It’s Monday — that means it’s time to open up the mailbox and answer YOUR questions!
Hello and welcome to another Mailbox Monday…
For those of you who are newer to Breakthrough Marketing Secrets, every Monday I answer YOUR questions here.
All you have to do to get in the queue (which is currently about 5 weeks deep), is to send your question to [email protected].
Okay, on to today’s question…
Hi Roy,
Thanks for bring this sales email thing up. [Ed. note: He’s referring to my article on selling vs. content in your marketing emails.]
Now here’s my question:
Is there an effective way to sell a product or a service using an email?
Or it’s always better to ask for a click to a separate sales page?
Let me re-frame the question:
Without a separate sales page, is it possible to sell a product or a service using emails ALONE? If yes, how?
Regards,
Cyril
Okay, my first reaction to this question is that it may be a little bit misdirected…
Because you should never restrict your selling process to one media.
As long as you make the sale, why should you care if you sold them in an email or on a webpage, or anywhere else for that matter?
The marketers that do best, in terms of sales results, are generally those that are media agnostic. That means that rather than focus on what medium is being used to contact the customers, they are making sure that they’re giving the right customers the right message, in a way that the customer is overwhelmingly likely to consume the message.
And so in this case it doesn’t matter if you are contacting the customer by email only, sending them from an email to a webpage, contacting them by postcard, or even by carrier pigeon!
If you have the market right, and the offer right, then the creative only matters in a relatively minor way, and the level of impact that different media have been communicating that creative message is even more minor.
The most important question is, “What does your market consume and respond to?”
With that said, let’s dive into how media are used in some different selling processes today…
The most common model used online involves building an email list, and using emails to pre-sell your audience, but doing the brunt of the selling work on a webpage.
This has many advantages.
For one, the email inbox is a very personal space. To have permission to communicate with your prospects there (and use it wisely) allows you to be in their awareness on a regular basis.
If you are regularly delivering valuable content through these consistent email communications, you are doing a lot of your selling in email.
However, attention in the email inbox is also a fickle thing.
In most cases, your prospect is looking to be done with your email as fast as possible… Whether that means deleting it or taking action on it.
And so if you’re hoping to do an entire sales pitch in email, you may find your prospects just don’t stick around.
Their inbox is full of too many other emails that they are reminded they need to deal with.
If you are able to get them to click through to your website, the level of sustained attention that they’re willing to give you is typically much higher.
If you present them with a compelling message on your site, they will typically stick with that same message longer than they would if they were an email.
Another advantage to this is that you are going to have to process the order at some point. And typically that is done through your website or through another site, so you’re going to have to get them to click away from email anyway.
If attention span is at your advantage by taking them to your site… And you’re going to have to get them to click away from email anyway… You might as well do it before presenting the core selling message, rather than after.
(You also have much better tracking on your site than in email — highly important for a scientific approach to direct marketing!)
The general trend in online direct marketing has supported this has the best practice, too.
You will hardly find any sophisticated direct marketers today who are trying to make the entire sale in an email.
Rather, they’ll use an email for one purpose only: to get the click.
Once that person has left their email inbox and is now on the marketer’s site, then and only then will they present their entire sales message.
Jeff’s Product Launch Formula is a highly-effective proven system for selling through email (and other online media)… And this book comes highly-recommended!
Product Launch Formula creator Jeff Walker has an interesting adaptation that is illustrative of the value of selling through email…
It’s called the Sideways Sales Letter technique.
In short, Jeff breaks apart a selling message into its component parts. Each component is then delivered separately. This can be done through email, video, or another medium.
However, when it comes time to actually start taking orders, you would still typically send your customers through to your website.
Here’s what’s really interesting about this though. Often, the orders start rolling in in less time than it would take for your prospect to read the sales message on your website. Which means the emails already did the selling. The website is then just functioning as an order taking device.
So again, none of this is meant to diminish the value of email as a selling tool. But you don’t want to limit yourself to just one medium…
In fact, the best marketers don’t even limit themselves to just marketing on the internet.
Why should you limit yourself to a fraction of your total audience, and a fraction of your total impact?
TV, radio, direct mail, magazines and newspapers, the list goes on…
Rather than thinking small, you should have an attitude of thinking big. Even if today email and a website are your only perceived option, you should see yourself in a future where you are testing all these different media.
And especially, the more complex the sale, the more touch points you want to use.
Maybe you need to make telephone calls. Maybe you need an email autoresponder sequence. Maybe you need a marketing video on your website. Maybe you need direct mail follow-up. Maybe you need to use postcards to bring new leads into your marketing funnel. Maybe TV or radio are a better source of leads.
Maybe you need all of the above!
The big distinction I’m trying to make is you shouldn’t be thinking how little you can get away with, but how much you can…
In a competitive market, that’s what makes you untouchable.
That’s a breakthrough idea if I’ve ever heard one.
Yours for bigger breakthroughs,
Roy Furr
Editor, Breakthrough Marketing Secrets
