How to use Conversion Rates to YOUR advantage. 

When a customer orders a mobile phone (ie the customer filled in the web form for an order - eg at www.2u.co.uk/mobile-phones) they get processed and credit checked (vetted and policed), because they are about to get a massive discount off of the true cost of the phone in return for agreeing to stay with the network for a set period of time. 

Only the people who the networks think are legitimate and will pay their monthly phone bills will get their phone and get connected.

So not everyone who orders actually gets connected.  Some get declined. There is more info on the order process here.

The difference between the number of people who order and the number of people who get connected is known as the ‘connection conversion rate’ or the ‘conversion rate’.

The different mobile phone networks each have their own credit credit check system, with different rules and criteria, which a customer must pass before the customer is allowed to be connected to that network.

This means that the different networks have different conversion rates.

What does this mean to you?

If you promote the best converting network more, then you will get more connected customers for the orders that you make. 

Which means more commission money to you!

And the current highest converting phone network (with the highest conversion ratio) is …

The ‘3′ network

The other networks are averaging around 40% conversion - while the 3 network is averaging around 60% conversion!

That is about 50% MORE! 

So use this knowledge to your maximum advantage.  Promote the 3 network hard, above all others.

Push your visitors and customers towards 3.  They have VERY competitive mobile phone deal offers, so you are really doing them a great service in helping them go with 3.

And you will earn more.

So don’t sit around waiting - go now and do everything you can to promote the 3 network through your www.2u.co.uk  affiliate link.

If you dont know how to do this promoting read everything here.  But take action now.

In this edition of the Tuesday Topup I want to look at another marketing fundamental. 

Last week we looked at the vital importance of understanding the relationship between value and money. 

In short you’ve got to - got to - got to - give massive value before you can expect any money in return.  And the value is whatever the value is to the customer. 

Moving forward from there - a question … 

“How do you funnel customers to your product or service - and get them to come back again and again?” 

There are 3 key elements: 

1. Contact,
2. Contact Management, and
3. Giving value (as discussed last week) 

“Contact” refers to the initial contact.  The first thing the customer sees of you and how they got there.  This is discussed elsewhere under the broad headings of “traffic generation” and everything that gets the visitor ultimately TO your website. 

“Contact Management” is how you then ‘talk’ with your visitors, both at the time of the initial contact and every point thereafter.  Built into this is your overall ‘brand’ - ie the overall feel of the customer’s experience with you. 

I am going to go in more detail into the “Contact” part and the rest of “Contact Management” and talking with your visitor at a later point, but for now, lets look just at the methods for talking with them again. 

Specifically, you need to talk with your customer right now, and again afterwards, until you have given so much value to them that they are ready to buy, to give you money for what you are offering. 

It is a generally accepted marketing truism that on average customers need at least 7 points of contact - 7 repeated conversations with you or your company or your product or service - before they will buy. 

Over time you will build up a growing list or database of potential customers, who have not yet bought from you. 

If you don’t contact them again you are leaving a whole lot of money on the table - and you could genuinely be able to help them, and they will go without … 

Unless you contact them again a number of times. 

You need to be contacting them with valuable, helpful information that helps show them you are worth doing business with. 

And you need to talk with someone who first came to you yesterday differently to someone who first came to you 1 month ago or 6 months ago. 

So as the number of people who have visited your site or business grows,  how do you do this without working a 25 hour day? 

Email Marketing using Sequential Autoresponders: 

Now I will say this up front - Email marketing does not work as well as it used to.  But is that a reason to not use it? 

I have heard people say “There’s no point to doing email marketing because it doesn’t work as well as it used to” 

It’s possibly the dumbest answer I have ever heard. 

Just because something used to work better, is no logical reason to stop using it.  The only time to stop using something is when the returns are less than the time, effort and cost of using it. 

So back to email marketing… 

You need to contact your visitors again and again with useful, insightful, helpful information that shows you are an expert. 

Firstly you need to CAPTURE their contact details.   

If you don’t capture their details and if they don’t buy on that first contact - which in all probability they will not - then you have wasted all your traffic-getting efforts. 

The bare minimum thing to capture is their email address and a very close second is their first name.  You can ask for more, but with every field (piece of information) you ask you will get less and less people who actually respond. 

So you need to take and store their email and first name. 

Then you need to email them instantly to welcome them and thank them for giving their details. 

