Preneur Marketing Blog – Pete Williams | Author Entrepreneur

If you’ve been around the info-marketing game for awhile now, you’d have a good grasp of the sales funnel model… and how you need to structure your products range in a way then ensure your offerings fit along the sales funnel so people opt-into your funnel with a FREE report, e-book or seminar and then move through the funnel by purchasing ever increasing priced products and services.

BUT, if your upsell conversions are not where you want them to be, how do you structure your sales pipe to ensure your customers NEED your next offering and continue along the slippery slide ?

Just offering a range of ever increasing priced products around the same niche topic ain’t going to do it folks… You need to structure the information you are offering at each stage of the funnel so that it’s an obvious and needed extension of the last product your customer has bought…

Enter the Why-What-How Structure of Information Marketing.

Let’s take a look an an analog (traditionally offline) example of how to implement this structure – The ’stock or share trading’ education niche.

Stage 1. They offer a free report, or no-cost evening seminar where they talk exclusively on WHY you must start trading equities; The speak about how your 401k or Superannuation won’t be enough for you to survive on, they pull pretty graphs showing how the stock markets value as risen a steady X% of the past 16 years and they even provide convincing examples of how others are now making $100,000 per month using the strategies they teach – All in an effort to convince you WHY.

Stage 2. At the end of the WHY presentation, they pitch a book, audio program or home study program that details exactly WHAT you must do to achieve this level of passive income. The course covers that you need to set-up a trading account, use a latest meta software and follow a fool-proof system. It talks in generics, on a high level simply explaining WHAT you must do. And as a customer you walk away feeling satisfied because you now know WHAT you need to do to get started.

But hang on, 3 weeks have past and you haven’t really taken any action… how can that be? You know WHY you must do something and WHAT it is you need to do?

But do you really know HOW to do it?

Enter stage 3. The 2 day live weekend event. It’s at this high priced seminar (at the bottom of the companies sales funnel) that they will reveal the inside secrets, the step-by-step techniques on HOW to do it… They will walk you through the exact steps on setting up a trading account, they will do live presentations on HOW TO use the trading software all so you can walk away and start doing.

It’s this structuring of information that ensures the next sale – They don’t reveal the HOW-TO information too early, they won’t teach the HOW-TO in the first to stages because if they do – ‘Why would you need their upsell product?”

What you need to do is structure your sales funnel (and offerings) so that your customers NEED to buy your next product… It’s about leaving the ‘key’ to it all in the next level down the sales funnel, so the customer must have the next product to finish the jigsaw puzzle that is your niche.

So how can you apply this WHY, WHAT, HOW approach to your internet marketing sales funnel?

Here’s a few examples:

Most people get the sales funnel model, and have structured their PRODUCT OFFERING in a correct way, with each product getting more and more expensive, but the majority of people haven’t structured their INFORMATION OFFERING to match.

If you are finding you are not converting your up-sells at a reasonable level, take a step back, forget about tweaking the sales letter…. and take a look at your information structure…

Are you giving away too much GOLD in your early products?

Do your customers really need this new, more expensive product to overcome the need they went looking to fulfill when they first downloaded your FREE e-book ?

If you find that you are giving your customers the HOW TO right up front, why would they spend money later to learn the Why or What? Because when you break it down, everything you offer falls into one of these three categories, so make sure you reveal them at the right time.

Still lost? Try this?

Re-write your entry level product, that’s the free report or ebook to simply reiterate to your prospects WHY they need your stuff, build the bond by showing you understand their frustrations and even throw in some new issues that hadn’t thought of. (Most people attend a stock trading free seminar to make more money now, but leave thinking they need this just to survive when their on the pension) That’s all your free entry offering has to do – build trust and understanding with your prospect so they feel you ‘get-them’

Then jump right to producing the HOW-TO product, and make sure this course covers everything they need to do to reach the holly-grail of your niche, every step-by-step technique they need.

Once this end-product is created, produce an extra-large executive summary outlining WHAT the end-product covers.. talk in generics not details. Make this report/audio/course a educational “list” of WHAT they will need to do to fulfill their need. And you guessed it, this “executive summary” (AKA the how-to’s index page) becomes your WHAT product, the second offering in the sales funnel.

For those playing along at home… please leave other examples of how you might implement this Why, What, How Structure to your info-marketing….

