It’s amazing how the world has evolved during the last 20 years.
More than just the shifts of power across countries… more than just the life changing events like hurricanes, earth quakes and terrorist attacks… the advancement of technology has completely changed the way that we view the world.
YouTube has virtually replaced television. Blogs tend to break important news faster than the actual news stations. And people are meeting their friends and significant others through social networks like Facebook and eHarmony.
And probably the most significant change has been the way that businesses market themselves.
If you go to YouTube and search for “Dollar Shave Club” you’ll find a minute-long video that a guy made in his warehouse that ended up getting over 15 million views… for FREE. The purpose of the video is to get people to go to his website and subscribe to a monthly program where they send you a high quality razor every month for a dollar.
Now, imagine for a second… if just 10% of those views convert into sales for him, he just generated sales of over $1.5 million per month… for FREE.
If you wanted to get 15 million views from a TV commercial, you would have to pay thousands of dollars, if not tens of thousands… AT LEAST.
In another simple example… if you wanted to deliver a 15 page sales letter to 1000 people, and you were going to do it through direct mail, you would have to cough up at least $5,000 to send those letters out. And unless you hired a professional copywriter to write your letter for you, for all you know, you could have very well wasted your $5,000.
Now, if you put that same sales letter on a website and drove pay per click traffic to it, you would most likely pay anywhere from $250 – $1,000 (dependent on the industry you’re in). And the beautiful thing is, you can track everything. You get to see how many people saw your ad, and what percentage clicked on the ad.
You can also compare ads to see which one gets more clicks and you get these numbers in real time. If you wanted to compare two different ads through direct mail, you would have to wait weeks before you got any response and your tests would be relatively hard to track.
There are countless more scenarios in which it is advantageous to deliver your message through online mediums versus offline, however, this doesn’t mean that offline marketing doesn’t work anymore.
The most successful business people that I know use both online AND offline marketing tactics. They intermingle the two mediums to deliver their message.
And probably THE MOST POWERFUL resource that comes with online marketing is the creation of the auto-responder. In its most basic form, an auto-responder is just that… an automated responding mechanism that follows up with your prospects automatically.
As a basic feature of the auto-responder, you can send newsletters to your prospect list. If you had a list of 1000 people, you could email them on a daily basis at no extra cost to you. However, if you wanted to send a newsletter to 1000 people via direct mail, you would be paying AT LEAST $1,000 per day!
It’s THE most revolutionary invention in the world of marketing and business.
In future articles, I will go into the finer details of each of the concepts that we talked about and will give you instructions on how to use them effectively.