By
Robert W. Bly
What’s
working in Web sites for newsletter subscriptions and other information
products? Here are a dozen quick observations:
1. Provide links to the order form early and often. Marc Stockman of
TheStreet.com says that placing links to order forms at the top of a
landing
page increases response. He also puts the “call to action” link
throughout a
landing page, not just at the end and the beginning.
2. Use a dedicated microsite to sell directly off the Web
page. Yanik
Silver, Fred Gleeck, Mark Joyner, Terry Dean, and other successful
online
information marketers use dedicated microsites to sell e-books and
other
information products.
Unlike traditional
sites, with lots of free content and navigation
capabilities and varied sections, microsites are basically a strong
sales
letter set up as a Web site. The only place the reader can click to is
an order
form for the product. For an example, see
www.surefirecustomerservicetechniques.com,
a microsite Mark Joyner did for my e-book on customer service.
3. Personalization sells. When you go to
www.trashproofnewsreleases.com, another Joyner site -- this one on
public
relations -- you are asked to enter your name. Then the Web site comes
up with
your name in the headline, “Joe Jones Will Be in the News in 45 Days or
Less --
Guaranteed” -- a clever and effective use of personalization.
4. Establish credibility up front. Yanik
Silver, a successful online information marketer, observes that
consumer
skepticism online is even higher than offline. Therefore, you need to
quickly
build credibility. On Yanik’s microsite www.instantsalesletters.com, he
leads
with three testimonials -- and a link to dozens more -- before he even
gets to
the first word of his headline.
5. Offer a free e-zine. The most
profitable model in online subscription marketing is to build an e-list
of
subscribers to a free online electronic newsletter, or e-zine, and then
promote
to that list. The alternative -- e-mailing to rented e-lists of opt-in
names to
acquire new subscribers -- has met with extremely limited success.
Your marketing Web site should have a prominent box for e-zine sign-up; see www.dailyreckoning.com for an example. The Daily Reckoning is a free daily e-zine published by Agora, the financial newsletter publisher. They have hundreds of thousands of free e-zine subscribers to whom they market their paid subscription newsletters with great success.
If
you have a microsite to generate orders for a single offer, you may not
want to
give potential buyers an alternative to purchasing your front-end
product.
Therefore, use a window for your free e-zine offer that pops up only
after the
buyer has either ordered your paid product or is clicking away from the
microsite without ordering.
6. Combine free and paid content. An alternative to microsites are sites that combine both free and paid content.
A
good example, mentioned earlier, is TheStreet.com. Many of the articles
are
free; some are not. If you attempt to read an article that is not free,
you are
taken to a “bridge page” (also known as a “barrier page”) that explains
how you
can read the article and others like it by subscribing to a paid
service, such
as TheStreet.com’s RealMoney.
Another
example is the home page of The Bahamas
Report, www.thebahamasreport.com, a subscription newsletter about
retiring
in The Bahamas. There is a section “Islands of the Bahamas” where, when
you
click on the name of a specific island, you get a free short report on
that
island.
Below
that is a section “Recent Articles,” when you click on the article
title you
want, you are told you must subscribe to their online newsletter to
read the
article.
7. Avoid “sterile” copy. In the belief
that online users don’t read, have short attention spans, and do not
like sales
copy, many Web marketers make their sites very plain and unexciting.
“Make it
look like information, not sales hype,” some experts advise.
But
just because someone is online does not mean they don’t have to be sold
on your
product. They do -- as strongly as you sell them in print.
Terry
Dean, a successful online information marketer, packs his microsites
with copy
that reaches prospects on a personal and emotional level, not just
intellectually. The lead sentence in a microsite selling membership to
his
subscription site Net Breakthroughs reads: “In just a moment, I hope to
make
you so angry you’ll want to throw your computer right out the window.”
8. Offer a choice of monthly or annual
subscriptions. Subscription Web sites or newsletters promoted
online should
give the subscriber a choice of monthly or annual payments. Salon.com,
for
instance, allows you to subscribe monthly for $6 or take an annual
subscription
for $30. The annual fee for online subscriptions is typically 10% to
20% less
than the monthly option; Salon.com is unusual in that their annual rate
is less
than half the equivalent cost of a monthly subscription.
9. Offer free trials and strong guarantees. Guarantee
satisfaction unconditionally. E-book marketers, for instance, offer a
money-back guarantee even though the product, sent as a digital file,
is not
truly returnable -- and they know the refund requestor is going to keep
it.
Another effective offer is the 30-day free trial, where you take the
credit
card information online but tell the buyer you will not process it for
30 days
-- allowing them to try the product for a month free. (If they cancel
within
the 30-day trial period, the card is never charged.)
10. Know your numbers. A variety of services and programs are available for tracking Web site metrics; you can find some vendors at www.evendorsonline.com.
The
most important metrics are number of hits, conversion rates (percentage
of hits
who buy the product), and average size of order. From this, you can
calculate
the value of each hit.
For
instance, if your conversion rate is 1 percent and your product costs
$100, you
will make $100 in revenues for every 100 hits. If you are willing to
break even
to acquire a new customer, you can afford to pay up to $1 per hit in
marketing
costs.
11. Position your site as the premier online
resource in your topic. You can increase traffic and therefore
revenues by
positioning your site as a value-added information resource on your
subject,
not just a sales vehicle to push a paid subscription product. When you
visit
www.nanotechplanet.com, you are told you have reached “The Center for
Nanotechnology Business.” News briefs, articles, stock information, a
glossary,
FAQs, and other features reinforce that image and feeling.
12. Push your primary offer
like crazy. At
www.consumerinfo.com,
the simply designed site has one goal: to get you to accept their offer
of a
free credit report. The home page is totally focused on this offer, as
are two
pop-up windows that come up when you log onto the site. When you click
away,
two more pop-up windows again make the same offer.
About
the author:
Bob Bly is a freelance
copywriter and the author of The Complete
Idiot’s Guide to Direct Marketing (Alpha Books). He can be reached
at
201-385-1220 or at rwbly@bly.com.
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