OK, so I’m a little behind the conversation.. like 3 months… but there’s been a lot of chatter recently about “moving the freeline”

Now, the “free line” concept comes from the sales funnel, where typically, the sales process begins with a free ebook, white-paper or audio download… in an effort to build trust with the prospect so they will buy from you further down the funnel. Nearly everyone online has experienced this – it’s what the industry was built on.

Moving the free line is the concept of giving even more stuff away for free and converting what previously were paid for products into free resources. So, what was previously a front end product you had to pay for, becomes a free resource now sitting above the free line.

Eben Pagan is the man who has been credited with coining the phrase and this is his take on “moving the free line:

“MY EXPERIENCES MOVING THE FREE LINE

… BUT that’s exactly it, and the point so many people are yet to articulate:

You are not giving away free resources – You are trading your resources for something of value that is perceived to be free.

As an business owner, online or off (there I go again; on my “you’re not an internet marketer, you are an internet business owner” rant) you never want to give anything away for free, you always need to get something of value in exchange for this “free”. Notice I said ’something of value’, not necessarily money.

An email subscriber (as Eben mentions) is something of value, that doesn’t cost the prospect anything out of their pocket.. but it does have an empirical value.

This empirical value can be calculated by working out how much profit you made last year, and divide that by the number of subscribers on your list…

And that right there folks, is what each subscriber is worth to you.

So in reality you are *selling* what is perceived as free, for a real $$ amount (in future income), because you are trading an ebook for an email address,… which in turn is worth $X to you.

So if by moving the free line you can exchange more email addresses for “free” stuff then, and only then, does the theory/concept/practice makes commercial sense.

So for those playing along at home…

No matter what form of business you are in;

Give a free ebook… get an email subscriber.
Give a discount.. demand a referral (or three).
Give an audio… extract a suggestion/feedback/response.
Give a bonus… require a testimonial.
Give X… insist on Y
Go above and beyond… get some value in return.

I’m so excited.. I just came across this website that appears to have embraced the phenomena known as web2.0

I can even picture how this forward thinking company came to have a crack at making their website more then just the typical brochure…

It was about an hour or two into the traditional end-of-month long lunch… Fueled by the company-charged pinot grigio and a belly full of confidence you get after 4 days on the job, a young marketing-intern who strategically weaseled his into the seat next to the marketing executive began to preach the gosbal that is web2.0

Equally under the influence of the aforementioned pinot, the “self-deluded-in-touch’ marketing manager starts to ramble on about his nightly struggle trying to drag his teenage daughter’s attention away from her shinny macbook air… and gives this pimply faced intern the project of “face-spacing” and “my-booking” their website.

So…

Fast foward two months…Beauty Addicts‘ has teamed up with iJustine and created a quisi-web 2.0 page on their site.

The page has distinct web 2.0 feel to it – Fans of iJustine can check out what BeautyADDICT products she uses, learn which products make which look, watch a video of her applying the products… PLUS it even intergrates her Twitter feed and Flickr roll into the page.

How cool is that, I here to say…. It’s about time, I hear to celebrate… Finally a business “get’s it”, I hear you scream…

Well here’s the kicker…

They haven’t opened it up to the public and began to make a community out of it….

This idea has so much potential as a really cool web 2.0 community… BeautyADDICTS customers (read: community) could share their favorite product combinations, display the products they have bought, upload photos of their favorite looks, interact and leave comments on each other pages… AND THEN INSTANTLY BUY THE PRODUCTS THEIR FRIENDS RECOMMEND.

Even the url is perfect for a web2.0 site, BeautyADDICTS.com… I can’t think of a better url – If they changed the focus of their site and made the community a primary focus of the site, with their products secondary I would almost guarantee they would shift more products – Which at the end of the day should be their SOLE focus of their website.

Speaking of web2.0…

Why hasn’t more businesses embraced the power of facebook and created applications like Apple Mac Addict…

It’s such an easy and effective way of allowing your customers to participate in your brand, generate some online-word-of-mouth, create some free over-the-shoulder advertising… all where their cusomters ‘hang-out’ most; online.

For a business to survive moving forward, it’s the participation element they need to focus their marketing on. The marketing mix no longer consists of just 4 P’s – product, price, place, promotion.

Participation is the 5th and most important element these days… and that’s why I am working on an entire post dedicated to it… Stay tuned for that.

P.S. For those following my twitter feed, the firefox plugin video has been delayed… please speak amoungst yourselves while I get use to this Mac.

P.P.S. If you know of any forward thinking businesses who have successfully embraced web2.0 please leave a comment below and let me know.

