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Category Archives: Financial Freedom

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Building an Online Database

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If you’re already in business—and new to online business—it means integrating your existing customers into your online marketing efforts.

For every single person that comes through your door, when they come to the cash register to pay—whether it be by check, Visa, or cash—you get their first and last name, and email address. Every single time! If they object, you kindly remind them that preferred customers get great discounts.

The reason for this is very simple: if you have their email address, you now have the potential to contact them for free from now on! You don’t have to physically mail anything except your actual products. Brochures used to mean at least a buck per piece by the time you add the cost of producing them or a sales person to call them up. By email it’s free!

This is a perfect example of how you raise your profits instantaneously by using this one simple technology that’s been around for almost decades. If you collect the first name, last name, email address, it allows you the ability to personalize every single email that goes out to all of your customers. You just put first name, last name, email address, date they came in, what they bought; one line for every customer. That’s all you have to do.

You’ve just built a database. You can take anything separated by commas and import into any program. People perceive this to be very difficult, but when you break it down it’s super easy.

It doesn’t seem like much when we’re talking about one email to one person. But what about sending to 500 people; mail merges by the date they came in, whatever they did, how much they spent? Within three minutes 500 customers get an announcement of a special offer for them. Do you think that within 24 hours you’ll notice an uptick in clicks, calls, or feet through the door? Of course!

It’s the simplicity of email. It’s faster than Federal Express. It’s faster than fax. You press a button, it’s there. And you can personalize it just for them.

Do you think you’re going to email something to 100,000 people or 500,000 people and you’re not going to make something extra in profit? We can send personalized emails to hundreds of thousands of people every single month and generate a lot of money from that.

Mind you, it can take a couple of years to create that kind of list, but so what? Two-years well spent to begin making $100,000 per month, yes? Think about it. If you send out an email to that list of 100,000, you’ll make a minimum of $100,000 from mailing that list just once! If we do that every month, you do the math. It’s a pretty powerful asset to have.

Just start with something. You don’t have to go high-tech. You don’t have to have automatic everything. Just get online and start marketing, start learning, and start experiencing, because if you don’t, your competitor is going to!

Stay simple. Stay clean. Get the job done. Your job is to be online, to be in business; get the customer to give you their information and buy from you. Whatever your goal is, get that job done online.

https://bit.ly/UltimateInternetBootcamp

Leaning on the Back-End

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When people are at your website, you’ve gotten through the creation of interest, credibility, and rapport. They believe in you. They’re ready to order from you, trusting enough to give up serious information. You’re not some guy in boxer shorts in some basement stealing credit cards. They don’t know who you are. You’re a webpage, but you’ve satisfied that most important question to the casual web surfer—what’s in it for me?


Now you have to convince them to buy something. Make an incredible, compelling offer, and then get them to fill out an order form or checkout or whatever. You have to ease understandable objections but having a secured site (Whatever the costs do it! You don’t want to be the site that was hacked or broken into for credit card info. It’s hard to recoup from that if you’re not one of the giants).

Once they’re convinced, you want them to fill out the whole order form that’s user-friendly, simple, yet detailed. What did they order? Is it a product that is used consistently? If so, about when would you expect this customer to be most open to buying this product again, and maybe something else, something that costs even more?

Here’s where the backend marketing starts. Great customer service and reliable producers and movers are musts, but your marketing costs are absolutely zero in terms of your ability to follow with hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of people (depending on the product/service). By having a system in place that captures key information, that database becomes your genie for when you are most likely to make your next sales. You can literally predict about how much money you’ll make at intervals you determine.

Let’s say you have a repetitive product like vitamins.  You sell a bottle of Vitamin C to one customer that amounts to a 45-day supply. Guess what they’re going to get 30 days later? On your order form you’ve captured name, email, product, date, all the key data you can manipulate any way you like to automatically kick a personalized email to that customer when they’re most likely to by that again. Throw in a 10 percent discount. Make them an offer hard to refuse.

