How To Buy a Click Once and Resell it 1000 Times- Part 4 Bridging the Gap (7)
How To Buy a Click Once and Resell it 1000 Times- Part 4 Bridging the Gap
(Links to all parts: Part 1: INTRO | Part 2: Long Term Money Secrets | Part 3: List Segmentation | Part 4: Bridging the Gap | Part 5: Overcoming Duplication | Part 6: Surveying and Splintering)
Someone recently posted that “campaigns aren’t created, they’re built.” Unfortunately I don’t remember who posted it or I’d give you credit (if you did, please let me know), but that is an excellent summation of this business, and the direct marketing business in general.
When you first run a campaign, one of three things will happen.
1) You have a dead bang loser.
2) You have a huge winner.
3) Your campaign is not profitable but it has a pulse and could be built into a profitable one.
Our preferred results are #1 or #2 . The one we get most often is #3 . And taking a #3 and turning it into a #2 is what “bridging the gap” is all about.
I first heard the term “bridging the gap” from Dan Kennedy, describing how to turn a money-losing direct mail campaign into a winner as long as you are getting some orders. If you have a #1 on your hands, forget it and move on. Even the best marketers can’t multiply zeroes.
I’ll illustrate “bridging the gap” with a direct mail campaign example, then translate that to an online campaign example- both are instructive.
Let’s say you have a direct mail campaign in the supplement market that is 50% negative- for every $100 you spend, you get $50 back (these numbers are for illustration purposes, and not actual numbers in that space). Is it a loser or a winner?
That depends. SOME people are buying, but not enough to overcome the gap between profit and loss. What can we do? Yes, hiring a better copywriter MAY be part of the answer, but often there are “mechanical parts” that can do the bridging.
The first thing you can do, for example, is add a basic/deluxe/super deluxe split to the order form, providing 3 options instead of 1 with your original option being the cheapest. Usually about 12% will take the “super deluxe”. 40% the deluxe, and 48% the original. Just by providing two more expensive options, you have increased your transaction value and have bridged some of the gap.
Secondly, you can test raising your price. Sometimes that affects response, but sometimes it doesn’t. You can add an “expensive upsell,” something 5 to 7 times more expensive than your initial offer, and a small percentage of people will take it. You’ve just added a few more dollars to bridging the gap.
Since the customer is a recent mail order buyer, you can rent the name on the list rental market and get revenue from that. For website orders you can have a series of 1 click upsells that immediately offer the customer other, related products (usually 20% will take the upsell). For phone orders, you can do the same with an inbound tele-shark.
You can include a “bounceback offer” with all your shipments, a “ride along” sales flyer that costs nothing to ship, and gets in front of the customer when they get their shipment and are happy. You can have an outbound tele-shark call them shortly after it arrives to sell them more stuff and so on. You can put them on a continuity program (rebill- what Nutra is built on)
You get the point- there are many “dials you can turn” to bridge the gap when you have a campaign with a pulse, and the same hold true with affiliate marketing.
So, let’s talk about some of them. Almost everyone is familiar with whitelisting and blacklisting of traffic sources, cutting out bot traffic, etc. But let’s talk about some that perhaps most affiliates don’t think about.
The biggest “dial to turn” is collecting both email addresses and push subscribers on any landing page. This opens up an enormous source of long term revenue many marketers don’t think about. Here are some of the unusual ways you can get money when you build lists instead of “click flipping” in the moment.
One reason I love opt in email is it gives me so many ways to bridge the gap you don’t get from running clicks to offers. And because I can pass email addresses via personalization to my internal landing pages, that opens up a lot of possibilities.
First off, I can pass the email address of an immediate CLICKER to my on-page banners and ad placements so that when that person clicks on a banner or placement (making them both an email clicker AND a banner clicker) an advertiser can use those banners to LIST build with very responsive traffic. In other words, when the visitor clicks, their email address goes into the advertiser’s email system AND that visitor gets shown the advertiser’s presell page. They do NOT have to opt in, they are opted in when they click on the banner or ad placement. VERY powerful, especially when the advertiser tags their new email address with the topic they are interested in (if they clicked on an Asian dating banner, they should be tagged as “interested in Asian” and the advertiser should immediately send them emails promoting every Asian dating site ever invented)
So, I’m not just selling one click, if a smart email marketer or network is buying my traffic, I am selling that network thousands of future clicks that come from that one email address AND what those clicks are interested in (segmentation). Therefore my cpc is much higher since I’m selling future revenue as well as immediate revenue. And, since specific banners can be used for list segmentation purposes (as described last article) I am selling a “double clicker” (he clicked on a link in my email, then clicked on a banner that caught his interest) who has demonstrated EXACTLY what he is interested in by browsing around a page and clicking on a placement he selects.
Furthermore, even if no one clicks, I can “grab” the email address via API from the internal landing page url (since I passed it) and insert it into a smart email marketer’s list, and they can pay me per successful insertion for an immediate clicker. No, they don’t get instant revenue since there is no thank you page redirect, but they can immediately start sending them marketing emails related to dating since that’s what my whole list is about.
I can also sell space on an internal landing page for an advertiser to put their push subscriber window on my page, collecting TARGETED push subscribers AND email addresses (OneSignal can collect both tags and email addresses in case you didn’t know). Again, no welcome page redirect, but they can immediately start emailing and pushing them. Or, if they bought all the clicks on the page for a month, I’d let them put their push subscriber collection window on my page as a free bonus.