Technorati Tags: ijustine, beautyaddicts, beauty addicts, beauty, addicts, facebook, web2.0, web2, web, 2, maclover, mac, lover, apple

People act in line with their commitments. Cialdini in his great book Influence, states that we have a ‘nearly obsessive desire to be (and to appear) consistent with what we have already done.’ This is the theory behind those competitions that you’ve probably seen where you have to state in 25 words or less why you like a particular product. The rationale is that if you make people write down why they like you or your business, they will then subconsciously want to keep their word, so next time they have to choose they will select your product.

This principle means that people will feel a sense of obligation to you if they have told you they like your product or that they would find it useful. Once people make a commitment, especially in public, they will usually make an effort to stick to it.

Using commitment and consistency in your business

You can use the type of competition mentioned above to create a sense of commitment to your business. Run a competition where entrants have to state in 30 words or fewer why your frozen yoghurt is better than all the other frozen yoghurts on the market. This makes them think about why they like your product, and will also encourage them to buy from you because they feel they have decided that your yoghurt is the best and they will want to be consistent with this. Use the entries as testimonials — with permission, of course.

You also now know the reasoning behind running such a competition, rather than just doing it because you’ve seen others do it — which is never a path to success. Here’s an example of a business that doesn’t seem to understand why these types of competitions are run. At the time of writing, a book publisher is having a competition that asks readers to do the following: ‘In 25 words or less, describe your favourite place to read in winter and why.’ What’s the point in that? Why not create positive feelings towards the books you publish? For example, ‘Describe in 25 words or less your favourite book published by us.’ This is an example of a business using a promotional tool without really understanding why. Don’t make this you!

You can also use this principle when talking to clients. As you discuss with them the benefits of what you are selling, get an agreement from them each step of the way. Don’t just bombard them with the information. So, if you are trying to sell a mobile phone, you would say: ‘This phone lasts 20% longer than most others on each charge. Would you find that useful?’ Then, ‘This phone can also play music through headphones. Do you think you could use that?’ And so on. Then, if the customer has replied yes to all or most of these, when it is time to say ‘Yes I’ll take it’, they have almost talked themselves into buying the phone by agreeing that they would find the benefits useful. This approach will give you more success than simply reading a list of features to the customer.

Use the concept of commitment and consistency to encourage people to make a written or verbal commitment to your company. They are then more likely to purchase from you.

HEY, did you know i’m running a contest while I am away…
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So how do you add a back-end to your business? Well, the first step is to start seeing your business as a back-end business. Think like HP, or like a mobile phone provider. Don’t think that once you have achieved the first sale, that’s it. A lot of businesses look at it this way: they try and get a customer to make a sale — that’s singular SALE. How you should be looking at it is; you make a sale to get a customer — where this customer will repeatedly come back to you and purchase more and more.

Have a look at your products or services to see how they can be used to create a back-end. This doesn’t necessarily mean adding something after your main products or services; you can add something before and make your main items the back end… It’s all about attracting people with one item and then leading them on to the next.

You should also investigate how you could add residual income to your business systems. Can you sign people up to a contract? Rent your product out? If your business is mowing lawns, perhaps you could sign people up to a program where you go back and give the lawn a quick tidy up once a month, and mow it every three months.

A good back-end offering will either be an essential requirement for what was originally purchased — such as the ink cartridges — or it will improve on or add to the item — such as the extra computer memory and the software. Here are a few questions that might help you find your back-end:

• What can you offer at a low price that will attract people to your business, secure a sale, and get people on to your mail list? We offered the certificates and small pieces of timber with the aim of finding people who might also buy the frames.
• What can you offer people that will help them with what they have already bought? For example, if you sell computers, can you also sell computer manuals? Or offer tutorials?
• Does your product require any consumables? For example, the ink in a printer, or bags for a vacuum cleaner.
• After people have bought your product or service, what else might they be interested in? If your business is mowing lawns, you can send your clients a brochure for your landscape gardening services when you send them the bill.
• Can you offer products to go with your services? For example, if you are an accountant, perhaps you can back-end people into buying accounting books or software.
• Can you offer upgrades for your product? People might not buy this at the time, but after owning the product for six months, they might then feel the need to make it bigger, faster, stronger, quieter …
• Can you offer customers a subscription to a magazine or newsletter? This can create a great back-end when people re-new each year.

Selling computer software is a great way to create a back-end, as people want the upgrades that usually come out every year or two — give them a 5% discount if they buy the upgrade from you. This should be enough to stop them going elsewhere.

HEY, did you know i’m running a contest while I am away…
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