Bob Serling - Marketing Ladder Blueprint
Bob Serling - Marketing Ladder Blueprint
Bob Serling - Marketing Ladder Blueprint
Program Details
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Copyright 2013 by Bob Serling All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission or further information should be addressed to Profit Alchemy, Inc., 2039 Bruceala Court, Cardiff, California 92007-1201. Published by Profit Alchemy, Inc. 2039 Bruceala Court Cardiff, California 92007-1201 (760) 497-8078 Fax: (760) 652-1636 www.ProfitAlchemy.com Printed and bound in the United States of America.
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Thanks for your interest in The Marketing Ladder Blueprint. In this information package, Ill give you more details on whats in the program, how it works, and how the materials and mentoring are delivered. So well be covering 6 topics today
1. The biggest problem (disguised as a solution) thats harming your short-term sales and long-term growth 2. The game changing strategy that solves this problem 3. A step-by-step tour of the complete Marketing Ladder Blueprint 4. The Big Aha how to think strategically about your marketing, eliminate marketing chaos, and lock in more sales and guaranteed growth 5. Details of how the program materials are delivered and how your mentoring sessions are conducted 6. How to apply for the program if youd like
If you dont fit into either of these categories, then The Marketing Ladder Blueprint probably wont be all that effective for you.
The biggest problem (disguised as a solution) thats harming your short-term sales and long-term growth
The Internet gained mass acceptance and became a mainstream source of information in the late 1990s. Because millions of web sites seemed to pop up almost overnight, competition for eyeballs grew at a ferocious rate. In order to attract more visitors and capture their contact information, it quickly became standard operating procedure to offer something for free in exchange for a visitors contact information. This caused even greater growth and much greater competition. So companies increased the amount of free material they were willing to give away in exchange for capturing a visitors contact information. This became known as raising the free line. In my opinion, it should actually have become known as mass hysteria youll see why in just a minute Once the free line was significantly raised, companies began competing to repeatedly give away even more free materials to each member of their list without ever asking them to buy anything. The prevailing logic was that this type of relationship building would result in converting far more visitors to paying customers. In some cases, this did work. But in most cases, it did not work well or work at all. 4
Fast forward to today and this process of continually raising the free line is still the main method most businesses use to attract prospects and convert them to paying customers. However, theres a major flaw in this entire process. And it can all be summed up in one sentence
Given the freebie seeking mentality of the majority of people (including YOUR customers), if you sat outside a grocery store with a cardboard box and a sign offering FREE dead kittens, youd probably get some takers.
You see, people have become so accustomed to receiving things for free, that they will take almost anything for free. Plus, all the raising of the free line has conditioned them to demand more and more for free. Because this practice of giving more and more away for free has become so rampant, Im sure youve noticed that fewer sales are being made. And as long as this give away mentality continues, your sales will continue to suffer. Why? Because the vast majority of people who take you up on your free offer have little or no plans to ever buy anything from you. And as high quality as your product or service may be, those freebie takers are not enticed by your free materials or free trials to actually buy anything. Instead, the minute you offer them something for sale, they simply move on to the next company giving away their products or services for free.
A list of 1,500 to 3,000 paying customers is substantially more valuable than a list of 50,000 unpaid prospects who join your list by accepting a free report, white paper, video or other free content. 5
And even more important, for the vast majority of service professionals, a list of just 1,500 paying customers thats built with a reasonably small first purchase is all you need to fuel a highly successful business for decades and enjoy the lifestyle you've always wanted. Now, I realize that this is contrary to all the advice youve been force fed for years now, so let me give you a couple examples that demonstrate how effective this solution really is.
At that point, I started thinking about what could be done to reverse that situation and to actually turn direct mail lead generation into a reliable profit center. Thats when I first got the idea to deal only with prospects who paid to get on my list, rather than jumping at yet another offer for something for free. And heres exactly how I did that Now, I still offered a free report as bait to get people to join my list. BUT instead of letting prospects request it with a toll-free number, I made them pay for the call by driving the response to a standard land line. Back then, the cost of a long-distance call was about 35 cents. So now, instead of getting the call for free, my prospects had to pay a measly 35 cents to take advantage of my free offer. As a result, my response plummeted! By charging for the phone call instead of giving it away for free, I generated around 850 responses instead of 3,300. Now, thats a steep drop off. Its a bit mind boggling, but simply by adding a 35 -cent cost to the deal, literally thousands of people dropped out! And this had two very powerful results. First my marketing costs were still $3 per prospect, but with 850 responses, my total costs dropped from $9,900 to $2,550. So that was $7,350 more that I kept. Second after tracking the sales to these prospects over a couple of months, I made nearly double the sales to people who had identified themselves as buyers as I did from the freebie seekers. Now, my promotion became very profitable, returning nearly $3 in profit for every dollar I invested in marketing. I passed this information along to my business associates and they produced similar results. So now I knew I was on to something very valuable, which can be summed up as:
The fact is that actual buyers even when the first purchase is small are as much as 10 times more likely to buy your more expensive products and services than people who join your list through an offer of something for free.
