It’s amazing how the world has evolved in the last 20 years.
More than power shifts between countries… more than life-changing events like hurricanes, earthquakes, and terrorist attacks… the advancement of technology has completely changed the way we see the world.
YouTube has virtually replaced television. Blogs tend to deliver important news faster than actual news stations. And people meet their friends and significant others through social networks like Facebook and eHarmony.
And probably the most significant change has been the way companies market themselves.
If you go on YouTube and search for “Dollar Shave Club,” you’ll find a minute long video that some guy made in his warehouse that ended up getting over 15 million views… for FREE. The purpose of the video is to get people to go to your website and sign up for a monthly program where they send you a high quality razor every month for one dollar.
Now imagine for a second… if only 10% of those views convert to sales for him, he only generated sales of more than $1.5 million per month… free.
If you wanted to get 15 million views from a TV commercial, you would have to pay Thousands of dollars, if not tens of thousands… AT LEAST.
In another simple example… if you want to deliver a 15 page sales letter to 1,000 people, and you are going to do it via direct mail, you would have to shell out at least $5,000 to send those letters. And unless you’ve hired a professional copywriter to write your letter for you, for all he knows, you might as well have wasted your $5,000.
Now, if you put that same sales letter on a website and drive pay-per-click traffic, you’ll most likely pay anywhere from $250 to $1,000 (depending on what industry you’re in). And the beautiful thing is that you can trace everything. You can see how many people saw your ad and what percentage clicked on the ad.
You can also compare ads to see which one gets the most clicks and you get these numbers in real time. If you wanted to compare two different ads via direct mail, you’d have to wait weeks before getting a response, and your evidence would be relatively hard to track.
There are countless more scenarios where it’s advantageous to deliver your message through online versus offline mediums, however this doesn’t mean offline marketing doesn’t work anymore.
The most successful entrepreneurs I know use marketing tactics both online and offline. They intermingle the two mediums to deliver their message.
And probably THE MOST POWERFUL resource that comes with online marketing is autoresponder creation. In its most basic form, an autoresponder is just that… an autoresponder mechanism that automatically follows up with your leads.
As a basic autoresponder feature, you can send newsletters to your prospect list. If you had a list of 1000 people, you could email them daily at no additional cost to you. However, if you wanted to send a newsletter to 1,000 people by direct mail, you would be paying AT LEAST $1,000 per day!
It is THE most revolutionary invention in the world of marketing and business.
In future articles, I’ll go into the finer details of each of the concepts we talked about and give you instructions on how to use them effectively.