Eat The Breakfast of Champions

Will you like to develop some marketing ESP?

ESP as in extra-sensory perception, or otherwise known as sixth-sense.

If you have that power to know what your prospects and your customers are thinking – and use that knowledge to your advantage – will you want it?

I hear you saying yes…

Alright. Let me reveal to you the dark secret.

The secret to knowing what your customer want is to….

Ask Them!

Yes. It’s that easy. Ask them for their feedback!

“Feedback is the breakfast of champions.”

You want to eat that kind of breakfast.

Getting the feedback of people that matters most to you allows you to

- Find out their needs

- Discover their wants

- Uncover their desires

- Locate their problems

- Finding a solution for their problems

- Add value to them

Sometimes people may say….”Nah…many will not give me a feedback!”

Well…if you don’t ask…how will you know?

And if you are in the selling business, this “intelligence” is invaluable.

Powerful Marketing ToolKit From Marketing Experiments

I’ve always been an advocate of testing and experimenting in marketing.

Often we don’t know what works. Or we think we know what works…but actually don’t.

I’ve done plenty of split tastings before on sales pages, landing pages and email campaigns, and the results have sometimes differ from what I thought was correct.

From there, it just underlines further to me the importance of testings in marketing and conversions. It’s NOT about what we think. But what the buyers think!

Now…when it comes to testing and optimizing, very few can match up to the folks at Marketing Experiments.

I’m a big fan of their marketing content.

Just recently, they came out with a big list of marketing tools, chockfull of guides, PDFs reports and worksheets.

They are FREE and extremely useful. If you are a marketer or a student of marketing, download them.

I’ve put them together here for your easy reference and download.

Free Tools from MarketingExperiments

1. Value Proposition Worksheet
One of our most downloaded resources, this worksheet will help you evaluate and present your value proposition more effectively.

Optimizing Your Sales Process – Dissected!

If you are doing sales, you have to constantly think on how to maximize your effort.

And how you can create leverage on your sales process and get back exponential results…

To bring this further, let’s look take a leaf out of the most sought after marketer today.

Jay Abraham says there are only 3 ways to grow your business. Only 3.

• Grow your no. of customers
• Increase the frequency of your sales transactions
• Increase the value of your sales transaction

Now that can give a lot of insights on how you can optimize your sales process. And getting as much out of the initial sales transactions.

There are several stages in a sales process. Let’s examine them from start to finish…

Pre-Sales

Move the free line. Give something of value away for free. Not just any free things you can think of. That will serve as a no-risk bait for your prospect to commit to you.

For example, if you are selling a trading system, you may want to give a free booklet on trading strategies. Something related, and packed with good value.

101 Greatest Headlines You Can Model For Your Sales Copy

Any good marketer worth his salt will tell you that one of the most important, if not the most important, aspect of a sales copy is….the headline.

The headline is the first thing a prospect see when he looks at an advertisement. The headline is the advertisement…FOR the advertisement.

If you don’t grab the attention of your prospect there and then, he is gonna leave. Period.

And precisely because of this, copywriters spend hours tweaking the headlines, split testing different versions, to determine which gives the best conversion rate.

You will be surprised just how much a good headline can out-pull a less attention-grabbing variant (with all else being equal e.g. benefit, offer, guarantee etc).

What makes a good headline? We are looking at something that incorporate the one of the following (or a combination of them) :

• Compelling benefit for prospects (What’s in it for me?)
• Curiosity factor (cliff hanger style…)
• Personalization (YOU.., your name…)
• Specificity (exact numbers and figures)
• Thought-inducing (What if you can…? What if you are able…? If I tell you that you can do….?)

How To Improve Your Email Confirmation Rate

A lot of email marketers will often ask – “how big is your list?”

A valid question. However, I prefer to ask this – “how targeted and responsive is your list?”

For me, quality of the list take precedence over quantity.

Quality first and then quality…and then finally quantity. Everyone can buy a whole database of leads but how many percent of that will actually convert into your subscribers or customers?

Now, if you want to ensure your prospects are really targeted and responsive to you, get them to double opt in.

In that way, you can be sure they really do want your information.

“What!…Double opt in???….But you will get a far bigger list with single opt in!”…as many will tell you.

True. But do you consider the following scenarios such as…

• People keying in email addresses with typo errors…
• People keying in bogus email addresses…
• People keying in other people’s email addresses without permission instead of their own…

Do you? Do you think such leads you will get are quality? Not a chance.

What Do You NEVER Do When You Entertain A Customer?

Very often when you do business, you have to entertain your client. Sometimes it can be a dinner. Or a drink out. Or maybe even golf.

You just do what it takes to seal the deal.

Now, entertaining a client is a fine art. You may laugh along with him, even when his jokes are not funny…listen to his needs and grouses…agree with him on discussed issues…basically doing everything right to make him like you.

All well and good. You are on the right track…

BUT…remember NEVER ever to do one thing…

The one thing that may seems so small on the surface but may swing the favor against you…

That is when it comes to payment…and when you rightly foot the bill…NEVER NEVER EVER ask for a receipt in your client’s presence.

NEVER!

Why?

When you do so, you make your client feel that he is just part of a business set up. And that entertaining him just means incurring business expenses to get his business.

You want to go beyond that. You want to make him feel like he is a friend. A friend worth spending on. A friend whose time and relationship you value a lot.