourself of the vast differential rewards available to you... Not when they’re so easy to acquire!

Start by modeling the secrets of the giants. Then, when you write your own sales letters, copy and mimic their letters, their websites, their products, their offers, their bonuses, their style, their formatting....

Apply the same proven strategies the winners of direct response marketing are using to send your own sales into the stratosphere. Try several alternatives. Testing is the refining process. It’s by trying out several different models that you find the killer.

Call it your control, and continue testing further, always trying to beat yourself - into higher profits! Always, the best working letter is your control.

Always study your results. If something doesn’t work so well, no problem. Either eliminate it or, if you think it just wasn’t properly executed, clean it up, make the specific adjustments indicated by the results you did get. Scientifically make your mistakes as quickly as you can so you can get on to the real moneymaking.

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The Parthenon Strategy of Pre-Eminence

Your eventual success is all a result of how you

think about your customers and your business. If

you think it’s about making a one time sale and

that’s it, then I hope you have your crash helmet

on. Just as surely as the Parthenon with 1 pillar

could not stand, you’re headed for disaster. Nobody

knows the exact time, but you’re an accident

waiting to happen.

Optimization of a single offer or aspect of your

Unstable Parthenon

business is only one of the crucial components in

- Advertising, Word of Mouth

your game plan to build a profit machine that

works for you over and over again. Your mindset, your goal, and your quest is to optimize everything.

For instance, let’s apply the unstable Parthenon theory to your marketing. Most companies do some form of advertising. That’s what they’ve been taught to do, and since it’s so conventional, there’s plenty of sales people knocking on their door every day. How effective that advertising may be is another question.

Further, though they probably don’t do it actively at all, they may pay lip service to the true statement, ‘Word of mouth is the best advertising’. Referrals.

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The Parthenon Strategy of Pre-Eminence assures you, that’s not enough!

That’s another great thing about Information Marketing. It offers you the ability to make repeated and larger sales for as long as you want to market... People are prone to developing relationships, and, if you treat them right, once you’ve served them once, you actually have a far better chance of doing repeat business with them than you ever had of doing business with them the first time. Remember the Info Junkie?..

Congratulations! When you multiply and optimize your channels of sales and the number of products you offer your client, you multiply your sales. Actually, it’s more correct to say that when you start applying these principles, you exponentialize your sales!

Your business will be stable when you have multiple pillars of income supporting your business.

Just as the Parthenon, with many pillars, has stood the test of millennia, your business will become stable and enduring when you have multiple pillars of income - of several classes -

supporting your business, earning you income. That’s how you assure your own lasting success.

In one sense these multiple pillars represent multiple products and multiple sales channels.

Indeed, your success is multi-dimensional, and you should think of the multiple pillars of Parthenon Marketing as actually representing the optimization of many different aspects of your business. That’s Parthenon thinking.

The Strategy Of Offering Multiple Products

Taking our Parthenon, we can imagine that each pillar supporting the building is a different product supporting our business.

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Enjoy The Easy Money’s In A Firm Backend

We’re talking here about the marketing principle of a backend. Every sale you make should be designed to make another. No product is an end in itself. You sell a $19 book to get your story out. Then, it’s easier to sell a $337 course by mail. After they’ve been fascinated, charmed, educated, and regaled by you, and received genuine value, they then need further supplies or, perhaps, a $2,000 seminar. Perhaps some consulting.

Your mission, should you choose to accept

it, and become exceptionally rich, is to

always have various and more high priced

products that people can use to improve

their lives - thereby maximizing the dollar

value of every single customer to you.

Whatever your business is!

Ideally you’ve got a group of related and

integrated products, so this progression

flows naturally. Build from a handful of

The Parthenon of Products - Free Special Report,

introductory materials and products a

Involvement Sale – Book or Cassette, Cassette or

funnel into more expensive courses,

Video Program, Course #1, Course #2, Newsletter,

products, and services. Your constant

Seminars, Consulting

quest is to increase the dollar transaction

value of every sale, as well as to encourage your customers to buy from you repeatedly, so that you also make more over the long run.

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And buy from you they will! But they have to be asked. But that’s okay, because that’s what you do as a marketer. You are someone who provides opportunity to interested people.

To illustrate, I’ll give you a few ideas from one backend system I know well, that of Diversified Resources, Inc.

Our first efforts at building the backend sales occur right on the order form - called an Enrollment Form - with the offer of discounts for the higher dollar purchases.

Here’s the pricing structure.

I:

$ 97 - no discounts

I & II:

$337 - 10% discount

I, II & III:

$737 - 15% discount plus

BONUS website

The same order form that offers the $97 product offers the $737 product. Which would you rather have?

We sell 400% more I, II & III bundlings than we do just I alone. Sure, dollar for dollar, it’s a better value, and only the combo truly gives the ambitious neophyte notebroker the full complement of tools that will allow him or her to earn top dollar, but its success is driven in large part by the bonus that’s offered with course III.

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This particular bonus, in fact, has made a phenomenal difference in the number of $737 orders our company has received.

In just one little section of The Workhorse Of Your Multi-Million Dollar Mail Order Empire -

The Sales Letter, I show you the facts of a real, true, proven test of a bonus.

