Hot New Market for “List Testing”
American’s are looking to get in shape
The tough 2009-2010 US economy has made home fitness one of the hottest markets for Americans to get in shape. The reasons are varied from people being out of work and having more time on their hands to better themselves.
The other trend is a decrease in gym memberships with more people looking at the home fitness opportunities. Exercise tends to lifts the spirits of people feeling down in the dumps to start over in making improvements in their appearance and life.
Direct response television has been the driving force for home fitness but digital marketing with email lists would be a least expensive medium to test.
Testing the market
Direct television has been used to launch new fitness products in the past with great success. Direct marketers are reporting that several new products were tested over the last 12 months and did so well that they went straight into a direct response campaign roll-out.
This was during a time when the economy in the US began to collapse and marketers are getting good response at testing higher price points. The fitness products include DVDs, meal plans, online clubs and some type of wall charts pacakaged in.
The success of these programs can be attributed to the hard times and the way consumers are spending their money in tight times. People will cut out memberships, personal trainers and they look for more efficient ways to exercise and stay in shape in their house.
Home fitness trends
The advantages are no commute time and in addition to convenience, the amount of consumers without jobs has lent itself to purchase fitness items for the house.
People with lost jobs will buy something and workout and get in shape, and they are happier out of work in shape than in a job out of shape. The right fitness product at the right price could be the best selling item on the market.
It makes sense to pay more up front for an email address since the long run benefits will pay for themselves buy mailing lists Guaranteed and a 100 free leads if you open an account today!
What To Consider When Finding A Mailing List Broker
Marketing List Brokers
Are business people in business to help you identify the best possible leads to generate income for your business. The leads come in the form of lists of potential prospects who may have an interest in a particular niche market and services that your company offers.
Another function of a Marketing List Broker is to help you identify your best demographics and customer profile before they run counts of potential prospects available.
Types Of Lists to Purchase
No matter what your needs are, you will likely be able to find mailing list brokers that can give you the exact list you desire. From the young demographic to elderly or retired persons, college-bound students to baby boomers who are at the highest level of their jobs, no list is impossible to find.
Your Customer Profile
Sometimes list brokers have the capability of matching a sample of your customer database to determine the best match, customer demographics, income, age. For business lists he must match standard industrial code and title before they purchase a list for you. It would be wise to test a small sample lists to determine the best fit for your offer and customer profile.
Though the possibilities are endless as to what is already out there, keep in mind that if you want a specialized list that does not already exist in a list broker’s database, they can use cross-sections of several lists that fit your demographic and come up with one master list that suits all your needs.
This can be done by sampling your customer database to find the most profitable segments based on recent purchases, dollars spent (rank customers by how much they spend for your products and services. When you discover your most profitable segments you must define who they are by age, gender, income or geographic are.
In business to business lists you would discover your customer profile by industrial code like manufacturing verses retailing. Size of company, the title of the contact that you would like to mail to.
How List Brokers Find Lists
List Brokers have many ways of getting information in order to help you sell your goods or services. Email lists are more complicated to rent because of anti-spamming laws and that to comply with laws prospects need to double opt-in and you normally need to mail through a list compiler or third party service to comply with laws protecting consumers.
If you are open and responsive to offers that suit your needs and lifestyle, there are dozens of people who will buy your name off a mailing list to try and pitch their products to you.
It makes sense to pay more up front for an email address since the long run benefits will pay for themselves buy mailing lists Guaranteed and a 100 free leads if you open an account today!
List Analysis Can Help On The Web
What’s The Conversion Rate On Your Website?
If you are testing some new lists, you will need to determine if they perform better than the old list that you acquired. This is direct marketing basics and without testing you will never know how to improve the results of your control package.(old campaign)
When you measure something you express it in numbers like an Excel spreadsheet. The return on investment (ROI) are all front end expenses for example list costs, campaign, printing and postage costs minus revenue generated, how many units sold.
The difference between these two amounts is ROI, after you calculate how many units were sold divided by numbers of addresses mailed/emailed is your response rate. The response rate for direct mail can be ten times higher that e-mail, and the return on investment could be greater. This is why you analyze these campaigns.
Web metrics provided by your hosting company or your Website dashboard will give great insight into your prospect conversion rate. This is very much the same way you would analyze the success of your direct mail campaigns in traditional direct response campaigns.
Today’s most successful Web sites are the online equal to direct response advertising. They have special marketing objectives and business goals and their performance can be accurately measured.
Measuring your Web site analytic will help you to determine if your are producing a ROI and if your achieving your desired goal outlined in your annual marketing plans. You can also purchase analytic software to determine if your Web site needs to be improved or changed or if the content or graphics need to be adjusted or changed to improve visitor conversion rates.
In your analysis always plan and set goals and objectives and constantly try to improve your results with the annual marketing plans
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Campaign Marketing – Borrowing Brilliance by David Kord Murray
NASA Aerospace Engineer (Rocket Scientist) becomes Direct Mail Marketing Millionaire Guru.