Now think about the up-sell, and the limitless people you can reach on the web. And what did that cost? Zero. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. No time at all. It’s done automatically. If 10,000 people order today, 10,000 people are going to get an email 30 days from now to remind them of that.

Think you’re going to get any extra business from that? And even if you don’t, so what? It’s free! It didn’t cost anything to do it. If it didn’t work, just fix the content of the email, go back and do it again. It’s so easy and simple, the power of Net. That’s backend marketing.

Once you have that email address, it’s free to market to them forever. Backend marketing is the key to online business. The old way of backend marketing meant sales aggressive sales calls or mailing catalogues, both expensive. By email, you can reach as many people as you can bear and do it free all the time.

And this doesn’t just apply to strictly online businesses. Next month we’ll look at how a few extra seconds of effort with your in-store customers means the beginnings of a database and more sales!

Don’t Sell – Help!

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man with help above him

There are another three components that are critical to website success—besides avoiding the pitfall of focusing on product before knowing who your target market is and where they hang out.

The first is help, don’t sell. By helping you will sell. The second is build credibility and rapport through educating.

You’ll go to a sloppily put-together webpage and get these annoying boxes that come up asking if you want something you weren’t thinking about before but are certainly too annoyed by now to entertain considering.

When you’re marketing online, remember that people don’t shop online. People research online.

Most people go online for research on how to buy a new car, or increase their business, or to learn about raw foods, or whatever it may be. So your website has to be designed around helping, not selling. Informing, revealing, educating.

If you sell, you will fail. By helping you build credibility and rapport. People will believe in you, and because of that, you can show them the value in your product or service. And they will buy from you. It’s absolutely critical to what you do online.

Everything on your website—every button, every graphic, every word you put on the page has got to be built around helping, not selling. Make it most appealing to researchers, not to shoppers. Save the two-page sales letters and the paper. Whatever it is you’re the expert in, whatever you do, they want more information. They’ll call you, email you, or order right off the website.

The mindset of the online researcher-pre-shopper is, “What’s in it for me?” That’s the first question you want to answer on your website. If you can’t answer that question at the top of your webpage, change it or you’re going to fail. Why should anybody stay there? They’ve got hundreds of websites to go look.

Don’t have a mission statement at the top of your page talking about who you are, what you do, how great and fantastic you are, and how you have a Ph.D. Nobody cares about that.

They care about what you’re going to do for them. That doesn’t mean not making available credentials and testimonials, but it all goes back to writing headlines—something that will make them stay. Suck them in. Make them feel like they’re going to be learning something they didn’t know before.

Nearly the same marketing rules still apply. Walk a mile in your prospects’ shoes. Empathize with them in plain language. Pharmaceutical ads are written and spoken so that children understand them. Use simple and/or precise language (depending on the uniqueness of your market) as your keywords—the words prospects would be typing into Google or Bing to find you. If you’re selling cow juice but everyone calls it milk, you better call it milk too because people don’t search for cow juice, they search for “milk.” If you get stuck, there are writers at reasonable prices who can do it for you.

It’s not how well you know your product that is going to determine the level of your sales and your success; it’s how well you know your customer, so that you’re ready for them when they visit your web page.

Next month we’ll cover that last key to success in building an online business—having the best possible sales process you can have—one that costs you nothing and boosts your profits!

https://bit.ly/UltimateInternetBootcamp

Cruise Control Over Your Business

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stocks above busnessman

It’s a virtual road-trip toward business success, the final destination–whatever your next venture will be, because you’re done with that last one. It’s running on its own, without you.

Until then, cruise control helps. Without cruise control, long road trips would be more tiring for the driver and for those of us with lead-foot, a lot more speeding tickets.

All you need is a dashboard that has the exact read-outs you need to control your business. You pick your top 5 – 10 critical success factors and come up with a system on how you’re going to measure them. If you can’t think of five, pick that top factor.

If you’re measuring lead generation, for example, how many leads are coming in? You gauge leads per week and per month, at least. Now dig deeper. How many leads from each lead source? How much does each lead cost per source? Is one source cheaper and bringing more return than another? When you have benchmarks–like how much you’re willing to pay for each lead–you’ve got numbers right in front of you that tell you how many leads come in and what you pay for them. What do you have?

