I have been talking about trends for this year that will demand a need to respond by online marketers.
As we looked at recently, response rates in both direct mail and the Internet are dropping. At the same time the costs are rising. Don’t be discouraged by any of this. The Internet is still the greatest medium for increasing your customer base and making add-on sales to your existing customers.
But the fact that there are rising-costs and a falling-response rate in the online world, make business-as-usual online, a thing of the past.
There is a much needed response of even more careful watching of all the details of your various marketing campaigns. We must continue, to be successful, to make sure our profits are maxed to the hilt and our expenditures minimized.
In the old Internet of not long ago, it just took a little SEO tweaking and blasting out ads, to be successful. Those days are pretty much disappearing. Today you have to do the old-fashioned work of building a business.
There was a time when marketing cost nothing on the Web or was very cheap.
Because of this some very sloppy promotions were implemented, that because of the novelty of the Internet, made some people some temporary gains; gains big enough to give the illusion that it could continue that way. Wrong! Those days are over. The sooner you embrace that the healthier your decisions will be for your company.
The downside to all the easy, temporary profits was that certain habits set in that just about guarantee failure over the long run. Because everything was so low in cost, there wasn’t much attention paid to the very things that would measure what was working and what wasn’t. Now the consequences for that have set in for many that operated that way.
Now they have no idea what it was that produced the results. Blasting something out and getting results without knowing why has created the situation. So what need to be done to change this for you?
There are several things:
You need to track everything – your promotions and which techniques produce the highest response rates.
You must insist that every dollar you spend marketing, whether it is to build an e-zine base or visitor to a website, generate a positive return of investment over a specific period of time.
One other thing that is just as important is in the area of your sales copy. It has to be absolutely topnotch. Look at what has been done in the past. Analyze it and look for way to make stronger headlines and subject lines.
Then when you believe you have satisfied that requirement, make sure you measure and test them until you get the needed results, continuously adapting as you go along.
Do this and the climate that we now live in shouldn’t do anything to hamper your success.
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