Then at certain regular intervals you need to contact them again repeatedly.  You will get much better results if this is regular.  For example, I have now made this blog into the “Tuesday Topup”.  How often do I contact our subscribers?  The clue is in the name

And attached into this blog is a VERY powerful system to automatically email out to all our blog subscribers to tell them when a new blog message or article has been posted (subscribe on the top left if you haven’t already). 

And this email system is the same system you can use to not only capture your visitor’s contact details, but also to send out emails in the sequence which you set, at the specific times you set.   

So you can set it up to send ‘new visitor’ information straight away, then later after a period of time and after a sequence of other emails, as you build rapport and you have built up more of a relationship, you can start sending out more in-depth information. 

Or however you want to structure it. 

The true beauty of it is that once you set it up - it is totally automatic. 

For example, on www.2u.co.uk down the left side you will see a form where a visitor can fill in their first name and email and get a sequence of money saving advice for their mobile phone.  There are a number of emails that go to the subscriber over a period of time.  The first is instant, then there are a number of weekly emails which give the visitor free information on how they can save money on their mobile phone bills etc. 

The WHOLE process is completely automated. 

 I set it up about 2 years ago and have hardly touched it since.  There are hundreds of people subscribed into that list who automatically get the information they have requested.

And it is incredibly easy to set up. 

Simply go to Aweber and get yourself an account.  The benefits you get FAR outweigh the tiny cost. So get yourself an account there now if you do not already have one. 

If you do nothing else for your online business this week DO THIS NOW. 

Then you can easily create a web form (which is the form to ask for their email address etc). 

Put this into your site.  You are now up and running collecting visitor contact details so you can contact them again and again. 

Now you need to start writing the sequence of emails to go out to these potential customers after they have signed up. 

Then decide how many days after signup they will be sent. 

And that is more or less it.  Sure there are more advanced strategies, such as segmenting, but this really is the bare-bones of an automated email marketing campaign. 

Aweber give excellent tutorials on exactly how to use the system, and I will go into more detail on what extra benefits you can use to enhance your email campaign. 

But this is the real skeleton outline.  And once you have done this, you don’t need to keep doing it. 

Set it -> forget it. 

Well, almost.  You need to revisit the sequence and check it is all up to date and if you could improve it to help your customers more. 

So that’s it for today.  If you haven’t yet go to Aweber and get yourself an account. 

Don’t put it off.  There is always an excuse but just get started and slowly over time your list will build up. Do it now.  Good luck.

Next week we are going to look in closer detail at exactly what you can do to fully automate a highly successful email marketing system. 

Speak with you then, 

Duncan Ritson-Elliott

This is the most basic, basic part of marketing - but it is also the most important!

It is SO fundamental that it is often overlooked.

And it is this:

The relationship between VALUE and MONEY.

Think about everything that means and everything related to it.

Providing value to your customers.  The money that ensues.

So many people start a bussiness idea with a thought process of

“How can I get money?”

“How can I make more money?”

The trouble with this thinking is that it should start with the customer.

The better question is this:

How can I better serve my customers such that it is worth so much to them that they will give me money for it.

(I know - it could be worded better, but you get the idea)

“How can I solve their problems?”

It is all about the CUSTOMER.

DRILL this into your head …

Give VALUE that people will be WANTING TO PAY FOR.

Return On Investment = ROI.

You’ve probably heard of the term “ROI” or “Return On Investment”.

You probably heard it from a business perspective, in terms of a business getting  return (income) from their investment in (say) building a product. 

They invest in their product and hopefully when they sell it, they will make more from selling it that they put into building it.

But it is far more important to your marketing mind to be thinking of that EXACT same equation from the CUSTOMER’s point of view.

The customer is going to invest their TIME and MONEY in looking at, and potentially buying your product. 

Is it going to give them a return on their investment?

Is the customer going to see what you are offering as worth more value than the money you are asking for?

As far as the customer is concerned, will they get something worth more to them than the money they paid?

So think about the customer’s ROI.

Today, do nothing else but these 2 things:

1. Think about how you can offer more value to your customers.

2. Think about how you can better communicate to your customers what current value you are offering.

That, in essence, is marketing.

We have some very cool improvements that I want to tell you about - I am quite excited so I made you this (free) video to tell you about it.  Click the ‘Play’ triangle to start watching …

If you cannot see the video above then click here now