One of the most misunderstood concepts in Internet Marketing surrounds how many people will buy “cold” (on the first visit) to your website and how many won’t!
To some extent, this depends on how good your sales letter or landing page copy is and how well targeted your traffic, but in the best-case scenario we are talking about 10 people in 100 that will take an action requested of them on a given webpage (buy something, sign up or leave a comment).
10% conversion though is the exception, the reality is much more like 1 in 100, which means all that hard work and investment you are putting into getting more traffic is disappearing into thin air…think of it as leaving all of your windows and doors open in the winter and turning up the heat, you are basically throwing money out the door.
The Art Of The Presell
Along comes this concept of preselling…a critical concept for making money with your own online business.Â
Preselling implies a sales process or funnel that “warms” your prospect to you, your business and your offer.Â
Since the days of Robert Cialdini (Power of Influence) and the host of research and books since on buyer psychology, we know that certain conditions such as likeability, trust, charisma, social proof, crowd influence, etc…have a HUGE impact on our buying psychology.Â
The objective then is to combine these influencers into a front-end sales process that we call the presell
Here are some of the ways that can be done:
- Opt-in email sequence triggered by an incentive giveaway
- A series of teleseminars (either given away or low entry fee)
- Blogs where you capture recurring readers
- Social networking sites such as Twitter or Facebook where you build loyal followings
- Offline – book tours, free seminars, introductary courses, etc…
Here’s an example that may help you understand the importance of preselling, the first scenario is with no preselling, the second includes a presell…
SCENARIO 1:Â A new movie is released and you get hit with ads in your local paper as well as TV telling you how great the new movie is…
SCENARIO 2:Â A new movie is coming out and two things happen a) A friend tells you they saw the movie trailer on line and it looked so cool, the best action scene was depicted in the online video so they send you the link so you can check it out and b) Discussion mounts around a series of clips that have been created on a blog posting daily leading up to the movie
Which of these techniques do you think will lead to more people wanting to see the movie? Â
We are likely to largely ignore Scenario 1, but Scenario 2 catches our attention and makes us want to see that movie no matter what — at a very emotional level so that we can talk about it with our friends and say that we saw the coolest movie of the month!Â
Preselling for your internet marketing business works…we have consistently implemented presell campaigns that get 3-10 times more sales AND continue to offer a deep pool of prospects for subsequent offers.
Simply having a pre-sell campaign where you focus on communicating with your market, offering them some complimentary content, sharing some results and proof with them will have a huge impact on your business. Inside InfoMarketer’sZone we share systems for developing highly effective presell campaigns that will capture more leads and turn more of those leads into paying customers.
Preselling is critical, your first responsibility is to make sure you are doing it. Second, you want to understand the basics of why people buy and third, learn to take your prospect on a journey that shares the basics with them pulling them back into your sales funnel to get them to buy.Â
Do you use a presell system? If so, what techniques do you use and how effective has it been?