Viral Marketing Tool

Just a quick note to say that this looks interesting: CB Clicks -- a free viral marketing tool for Clickbank merchants.

Sten

Update Thu Mar 16, 2006: I still haven't received a single sale from CB Clicks, so I've removed the code.

I also discovered it added an annoying pop-up to this blog! Sorry! It is gone, dead, finito!

Personalizing Your Sales Page

In my last post, I said I'd done two things right lately, and I talked about one of them, capturing your visitors name and email address.

The other tecnhique that has boosted my sales lately, is finding out what my customers want, and then personalizing the sales letter to their desire.

I also include their name in the sales copy.

This process has two stages.

1) Set up an email-squeeze page that also asks the visitor what is most problematic to her, regarding the topic of your web page.

I sell an eBook on how to improve your memory, so I asked: "What do you have the most difficulty remebering?"

So people answer this question, fill in their name and email address, and are sent to a web page that is personalized with their name.

Then I follow them up with email.

2) After receiving enough answers to my question, a pattern emerges. Four or five themes seem to come up again and again.

So now I change the squeeze page. Instead of an open question, I ask "What is most important to you to?" and then I give them five options as radio buttons.

They fill in their name, email address, and click the radion button that is most relevant to them, and so now I can show them a web page, not only personalized with their name, but also with specific information regarding what they are most interested in.

Then I follow them up with email.

It is beautiful.

Sincerely,
Sten

Catching Names & Email Addresses

Wow it's working!

I'm making between $20-$40 dollars every day now. Yeah, I know, I can't live off of that, but it's going in the right direction, and I'm so excited!

What happened is I started doing two things right.

One I've talked about before in this blog. It is the need to capture your visitors information -- the first name and an email address will do just fine.

If you ask people for too much information, it becomes too much of a hurdle for them. Giving away their email address is hard enough. They know you will email them -- and their inboxes are pretty full allready. So you better have some good info lined up!


Trying To Do Everything Myself

I'm a programmer, so I thought: "I'll just find some php-script on the net and modify it to my liking, and I'll use that to capture email addresses and send out automated email. It's easy."

I've programmed an SMTP-server in my time, so I had absolute confidence.

Now the things is, finding a free autoresponder is easy.

Modifying it and setting it up is easy.

Creating a CRON-job to call the php-script that actually sends out the emails, is easy.

It is all easy.

Problem is, it doesn't work very well.


Tracking, Sidetracking, and The Anti-Spam Laws of California

The set-up I just described, works. It does capture names and email addresses. And it does let you personalize emails with peoples names and whatnot. It even sends out the emails.

But there, it stops.

There is an issue now, called deliverability. It has to do with spam complaints, spam filters, blacklists and whitelists.

The truth is, if you grow a list past 10 people, you will get spam complaints. Joe forgets he signed up. Anik dislikes what you write in the third email.

I even got a spam complaint for sending out the "please confirm your subscription"-email!

With free scripts or other do-it-yourself solutions, you most often will not know. You don't know if your emails reach the recipients. You don't know when there's an official spam complaint. You might not even know if you've been blacklisted by an anti-spam company.

Then, you don't know how many people open your emails. And you don't know how many click the links in your emails.

Man, are your blind!

Then, because of the extremely strict spam laws of California, a conglomerate of NSA, FBI & KGB agents burn down your house in the middle of the night.

So I stopped. I stopped doing it myself, I mean. I did some research and found that Awber had the best deliverability around -- 99.34%. And I can track everything, and set up unlimited autoresponders, and build several lists, and send broadcasts extremely fasts.

I've been using it for a couple of months, and it has already paid for itself.

You can try it yourself by filling in the form here.

Happiness,
Sten