Now, lets jump forward 15 years or so and take a look at applying this principle to marketing online.
Case Study $212,500 in sales from a small list of 827 customers who paid to join my list
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A few years back, I offered a live, 4-day training program on a rapid method for creating and selling information products. The enrollment fee for the program was $12,500 and space was limited to 16 participants. However, I ended up selling 17 seats before closing down enrollment, so the gross revenue came to $212,500. But the most important factor was that these 17 sales were made to a list of just 827 people. That comes to $265.95 for every prospect on the list! So what was the driving force that resulted in such a high return per prospect? Quite simply, it was the fact that all the people on this list had bought something to get on the list. In this case, it was a low cost report (I believe it sold for $17) that covered the fundamentals of creating and selling information products. Some of these customers came from my own ezine list and others came through joint ventures to other peoples lists. But all 827 people on this list joined the list by making a small purchase. In addition, in a separate test to nearly 30,000 people who had joined another one of my lists by taking advantage of a free offer, just 4 seats were sold. So as you can see, even in the current environment, the concept of raising the free line is deeply flawed. The principle behind this ridiculous concept is that if you give enough stuff away for free, eventually these prospects will recognize all the value you bring them and buy something from you. But just the opposite is true. Because the more you give and give and give away the more you condition people to expect to get things from you for free. And without realizing it, youre actually training your prospects not to buy from you! So at the risk of repeating myself, let me underscore once more:
A list of 1,500 to 3,000 paying customers is substantially more valuable than a list of 50,000 unpaid prospects who join your list by accepting a free report, white paper, video or other free content. Because the fact is that actual buyers even when the first purchase is small are as much as 10 times more likely to buy your more expensive products and services than people who join your list through an offer of something for free.
With this critical understanding in mind, lets take a look at exactly what you need to do to shift from a raising the free line approach to marketing to sellin g only to customers who have made a small purchase from you. That can easily be achieved by using my Marketing Ladder Blueprint.
Step 3 Sell the right product and service types Products Low to medium-priced products to your prospect list Medium to high-priced products to your list of paying customers Services Sell primarily to your list of paying customers Cherry-pick clients who can afford high-ticket services As you can see, the entire system is simple in principle. But as I said, there are many nuances to each step. So lets dig deeper into all three steps.
Keep trying to funnel those 1% up to more expensive products, realizing that 50% to 80% of them will drop out during this funnel process What all of this boils down to is that you need a LOT of traffic and a very large list to make the Marketing Funnel work. And that requires a lot of work, a lot of time and a significant financial investment without any guarantee that it will work. I cant tell you how many clients I work with who have lists of 150 ,000 or more, but fewer than 2,000 of the people on their lists are paying customers. And many of them are bleeding money, barely able to keep their doors open month to month. Now lets consider the Marketing Ladder model. The core principle that drives the Marketing Ladder is just the opposite of the traditional Marketing Funnel. Instead of building a massive list of tire kickers (at a tremendous cost of time and money), you build a much smaller list thats primarily paying customers. Then you continue to graduate them up the steps of the ladder to your mid and higher-priced products and services. So again, you do need to use a free offer to get prospects to join your list. But as soon as they join your list, you make them a low-cost offer in a non-pressured way and convert as many as them to paying customers as possible. Those buyers get moved over to your buyers list. And you begin the process of graduating them up the ladder to higher cost products and services. Meanwhile, youre still making low-cost offers to convert as many of the prospects on your other list to paying customers. However, you are not going to leave them on your list forever, giving a false sense of how large your list is. In general, youll remove prospects who have not converted to customers in 12 to 18 months, constantly cleaning your list by removing the dead weight and adding fresh leads to the list. Another important consideration is how you generate the traffic of prospects who will accept your free offer and join your list. For the majority of businesses and especially for consultants, coaches, authors and subject matter experts I recommend using only the following sources: Email lists Direct mail lists List swaps (having another list owner promote for your bait piece in exchange for you promoting theirs)
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The key similarity between these sources is that the majority of the time, you can use them to reach people who have already demonstrated a willingness to buy. With other sources, such as social media, pay-per-click, article marketing, banner ads and so on, you dont have any idea whether the prospect has ever bought anything similar to what you offer. So those prospects are far less likely to buy the low-cost item you offer than prospects with a proven buying history. Are you beginning to see a carefully orchestrated pattern here? Great I knew you would!
