Traditionally, Internet “niche” marketing has been traditionally taught in the following manner:
- Create a “free” report
- create a “squeeze” page that captures a prospect’s name and address, and in return, the free report is provided.
- on the “back end” you sell the product you really want the prospect to purchase.
The above may be an oversimplification, and there are many variations … but in the end, what you end up with is a email list with a lot of barely-qualified people on it.
Two things at Ryan Lee’s Continuity Summit has me questioning this sales method.
The first was Russel Brunson’s presentation, where he shows that providing a very low cost CD actually increases conversion.
In this case, you end up with a very qualified list of people that actually are willing to pay for information. But more importantly (in my mind), the conversions of the back-end offer were tested to be two-times that of sending a prospect directly to the sales page.
(I think more testing could – and should – be done, but the results are encouraging)
The second presentation was Stephen Pirece, who shows how to start making sales directly with a five step process that gets qualified traffic to just about any offer. Russel also us upteen (60? More?) ver different methods to get offers in front of traffic (and some of them are quite ingenious).
You see, originally getting a “big list” was necessary so that marketers could send traffic to various offers. But now, there are so many alternative ways of getting offers in front of people that are already online, email marketing just simply isn’t as attractive of a traffic source as it once was.
Maybe I should qualify this a little: CUSTOMER listbuilding is NOT dead. What may be on its way out is listbuilding for list building sake: free reports, for example, where all you can do is hope the person on the other end is a live, human, prospect.
Having a CUSTOMER list (those people who have actually purchased from you, vs. “just interested”) is another matter entirely.
A corollary to this theory becomes: listbuilding may not be your most valuable skill, and “not having a list” may no longer mean doom to your business. The “my list is bigger than yours” pants-pulling-contests really don’t mean squat.
The real skill is getting your message in front of people – or “traffic building”.
With good traffic skills, you can easily build any list.
Do you agree? Disagree? Let me know below.