David Kord Murray – Borrowing Brilliance is on the Wall Street Journals 10 best sellers list and should be on the holiday bookshelf of all direct marketers.
Borrowing Brilliance in David Murray’s words is “to take the creative process out of the shadows of the subconscious mind and bring it into the conscious world. It’s to dispel the misconceptions about creativity, lift the fog off its true nature, and reveal the fact that brilliance is borrowed.”
Borrowing Brilliance is a six step process where you build your idea from well defined problems. Once defined you borrow your ideas from other sources with a comparable problem.
For example Bill Gates came up with the idea of Excel by stealing the original program from Lotus 1-2-3 and tried to make it better and easier to use, so Bill Gates took this software program and allowed it to evolve into something more useful for business applications and accounting.
Take your best ideas and the best ideas from your competitors and do the opposite because sometimes you can’t beat a bigger, stronger competitor by copying them exactly but you can beat them by doing the opposite.
David Murray uses examples from the Google guys, Albert Einstein and some of the work he did for Turbo Tax when he started his own direct marketing company Kord Marketing Group and was hired by a company to be ahead of Innovation.
David Murray used his direct marketing venture with Turbo Tax direct mail program and on his office walls he would tape up letters, order forms, brochures and envelops and at his desk, shampoo samples, CD’s DVD’s and dozens of other things that he borrowed from friends.
He assembles idea’s by using ideas from Publishers Clearing House, order forms from Columbia music, an audit letter from the Internal Revenue Service and borrows an idea from America Online. From this he creates a break through direct mail marketing breakthrough.
The zero balance bill was the idea the first time he mailed it he got a 1% response, the second time he mailed he got a 2% response and eventually 25% response, his direct mail campaign completely broke the law of direct mail diminishing returns. Normally in direct mail when you mail a duplicate package to the exact same list you would experience diminishing returns, but in his cast the exact opposite occurred.
This direct mail package would net a higher response each time you used rather than the opposite. The reason is that people seem to like the bills that they don’t have to pay and you make it look like a notice from the IRS. This direct mail package was called the zero balance bill.
Click Here for list inquiry!>
Time to plan your direct mail campaigns with Marketing Brilliance!
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Time to start planning your strategic direct mail marketing campaigns.
Learn more about Marketing Plan Pro. Palo Alto and Marketing Plan Pro Software is one of the few American, award winning developers left and they offer free sample downloads and a 90 day money back guarantee.
Finding Your Marketing Assets
Sometimes the only way to find your marketing assets is by defining your marketing liabilities and then turn your liabilities into assets.
When you write your annual marketing plan for 2010 you’ll need to set some marketing objectives in measurable terms, like your conversion ratios for converting Website visitors into sales. You need to determine your return on investment and define acceptable conversion rates. Find the assets that can be improved
- Look at declining sales revenues from your sales people
- Look for ways to improve inquiries from customers with better follow-up
- Look for up-selling and cross-selling opportunities and ways to increase the dollar sales amount
- Look at closing ratio’s of sales staff per appointments/sales and ways to improve them.
- Look at past customers and ways to follow-up with in-actives
- Look at acquiring new prospects by analyzing the profiles of you top 10% clients and clone the best demographic criteria like age, where they are from and past buying habits
These are your marketing assets that can be improved in measurable terms using ratio’s to determine your progress.
With analysis you can spot the lowest hanging fruit and the best opportunities for example you could improve your Website conversion with better copy, a headline, an offer with a time limitation. With testimonials and guarantees, The only way to know for sure is by testing one of these elements at a time and study the ratio’s.
You improve you sales conversion with better training and closer supervision of the lowest sales performers. You improve customer follow-up of inactive customers with better systems for more touch points by mail, email or phone follow-up.
The articulation of your uniqueness in your marketing efforts will help you to improve the ratio’s of your current marketing assets.
Knowing how to promote a successful Webinar or online seminar is one
of the best ways to generate highly qualified sales leads or educate and up sell existing customers. You not only send e-mail invitation to current customers asking for referrals but you also invite prospective customers through targeted e-mail lists.
When you write your marketing plan be sure to:
Define objectives
It sounds obvious, but you really need to think about what you are trying to do with a Webinar, so that you can measure your success and ROI after the fact. Is your marketing objective;
- To acquire leads and bring in new sales?
- To educate existing customers on a new product/service?
- To obtain research or feedback on an existing offer?
If you are looking to acquire leads, one effective approach is to focus on third party opt-in email list rentals. If you are increasing awareness of a new product or doing research among existing customers, then conducting a permission-based internal email campaign could be the most efficient use of your resources. Free demonstration and trial use: 2009 Inc. 500 Winner Discover Why MegaMeeting.com was voted The #1 Video & Web Conferencing Company on the 2009 Inc 500 List!
Please feel free to call or emial if you have specific questions with finding your marketing assets.
Sincerely,
Tim Little, Owner Marketinglistbroker.com
FREE eBook “Boost Sales With Lists”