MLB Step 2 Sell multiple products and services to your buyers list
I could spend hours on this topic alone, but let me just give you a number of important points to pay attention to. First and foremost, 90% of all your sales will come from people who have already bought something from you. So it only makes sense to devote the majority of your marketing efforts to them. This shift alone will dramatically reduce the amount of time you spend marketing and eliminate a lot of the chaos normally associated with marketing. At the same time, if you restructure your marketing to focus on this critical principle, youll also make a lot more money with a lot less effort. The other key point is that you must commit to systematically offering more products and services to your customers on a consistent schedule. Now, youll also be offering your low -cost entry product to your prospect list in an effort to convert more of them to paying customers, but this is easy to do and it isnt where the real money is in your business. The real money in any business is always in repeat sales to satisfied customers. Those sales are easier to make, cost next to nothing because theyre already on your list, and produce the majority of the profit and growth for your business. So lets examine the types of products youll want to be offering to your customers on a regularly scheduled basis. This brings us to an important point that you may want to make note of. In keeping with the driving philosophy of selling more products to your existing customers, you want to design products that are specifically constructed to do this. So the goal here is to create product/service offerings that can be serialized or sold on a continuity basis. Some examples of standard continuity programs are those based on a membership. That membership can be limited to a specific length of time or be open ended.
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For example, in what I call soft continuity you may offer a series of webinars on a specific topic once each month for a period of 12 months. In its simplest form, people sign up for the entire series and get billed monthly for that particular webinar. You could also do mix-and-match offers where people can pay a flat rate for packages of 3, 6 or all 12 webinars. Either way, youre locking in multiple sales to the same customers. Heres an example of how I recently used this soft continuity model. I started by selling a low cost product on the 3 types of subject lines that can increase your open rate by 70%. This was followed by an offer for a series of mini-courses on writing email copy, writing sales letter copy, writing copy for web pages, creating better offers, selling directly from email, and more. Each of these mini-courses was priced at two payments of $97 each, which is in the low to mid-range for my particular market. Customers could enroll in as many or as few as they wanted. Thats why I call this soft continuity. It means that theres more flexibility than standard continuity where customers are forced into an entire series, but it still produces multiple sales to each customer. By serializing my product offering this way, sales far exceeded what Id make if each program was offered alone. And I locked in regular, recurring billings for a number of months with each customer. An example of an open ended form of continuity (the standard method most companies use) is a membership site offering content on a specific topic. Customers are automatically billed the monthly membership fee each month until they cancel their membership. This can lock in sales for years on end. In addition, those customers who stay with you for longer periods of time are also far more likely to buy more and more and at higher prices. So you can use this knowledge to create and offer products and services tailored to these raving fans needs. Ive published a number of newsletters over the years, which are really a form of month ly continuity. Let me tell you, its a great feeling to know that you have tens of thousands of dollars coming in each month like clockwork and that you can rely on this for as long as you keep adding members to your continuity program. Whatever form of it takes, I cant emphasize strongly enough the immense value of focusing on making serial sales to your core list of paying customers. Theres nothing that will grow your bottom line quicker and more consistently.
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Services The guidelines for selling your services are even simpler. For the sake of this discussion, youre going to sell your services primarily to your paying customers. Heres why. Customers who have bought one of your low-priced products perform almost no differently than customers who have bought a higher-priced product or service. In study after study, the determining factor in selling a higher-priced product or service was the fact that a customer had already bought something from you. And it almost didnt matter what the price was of that first sale. You see, whenever you sell a customer any product or service and then over-deliver on your promise, you immediately establish a bond of trust with that customer. And its this bond of trust that makes the critical difference in making additional sales not the cost of the next product or service youre selling. Since services tend to have a higher price tag then products, it makes sense that it will be pretty difficult to sell them as your first offering to a prospect who has never bought from you before. Heres another great side-benefit of using the Marketing Ladder methodology. Once youve added enough paying customers to your list (again, by selling them a low-cost, entry level product), you can then cherry-pick which clients you decide to offer your services to and work with. In fact, youll start to see a pattern of these paying customers approaching you about your services and not having to do as much marketing. When you reach this level, you can now carefully choose who you decide to work with. For example, in my business, when were doing project work with clients, we turn down any projects that wont be worth a minimum of $50,000 to my business. Since it takes about the same amount of time to service a lower-priced project as it does to service a higher-priced project, you make a lot more money when you have the ability to pick and choose who you accept as a client. That isnt to say that we dont sometimes work with clients who have smaller projects. For example, if a client offers a product or service we think would be of greater good to society, then we may choose to work with them. But the real point is that you now have the ability to pick exactly who youd like to work with and this gives you far more control over your financial future.