You have control over your business.

Consistency, predictability, tracking–systems that can be operated and understood by practically anyone. When you can duplicate that, you’re on cruise control.

Now take 15 of the most important things you want to track. It might be lead generation. It might be customer satisfaction. It might be cash flow management. If you have a business with labor, labor productivity is a good thing to measure. And then the question you want to ask is what’s going to enable you to measure whether or not you are being successful at that?

All you do is establish a handful of gauges, tools, or metrics–whatever you want to call them– for whether or not you’re executing that critical factor properly.

We test to make sure it works. We test it backward and forward. You want to make sure you can get to the benchmarks you set from the steps in your system. The good news about systems is they don’t require that much training. A good system is where you put that system in someone’s hands and they know how to use it.

It can be a simple narrative to describe–for people who like words–how this system works. You do flow charts for people who are the linear and visual thinkers in your business. It’s as simple as a check-sheet. Someone else could operate it because all they need to do is go down the list: I did this, check; I did this; check. If you do every step on this check sheet, at the end, you’ve got a system. That simple!

Note, though, that it’s not that easy. There’s work required to put systems into practice. Not torturous work; it can be a lot of fun as you refine them. Intuition and creativity can play into this thing, from the artist to the architect. You are the person qualified because you know it inside out. You know all the parts of it. You know what’s involved. Your business is you, and you are in control!

What do you think Millionaire Mind community? We want to hear from you!

Staying On Track

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people standing on puzzle pieces

Your business is you. It’s you creating something that wasn’t there before; with material results from your intentions, your energy, your essence, whatever it may happen to be at that time. The science of growing it simply means having prepared leadership, development, producers, and administration. As the process evolves, so do your systems for solving frustrations and focusing on those critical factors that matter most.

This is your rich-making vehicle. Like any car, you’ve got a gas gauge, a speedometer, oil gauge–all the key things you need to know quickly and conveniently if this thing is running properly. You need the same things in your business.

You need the ability to track what’s important. There’s what is quantifiable and easy to count–like sales–but there are also subjective things where opinions are measured, when the ‘qualifiable’ becomes quantifiable.

One issue that’s gained tons of traction over the last couple of years is going green–especially in businesses–from "cloud" computing to energy consumption’s impact on the bottom line.

Some people couldn’t care less about the plight of the pelicans in an endangered eco-system (a shame, for sure), but when you can quantify how switching over to energy-efficient equipment can save thousands of dollars, politics goes out the window. Saving the planet is on the same track as the bottom-line.

Also consider, though, the marketing appeal of being able to sincerely tell your market you support green initiatives. Again, the subjective can become countable in response rates.

Put a scale in and it. Customer satisfaction; employee satisfaction–you measure benchmarks, time frames, the ranges you’d like to be in, or what high/low thresholds would signify danger-zones. They sound complicated, but they’re really not.

How many sales calls and closes per hour would you like to see? You look at what your sales are per month and compare. Too low? Too high (maybe there’s something else not being considered if it’s too good to be true)?

You want the salesperson that follows a script, makes the calls and closes the ratio that they should be closing. That can be copied, duplicated, and most importantly, tracked. If the oil pressure in your vehicle is too high, you’ve got a problem. If it’s too low, you’ve also got a problem. You want to be in between, yes? What are your operating ranges for your critical success factors?

It might be that you’re willing to spend a certain amount of money per employee depending on their role in your business’ structure. If you’re paying your marketing guy $30,000 more than you really intended, there isn’t going to be much speculation on why your profits aren’t where you want them to be. Like getting a speeding ticket, you had this gauge that you weren’t paying attention to and you exceeded the operating range.

There are things you can count on and physically look at; things you can measure; and real accurate data that you can track–not guess. They’re documented. It could be in a manual you pass out to all employees, or one that you’ve got linked up online.

It takes consistency, predictability, and tracking–systems that can be operated by someone with a base-line level of skill. When you can duplicate that, you’re on track to financial freedom.

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