I ask the question. Given the choice, how do you get 100 customers to voluntarily send you $22,110 more than you asked them to??!!

Answer: Give them a killer bonus!

This case study also perfectly illustrates the type of bonus you want. Something that

dramatically increases the money you bring in, yet that costs you pennies!... Our costs in this bonus, to earn the entire $22,110, were less than $200.

Marketing Secret! The reason why this works so well is that the bonus has a high perceived value!

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With your paid in full enrollment in Parts I, II,

As you saw in the graph above, the bonus is

& III you also receive our pull out all the stops

just one thing. Your quest, of course, is to

put you in business on the Internet overnight

leverage everything you do to ever greater and

mega bonus, by itself worth over 3 times your

higher profits! You’ll learn hundreds of

entire investment in the course! It’s our

distinctions, each of which can make you tons

copyrighted turnkey world wide web presence.

of money, in ‘ The Workhorse of Your Multi-

We build you a customized set of world wide

Million Dollar Empire - The Sales Letter’.

web files. You’ll instantly have your own

You also see this upgrade offer on the order

homepage with your name, address, phone,

coupons of magazines, where you get

fax, and email address on it. It will be your

substantial savings if you opt for the 2 or 3

Note Presence on the Internet. Overnight you’ll

year subscription. The publisher, of course,

have an audience of millions who can submit

has just increased his dollar sale to you!

notes to you ONLINE! They work

automatically, 24 hours a day! It can’t get any

Continuing with the Paper Profit$ example,

easier than this

then, believe it or not, there’s a free special

report that rides out with every product

delivery! No extra postage, it rides along for free! It offers the happy client, who promptly received his product, the chance to purchase a related product, a $187 supplementary product concerning For Sale By Owner (FSBO) note holders. 20% of the people who receive the Paper Profit$ Course order the FSBO program within 2 weeks. It offers a genuine benefit to the beginning note broker.

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A few days later, those who didn’t take full advantage of Paper Profit$ I, II, and III get a bonus opportunity to upgrade - and still get all the discounts and bonuses! (That is, if they upgrade within 30 days.) A good number upgrade immediately. Remember, they’ve now seen the

product. They now know it’s a quality product. They received it promptly after ordering it. They trust Diversified Resources and Ted Ciuba. The second order is e-a-s-y.

Then, in a carefully orchestrated sequence, they’re invited to purchase a whole series of products, ranging from $197 up. Our best seller in the backend category is Ron LeGrand’s CashFlow Real Estate System, a $2,497 product discounted down to $1,197. It’s the best course - bar none - on making BIG MONEY, real fast, without money, without credit, and without partners in quick-turn real estate. Contact our office and we’ll mail you out a hard copy free. Or, you can read the full special report at http://www.realprofit.com/cashflow/

At every point these kind clients are also invited to visit our web site and see the wide selection of real estate and marketing courses we make available.

And there’s special offers throughout the year, thanks to the fact that everyone who enrolls in the Paper Profit$ Course gets a free subscription to the Paper Profit$ New$Line. We normally stuff a ride-along offer with the outgoing newsletter... at no cost to us but the printing!

Offer High Value Products

Be aware, however, that the future of your business is as closely related to the backend products you sell as it is to the front-end product. For example, we don’t offer a bunch of real estate courses. We offer one. There is no peer to The Cash-Flow Real Estate System. Nobody who

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receives this product will ever be disappointed. That’s another way of saying everyone who orders this product is an incredible prospect for the next offering.

As you’ll see shortly, you can earn over $100,000 from a single customer this way!

Hm-m-m.

High Performance Profitability

These backend products give you the ability to leverage the value of a single customer. The very first act - giving a person a free special report, or a $20 book - is working on the final act - an ongoing customer relationship worth hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands.

The first sale is the hardest sale! You’ve got to break through that very tough credibility barrier.

Then, when you get this customer - serve him for all it’s worth! We’ve got a saying around our company, and I encourage you to adopt it, too:

‘Every friend is a friend for life.’

Mean it. It’s all about creating a lifetime relationship.

Design and unfurl a strategic, systematic, profitable backend with every product you offer. How much service can you give to your clients?

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How To Sell At A Loss And Make A HUGE Profit

Just so we’ll all know just how powerful what we’re talking about can be, let’s look at an example that Jay Abraham offers when he talks about backend. He had a client who sold

collectible coins. They actually sold their product at a loss!

Involvement Sale 2x Morgan Silver

Dollars

Sale price

$19.00

# of beneficiaries

50,000.00

Subtotal

$950,000.00

Cost of product

$21.00

# of beneficiaries

50,000.00

Subtotal

$1,050,000.00

Profit/(loss)

$(100,000.00)

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A pretty substantial loss... but let's look at the backend.

Backend #1

Avg. per sale

$1,000.00

Beneficiaries

10,000.00

Sales

$10,000,000.00

Backend #2

Avg. per sale

$1,000.00

Beneficiaries

250

Sales 250,000.00

$10,000,000.00

3x per year

$750,000.00

Backend #3

Avg. per sale

$5,000.00

Beneficiaries

1,500.00

Sales

$7,500,000.00

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TOTAL SALES YEAR ONE $18,150,000.00

Let’s Recap: In their advertising for these coins they

admitted that they we