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The Big Aha how to think strategically about your marketing, eliminate marketing chaos, lock in more sales and guaranteed growth, and work substantially fewer hours while making a lot more money
Whew, that sentence is quite a mouthful! But the thing is all of this is true. Most marketing is frenzied and chaotic. Most of it is very ineffective. And because there are so many possible ways to market and the majority of them are very time-consuming, marketing practically becomes a second career. But thats not the way it should be. And it will no longer be that way once you get the Big Aha. In fact, as soon as you begin to think strategically and really get this, your marketing will begin to transform into a simple orderly process that produces consistent growth of your sales and profits on a reliable basis. So just what is this Big Aha? Simply this by applying the Marketing Ladder methodology, all components of your marketing now fit together seamlessly into a cohesive, highly effective system. Instead of having dozens of highly demanding components that dont communicate with each other or work towards a common good, by systemizing your marketing, everything now works together in concert to produce the results you really want. There are fewer working parts each part does the job of what multiple, complex parts used to do for you and they do it on a more orderly basis where everything is essentially the same all the time. So all the guess work is removed from your marketing. All the gambling is replaced with a simple, powerful system that works month-in and month-out like clock work. The net result is an easy to implement and manage system that always produces reliable sales and growth. And I can promise you this once you get the Big Aha and systemize your marketing, youll wonder how you ever survived all the chaos and sleepless nights tha t are the direct result of chaotic, ineffective marketing.
Step 1 Generate Traffic The exact prospecting system my team and I use in my business to generate high-quality leads who will quickly convert to that first small sale Examples of two actual bait pieces we use to attract prospects along with templates for creating similar pieces of your own. Each is used differently and include powerful trigger mechanisms to maximize the number of prospects who join your list. Recommendations for list software for building and managing your list Prospecting emails and physical mailing pieces to use for building your list. Includes examples and templates for the exact pieces I use in my own business. Vendor recommendations for renting high-performing email and direct mail lists List hygiene how and when to purge non-responsive prospects from your list The MLB List Swap formula. Everything you need to get companies with lists of your ideal customers to promote your bait piece to their lists.
Step 2 Sell multiple products and services to your buyers list How to quickly create low-cost products packed with immense value that make it easy to get your initial sale How to design and create mid-price and high-price serial products and serial services that lock in multiple, repeat sales from each client Step-by-step templates for the marketing pieces youll use to sell your products and services BONUS #1: How to create and deliver group training services. This is one of the most effective ways to leverage your time and substantially increase your profits. Bonus #2: The concentric circle method for expanding into other highly profitable markets. Once youve created your Marketing Ladder system, youll have more free time to devote to expanding into other markets. Ill show you an accurate, highly effective way to identify the best markets to expand into and leverage your track record to quickly gain significant market share.
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Step 3 Sell the right product and service types Guidelines for product segregation how to develop highly targeted products and services for prospects and for paying customers How to conduct simple, shirt-sleeve research to identify the ideal products and services for each segment of your market Structuring and matching low-cost, mid-priced and high-priced products and services for each rung of your Marketing Ladder. This is one of the simplest, yet most powerful methods of increasing your sales and reducing the time you devote to marketing. Cherry picking the best clients to sell your services to. How to use my simple process to identify and market your services to those clients whose projects are worth 3 to 10 times more than other projects. Why not make more money for the same amount of time and effort? The Big Aha your step-by-step formula for organizing everything into a simple, repeatable system that runs automatically, whether youre in your office, at home, out playing golf, or on vacation. Dont forget, in addition to helping you increase your sales and profits, the other key goal of The Marketing Ladder methodology is to eliminate the chaos normally associated with marketing and lock in more sales and guaranteed growth while working substantially fewer hours. To achieve this, youll get thorough training in how to build and implement your Marketing Ladder system that works with practically no intervention at all. Once youve built the system, instead of constantly struggling to make things work, youll now be able to reliably repeat your success with just a couple hours of fine tuning each month. Bonus #3: The drip upgrade methodology for rapidly moving non-paying prospects to buyers of mid to high-priced products and services. This is to be used sparingly, but at the right times it can add substantial sales to your bottom line. Bonus #4: The reproducibility trigger to build into almost every consulting or coaching service you offer. By applying this properly, each project can quickly be turned into multiple projects. Includes a case study of how the reproducibility trigger was used with one of my clients to turn a single project into 18 projects.
Coaching and Support Ongoing support and personal coaching services provided directly by me. This includes monthly coaching calls and direct email access to me by my private email address. 18
Direct telephone access to me in case you have an emergency that you need help with Bonus #5: Ride along and concurrent development of your Marketing Ladder system as I develop a new version of the system for my own business. My team and I are about to design and implement a new division of my business driven entirely by the Marketing Ladder methodology. Along with the training materials for each component of the system, youll be able to watch over my shoulder and see exactly how my team implements the system in real time. This practical, real world view works like nothing else to accelerate your success in developing your own system at the same time.
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