A while ago, I was at a conference where Armand Morin was a featured speaker. If you don’t know him, he’s a pretty respected Internet marketing guru. There are a few of those kinds of guys out there, but Armand has been more successful than most.
Many of the things he spoke about grabbed my attention, but years later, one stands out from the rest.
For any of you who use or want to use the Internet to build your business, pay attention. It sounds simple—as most of the really ground-shattering ideas are. But you might be missing this key step to successfully using the Internet to build your business.
Most people who market and sell on the Internet use this process:
- Get people to come to your website
- Get as many people as possible to opt-in for something cool and free
- Begin a marketing campaign to those people using autoresponders—sales letters by any other name
- Try to sell them something or get them to take your call and maybe upsell them at the same time
- Get them to download what they just got and look at it
In essence you’re busy selling to strangers. And selling to strangers is a trudge uphill that can take some time.
Here’s the flaw Morin sees in that approach. Between the sales letter and the upsell, you lose most of your prospects. Like, almost all your prospects. Therefore, you need really big numbers to achieve reasonable sales.
Morin’s response—sell to friends instead.
Now he doesn’t mean that your marketing campaigns are targeted at your Mother, Father, Aunt, Uncle, siblings, spouse and friends. Just typing that leaves a distaste in my mouth. What he means is cultivate those strangers into friends. THEN offer your friends something. They are more likely to buy.
Here’s the sequence he suggested:
- Get people to come to your website
- Get as many people as possible to opt-in for your really valuable on-going newsletter
- Create and send an info-packed newsletter
- Turn your newsletter receivers into friends because your info is so valuable—they want to follow you
- Determine what products they really want
- Create those products
- NOW sell to them. They are your friends now.
Morin sees that this simple process change—turning your opt-in prospects into friends before you begin to sell to them–greatly increases your sales flow. And while I’m talking about sales, it also increases the number of prospects who will take your call or call you if you’re not selling something over the Internet.
So online and offline, this is critical to you too.
Sell to friends, not to strangers.
Go back and take a look at your Internet process. How can you adjust to create friends and then market/sell to them rather than leap on strangers and expect them to leap on you?
Go Forth and do Great Things,
Martha Hanlon and Chris Williams