I can put multiple targeted offers on my page- Foreign dating, Mature Dating, some casual dating, but also offers to which the audience is likely to respond such as ED offers, enhancement offers, even sweeps offers or others. All offer links open in new windows and while this is much more effective on desktop than mobile, it tends to hold the users on the page a lot longer. The offer owner gets a very high quality click in this instance.
Remarketing code can also be placed on each page, so I can chase visitors to that page around the web via targeted banner, if I so choose.
Since I’ve built an email list and a push list, I can sell direct email passing cpc blasts to my list where *I* write the targeted email to my list (and coming from the direct mail and magazine advertising world, I write much better email copy than most mailers- it ain’t bragging if it’s true, that’s my “secret sauce’ others can’t knock off).
Do you see the magic of “bridging the gap?” When you think in these terms, you can usually “see” winners where others can’t, “see” hidden profits others have missed. It is, literally, using every part of the pig to get to profit in a way that’s hard to knock off or duplicate.
Stay tuned tomorrow for…
How To Buy a Click Once and Resell it 1000 Times- Part 5 Overcoming Duplication Part 1
Originally Posted by johna5150
Superb value - thank you for sharing all this info. I knew about it, just it never 'clicked' as much as when reading your posts.
One Q. What ESP/autoresponder do you use?
I was in email a looooong time ago, also opt in email mktg, and the go-to then was Aweber. But that was like 2013.
Very nice! There are some real gold nuggets in here. Thanks again!
I have some ideas how that would work. But I'm not that technical.
Originally Posted by hungrymaven
All email systems have the ability to personalize emails with variables such as first name, last name, email address, country, almost any field that is in the email system. Think of these as “tokens” that any tracker like
I use Lyris List Manager as my email system (complex and complicated, not recommended for those starting out, but I’m familiar with it so I use it) and the “token” used to pass email addresses in Lyris is %%merge members_.EmailAddr_%%
A quick example to illustrate. Let’s say I am opted in to an email list, with the email address eugene@fudpucker.com I get an email with a link that passes my email address to a landing page, and that link would look like this:
https://mylandingpage.com/lp.php?ema...@fudpucker.com where the system replaced the token %%merge members_.EmailAddr_%% with the email address eugene@fudpucker.com
When I click on the link, the email address is in the php string of the url, and I can use a GET command on the page to “grab” the email address and display it wherever I want, such as at the end of an offer url. Here’s an example url in the code that I would place in, say, an a banner on my landing page:
http://www.effortlesscommunication.com/latinas.php?addata=<?=$_GET['addata'];?>&email=<?=$_GET['email'];?>
Now when the visitor clicks the url, it passes the email address to the offer, in this case the actual url clicked would be:
http://www.effortlesscommunication.c...@fudpucker.com
Alternatively, we could have an API call in lieu of the that specific link that interacts with the API of my email system when the visitor clicks. That API call would add a code (like, say “Latinas”) to an empty field in the email system (you could use city, state, and most email systems allow you to add custom fields) attached to that specific email. So that email address has now been “tagged” as being interested in Latinas, and the API can then “return” the offer link, which redirects the user to the offer. When you send future emails (or set up an autoresponder) you just create a segment based on “Latinas” and then send email pitches to that segment for more Latina offers. All good email systems can create segments.
Now, how do you set up what I just wrote? This is the important “second answer,” I learned a long time ago from the late, great, brilliant, completely dysfunctional Gary C. Halbert- you hire an LM to do it. This is, after all, what Gary termed LMS.
“LM” stands for “Lesser Mortal” and “LMS” stands for “Lesser Mortal Shit.” Gary always made the point that people getting into direct marketing were concerned about the mechanics of printing, envelope stuffing, bookkeeping, etc., and they focused on that instead of the only thing that mattered. What Gary said is this: “You get the sale, and Lesser Mortals will take care of the rest.” That was one of the most important pieces of advice I ever, ever learned, and the term Lesser Mortal sticks in your head.
So, for API and other coding stuff, I go to Upworks and post a description of the job. There are lots of great coders on Upworks who love nothing more than to figure out API stuff, it simply makes them happy. You have to look at their past jobs and references, but if you do, you can get a feel for whether they are any good or not. Then you hire them, send them your project description, and go back and forth with them several times until it is done. You always want them to code it so you can “template” it and use the code in other places, simply by changing a few variables (for example if I use field 6 in my email system to tag as “latinas” I may change the code to use field 7 for Asians for an Asian placement- same code, just a few tweaks).
If that coder does good work, contact them personally, form a relationship with them, and use them whenever you need coding done that you can’t immediately figure out (or keep paying them on Upworks). Don’t waste your time on LMS. There are plenty of LM’s who have zero interest in AM who are ecstatic about fooling around with API, php, curl scrips, dev, and whatever else you want done. That’s the best way to get anything technical done fast. You concentrate on the conversions and Lesser Mortals will figure out the rest for you.
You're making me horny with that post above. Looking forward to more of this!
This is an exceptional series of articles, and I can confirm I've used most of these principles to make a ton of money. This guys knows his stuff. Collecting emails is definitely the way.
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