In my opinion, marketers can make profits on the Internet. The first step is to recognize four disadvantages.
1. Unlike traditional marketing where the sales person controls the direction and pace of the sale, the prospect and customer are in total control -- and a mouse click away from oblivion.
2. Your Web site is situated in the armpit of the world, a venue akin to Times Square in the 1950s, with girlie shows on one side of you and Hugo’s Trained Flea Circus on the other.
3. Unlike telemarketing -- where a wrong number is a bit of an embarrassment -- a mis-entered URL can lead even the most well-intentioned prospect or customer off on a journey of discovery and zero business for you.
4. Given the terrible publicity about hackers, cyberthieves, privacy invaders and scam artists, your prospects and customers will not have the same immediate trust or sense of safety as they do in Home Depot, Circuit City or a local supermarket. For this reason, Net marketers are losing a lot of business.
5. The entire point of your Web site is to get yourself book marked by prospects and customers; everything else is secondary. No bookmarks, no regular return visits.
6. Once book marked, your Web site must become addictive. Examples of addictive Websites: www.Drudgreport.com (I check it two or three times a day for the latest news and dish); www.eBay.com where new stuff is continually coming up for sale.
7. How do you make it addictive? In order to lure people back often, it is imperative that your Web site be updated weekly -- if not daily -- with interesting, useful material.
8. With a Web site, you are always open for business. People expect instant gratification. Finalize an order with Amazon.com and you receive an immediate confirmation via e-mail. This is the current model. Order fulfillment must also be quick and flawless. According to a study in the U.K., 77% of companies fail to respond to an e-mail inquiry within 24 hours; 33% of companies fail to respond at all. If these statistics are even remotely akin to yours, you have no business being on the Web.
9. The Internet must be treated as one of many marketing channels -- along with direct mail, space advertising, broadcast, retail, and telemarketing. Remember that most dot-coms that hit the skids were trying to do business entirely on a piece of glass in the homes and offices of fickle, easily distracted prospects and customers. That model works for AOL, Yahoo and maybe e-Bay and E-Trade, but not many others.
10. You cannot be all things to all people. Niche Internet marketers will find and service niche clients profitably. Example: My friend Barry Rose in England has a nifty little Web business selling fully restored vintage fountain pens to collectors (www.Write time.co.us). Jeff Bezos’ Amazon.com keeps adding new categories and continues to burn through more and more money.
11. “Your job is to sell,” says freelancer Jack Mason, “not entertain.” This was recently echoed by developer Willard Rouse (Baltimore’s Inner Harbor and the Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston). “The concept of building it and they will come is a lot of crap,” said Rouse in The New Yorker. “Build it, sell the hell out of it and they will come.”
12. Look at the selling on the Web as direct mail on glass and apply the old tried and true, marketing proven rules, a number of which follow.
13. “More than half our buying decisions are based on emotion.”
--Jack Mason
14. “When emotion and reason come into conflict, emotion wins every time.”
--John J. Flieder
15. “Make it as easy as possible for the customer to order.”
--Elsworth Howell
16. “If you want to dramatically increase your response, dramatically improve your offer.”
--Axle Anderson
17. “You cannot bore people into buying anything.”
--David Ogilvy
“The seven key copy drivers -- hot buttons -- which change human behavior, are: fear, greed, guilt, anger, exclusivity, salvation, flattery. If your copy isn’t positively dripping with one or more of these, tear it up and start over.”
--Bob Hacker
19. The 13 most powerful and evocative words in the English language are:
you - save - money - easy - proven - guarantee - health -
love - new - results - discovery - safety - free
Use them unsparingly.
20. The Internet is the only print medium that allows you to test in real time (and far more cheaply than mail, phone or broadcast), giving you readable results in as little as a few minutes. Take advantage of this.
21. Make sure what the prospect first sees on your Web site directly relates to the message and the medium that brought the person there. In other words, don’t make a specific promise in direct mail or space and then fulfill with your basic, self-congratulatory home page aimed at everybody; this will result in a mental disconnect.
22. “The prospect doesn’t give a damn about you, your product or your company. All that matters is, ‘What’s in it for me?’
-- James Faasse`
No comments:
Post a Comment