Preneur Marketing Blog – Pete Williams | Author Entrepreneur

Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose By Tony Hsieh.

The visionary CEO of Zappos explains how an emphasis on corporate culture can lead to unprecedented success.

Pay new employees $2000 to quit. Make customer service the entire company, not just a department. Focus on company culture as the #1 priority. Apply research from the science of happiness to running a business. Help employees grow both personally and professionally. Seek to change the world. Oh, and make money too.

Sound crazy? It’s all standard operating procedure at Zappos.com, the online retailer that’s doing over $1 billion in gross merchandise sales every year.

In 1999, Tony Hsieh (pronounced Shay) sold LinkExchange, the company he co-founded, to Microsoft for $265 million. He then joined Zappos as an adviser and investor, and eventually became CEO.

In 2009, Zappos was listed as one of Fortune magazine’s top 25 companies to work for, and was acquired by Amazon later that year in a deal valued at over $1.2 billion on the day of closing.

In his first book, Tony shares the different business lessons he learned in life, from a lemonade stand and pizza business through LinkExchange, Zappos, and more. Ultimately, he shows how using happiness as a framework can produce profits, passion, and purpose both in business and in life.

Not sure about you, but I use a tonne of email auto-responders in all my companies – and not just the online businesses. The sequential, set & forget marketing from the email auto-responders are killing it for my biggest real world company Infiniti Telecommunications

See, I’ve been looking for a way to implement the same automated follow-up marketing offline via direct mail for about a year, and not a single direct mail print company (in Australia or USA) offered a solution. They all offered the ability to do a mail merge (variable data) print run, if I wanted to arrange a once off promotion, but nothing that even resembled an automated follow up sequence of post-cards and/or greeting cards.

Anyway, a friend ‘pitched’ a card sending business model to me over a year ago, which I completely blew off. It was an MLM business-model and he used the standard network marketing pitch as well – I had too many other projects on the go, didn’t want another income opportunity chewing up my time, and felt that I’d have to sell ‘snake oil’

BUT, then after helping him out in a completely unrelated area, I got one of these cards as a small thank-you note… and the thing that stood out for me was:

The cards (and envelope) were printed in his own Handwriting – With a Local Postage Stamp !!

Yep, the platform they use to print these cards allows customers to fill out a form and have their handwriting uploaded as a custom font — blew my mind ! Just imagine how high the ‘open rates’ of these cards are – 98%+ ? (Puts the open rates of even the best email copywriters to shame.)

So, after a quick conversation I also learned that the platform allows clients all over the world, to not only send out single cards, bulk mailings, birthday/anniversary cards on pre-set date (which is cool in itself) …

BUT you can set-up an auto-responders style sequence, where clients can get a ‘thank you for buying’ postcard immediately, 17 days later a ‘hope it’s all going well’ two-fold card, then a ‘it’s probably time for a refill’ postcard 45 days later etc etc etc.

As I talk about in the ‘Preneur Hierarchy’ section of the book, the easiest people sell to are your existing customers, right ? Well, this is that follow-up, stay-in-touch, up-sell, back-end real-world marketing program on auto-pilot.

The thing that really annoys me, is they don’t really ‘pitch’ the auto-responder feature of their service – They are more focused on people sending one-off thank you cards to friends and family.

The other amazing thing is that it costs a lot less than $1 per card… and that includes postage!! (You won’t find hallmark anywhere near that price – and the quality is identical to me)

There library has over 10,000 card designs, but you can obviously upload your own designs (in under 2mins) for custom promotional mailings.

This is one of the best direct response marketing services I’ve ever seen…

Now regarding, the often dirty term ‘Multi-Level Marketing’ – Firstly, let me say:

You can become a customer of their service WITHOUT joining the MLM structure.

I wanted to make this clear again, because I am not trying to pitch you on ‘joining my downline’, I really do believe the direct marketing service they offer is a powerful one.

If you want to also have a opportunity to make some (good) coin along the way, great… They offer some very healthy sign-up commissions, plus a (residual income) $% of every card printed and sent from people (customers) in your downline. But, that side of things is all explained on a video over at their site.

Either way, I really encourage you to check out their direct mail services.

I’ve arranged a 7 Day Free Trial, so you can send 2 or 3 one-off cards to friends, customers or even yourself (to see the quality first hand) and trial their direct mail marketing platform.

Just visit http://bit.ly/7DayCardTrial, ignore the crappy site layout, and click the big banner at the top of the page, then follow the simple sign-up process.

If you have any questions at all, feel free to shoot me an email anytime – I’d really love your thoughts and feedback.

That link again is http://bit.ly/7DayCardTrial

Speak soon.

Pete

P.S. Did I mention that once you’re a client they upload your OWN friggin handwriting as a font – and include a couple of signatures too !!!

