I have been studying online marketing for a few years now, but recently I’ve become aware of marketers like Jeff Walker, Frank Kern, Eban Pegan and others that seem to be championing direct response marketing online. Direct response marketing has been around for a long time, but since the internet has gained in popularity, and we have an ever increasing number of ways to communicate with social media, direct response marketing can be cheaper to execute than ever before.
I pulled this from the wikipedia page for “direct response marketing”
Direct-response advertising is characterized by four primary elements:
* An offer
* Sufficient information for the consumer to make a decision whether to act
* An explicit “call to action”
* Means of response (typically multiple options such as a toll free number, web page, and email.)
So I’ll do my best here to break down this process for you.
First of all we need to somehow direct people towards the website where we are making our offer. This could be done through various different means, whether it is our email newsletter readers, traffic from pay per click advertising, or even a flyer we have mailed out, but let’s pretend it is PPC for our example here. So we run an ad on Facebook, targeting people who are interested in web design, because we’re selling a course on how to make money as a freelance web designer or something like that. The ad copy (text) and image should be designed to lure in the people who we want to try sell to.
When we bring them to the website, we generally want them to arrive on either a sales page, or a sign up page where we can have them sign up for our email newsletter so that we can take our time to establish a relationship with them. Refer to my article on relationship marketing to see how this works. For this example we’ll pretend that we’re sending them to a sales page where we are trying to sell our course. This is where the offer part comes into play.
The best resource I have ever come across providing examples of different kinds of offers was Copyblogger’s 58 of the World’s Greatest Offers. Different offers have different objectives, I won’t go into great depth about the different types, look at the Copyblogger article for that, but to summarize we’re basically playing on all sorts of common human emotional triggers. These triggers are more or less universal, and while we won’t succeed in selling everyone as a result of a well crafted offer, it certainly can raise our success rates.
For our example let’s pretend that we have decided to use the “Enrollment Period” offer from Copyblogger’s list of examples (it’s an offer that increases urgency in our prospects). On our sales page we explain to our prospects that we will be opening up our doors to new customers for a limited period of time, or for a limited number of spots. If our prospects do not sign up within a week our doors will be close and they will have missed their chance. This increases scarcity, which raises the perceived value of our course, pressures our prospects to act more quickly because their is a time limit. If there was no time limit on this offer, and people could sign up at anytime, there would be less pressure to act on the offer.
At this point our offer is clear to the customer, but perhaps they still have some reservations about it, now it’s time to give them sufficient information to make a decision. Price is the most obvious of these reservations, but this can be addressed a few different ways. In our sales copy you can compare our price to something that would be of comparable value, but more expensive in price. An example could be saying how our course is only $500, but provides the educational value of a year long course at a school that charges $15,000. Suddenly our prospect is thinking you’re a bargain. Perhaps their concerned that our course won’t be right for them, but perhaps a 30 day money back guarantee will eliminate their worries (this is another offer actually, so we’re stacking offers). Finally, we could provide a brief video tour of the course, or a detailed description of what they are getting. Either way, you are providing them with enough information to make their decision.
The next step is making an explicit call to action to our prospects. I’m sure you’ve heard many sayings like “You never know what you can get until you ask”, or “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take”, and the sentiment is always the same, you have to try in order to succeed. This is a common mistake made by inexperienced business people, neglecting to flat out ask for the sale. Either they’re nervous, they forget, or they don’t want to seem too pushy, but regardless the reason, it’s a mistake not to do it. We can do it without being pushy, in fact there probably isn’t any such thing as pushy if our offer, and information we have provided to our prospect has properly prepared them to buy. In many cases they will be aggressively seeking out how they can buy from us, and in an online situation all we need to do is the make it really obvious to them how they buy from us, and remind them of the terms of our offer. Remind them of the scarcity, and the value, and how they are going to be missing out. We’re not pushing them, we’re guiding them to the obvious conclusion.
Finally, the last step of the process is to provide them means to respond to your offer. In our case it’s most likely that we will have a buy now or subscribe now button of some sort, so that they can immediately purchase our course. Another option which will oftentimes increase response rates significantly is offering a phone number that they can use to make their purchase or make further inquiries. More tech savvy people who have been making purchases online for a longer period of time are more comfortable with online purchases, but people with less experience with e-commerce purchases will prefer, or even sometimes need to speak with a real person before making the purchase.
In a nutshell, this is direct response marketing, the future of my company, and maybe the future of yours.