The web is the purest form of marketing I know.
You cannot find another medium that works so quickly when you make a change to your sales approach.
Amateurs on the web do not know how to close a sale.
When the customer is ready to buy you must close the deal otherwise you will lose the sale.
It is an old old axiom of selling.
I do not expect to rise in your estimation when I say this, but I'm one of the world's experts at getting junk mail to work.
Ok, ok, I know it never works on you.
But if you had one of my direct mail shots you would never ever realise that it had gone out to 40,000 other people.
I used to live off returns of 2% response rate and a 30% conversion of enquiries.
In plain English, if I sent out 1,000 mailings, I would get 20 replies, and from these I'd get 6 sales.
There is a point to all of this.
Those 1,000 mailings would cost about £450 in English money.
But the sales would be worth £750 each, on which the gross profit would be £500, and the follow up business over the following two years would be perhaps £30,000 per client.
multiply by about 1 1/2 for USA dollars.
But you really had to be clever with the direct mail.
You had to get the right list of prospects, and you had to get the timing right and the right message and design.
Each mailing had to follow a format.
Any deviation from the routine and the numbers would drop off immediately.
We sent out 40,000 mailings 8 times a year, all around the world.
Our investment over ten years would be over £1,500,000 in this form of advertising.
Nothing else would work as well.
You can test direct mail easily.
Our business fees, based on it, would be worth nearly £1,000,000 a year from all around the world.
Compare this to the web.
The web is the purest form of marketing I know.
It is totally wonderful the way you can do something on the web and within two days, you are beginning to get a result.
We use Google Analytics to evaluate this.
Let us take a simple example which most people will understand, that of vacation rental.
Imagine that you own a property for holiday rental and you use the web to do it.
We do own such a property in Scotland as it happens.
It is a little cottage in the Highlands.
We know that the vast majority of visitors only see our front page and move on.
More of them find that we have no availability when they want it, or our facilities are not right, or the number of rooms is not right, or the prices are not right.
Or they simply don't like the look of us.
It will be he same with your web site.
People click on it and move on immediately.
No accounting for taste.
The rest, if any remain by this time, put us in competition with four or five other sites they like the look of.
Now if, at this stage, we delay in giving them all the information they need we will lose all but the most dedicated of them.
Most of the vacation rental web sites I've looked at in the past month, make me realise that they don't put their availability on their site.
They make people write in to enquire.
Well, I can tell you for an absolute certainty if you've gone to all the trouble to get them excited about taking their holiday at your place, and you are in their short list.
you've got to give them all the information they need to make their decision there and then.
Don't ever make them think twice about it.
Our direct mail campaigns would have failed miserably if we had not captured them at the moment of maximum excitement about buying.
The market place is not for cosy little chats with prospective customers, to-ing and fro-ing.
Sure you can do that with some and they'll book with you.
But the experts give them all the information they need to make a decision when they are thinking about it.
Direct mail taught me that.
Give them two decisions to make, they'll lose interest and you'll lose the sale.
Close the deal when you can John