P.P.S. Direct Mail Auto-Responders = No Spam Filters + Really High Open Rates + Less Competition (no one get’s “handwritten” mail anymore, unless it’s a bill)

P.P.P.S. Go and visit http://bit.ly/7DayCardTrial

P.P.P.S. And yes… given that it’s an MLM model, when you sign up for an account and implement this offline auto-responder service in your business, I will make a few bucks. But if you join their entrepreneur program I’m more than happy to ‘coach’ and help you grow your MLM business.

Here’s a quick preview of my upcoming video series for the Immediate Edge

Howdee…

Just wanted to let you all know that Brent is running a little ‘challenge’.

If his recent blog post titled ‘Want To Watch while a Copywriter Writes Salesletters – for real?’, gets 20 responses by Thursday 13th, he is going to do a series of short screen-cam videos the week after showing each copywriting step he goes through as he goes through it, what he’s thinking at each step, and how you can duplicate his process to create your own sales letters – and make the videos available on his blog.

So why should you learn from Brent?

Well I was “some-what” on the inside of one product launches Brent wrote the sales letter for, which resulted in $560,000 in orders in under 24 hours… On a niche product… With the offer targeted to Australians (only) who were interested in this niche.

Need I say more ???

So, just make sure you go to his blog post ‘Want To Watch while a Copywriter Writes Salesletters – for real?’ and leave a comment.

Technorati Tags: copywriting, brent, hodgson, brent hodgson, over-the-shoulder, over the shoulder

Todays post is based on the Robert Cialdini influence principle of ‘Liking’… and the two ways you can look at the factor of ‘liking’ when it comes to marketing and selling.

Firstly, you can say people will buy from people they like. Pretty plain and obvious, it’s just human nature that people are reluctant to throw money at people they don’t like.

There really isn’t anything new here… this principle has been openly discussed for decades. No sane marketer goes around trying to piss their prospects off.. that just ain’t cricket.

Although, what I am NOT saying is “try and get everyone to like you”.. trying to do this is a fast ticket to the insane asylum. Dan Kennedy talks about this principle really well and I will dedicate an entire post to it at some point.. but for now the take away is:

“Try and get your targeted prospects to like you… and just ignore everyone else… even Mother Teresa had her haters”

Secondly, you can look at it from the point of view that if, as a marketer, you can get your prospects to think/believe/feel that they are “just like you” it builds a very strong bond that is such a powerful selling tool.

Over-The Shoulder marketing is not just about letting your prospects look over your shoulder so they develop a liking for you… It’s about creating a subconcious connection in the prospects mind that the are JUST LIKE you..

It’s this take on the ‘liking principle’ that forms the foundation of ‘Over-The-Shoulder’ selling and one reason why Twitter has become such a powerful marketing tool.

Twitter is a great way to really engage your customer in this “Over the Shoulder” way.

Some of the greatest over-the-shoulder marketers around are really embracing Twitter to interact with thier herd (read: prospects) but posting what would otherwise be considered the most random collection of tweets (posts on thier twitter feed)… everything from what they had for breakfast, to what they are doing with their family on the weekend, to what random web-site’s they’re visiting.. plus the odd (strategically placed) sales pitch.

By reading the Twitter feed, you are practically reading over their shoulder and getting a glimpse into the persons life.

So is are these tweets really that random ?

Well, what’s actually happening in these prospects mind whilst reading these random tweets:

“Look at Scott… Look at what Scots’s doing. Aww, Scott’s with his family! I have a family… Oh, Scott had to go to the supermarket just like me. Oh wow, Scott has to do the same mundane taks as me… Cool, Scott likes wearing pink tutoos just like me… Scott really is so similar to me. Amazing, Scott is making like $100,000 a month doing this internet marketing thing… Well if Scott is just like me, there is no reasons I couldn’t do that too… Maybe i will buy his stuff and be even more like Scott….”

It’s not just about having someone look over your shoulder and exposing your life to the world (although thats why the majority of people twitter) – it’s about building a rapport, it about allowing your prospects to get a glimpse into your life and create that “i’m just like you bond”.

As Brent says so elequently…. It’s about making yourself similar to other people in your market – with some of the same struggles, joys and mundane day-to-day life. It’s “mirror marketing” – allowing people to see themselves in you.

It makes anything you do seem achieveable.

If you’re a guru, and you’re like them, your success becomes within their reach. It becomes achieveable.

Pete

P.S. – If you want to find out what Fleur and I are doing this weekend then subscribe to my twitter feed here.

P.P.S. – Make sure you check out Brent Hodgsons blog here – http://www.brenthodgson.com/. He’s just started blogging again after a little break and he really does know what he’s talking about.

Technorati Tags: over the shoulder, over, shoulder, marketing, over the shoulder marketing, over the shoulder selling, brent hodgson, brent, hodgson, pete williams, peter williams, Robert Cialdini, Robert, Cialdini