Risk Reversals - How to Get More Sales by Offering a Guarantee

One of the most powerful marketing strategies you can use to instantly increase sales is a strong guarantee. The reason why a guarantee is such a powerful sales tool is that it eliminates the risk a customer faces when doing business with you. It is like giving your customer an insurance policy to protect them against shoddy products or services.

Think about it. One of the leading reasons why people choose NOT to buy a product or service is they are worried that if the product or service sucks, they are going to lose their money and they will feel like a fool for buying it. And nobody wants to feel like a fool.

Here is an example of the power of a money back guarantee for a product. Let’s say you want to buy a puppy for your kids. Pet store “A” has several very cute puppies and they cost $250 each. Unfortunately, if you buy a puppy from pet store “A” and it turns out the puppy is sick or has a disease, it is your problem. All sales are final. No refunds or exchanges. On the other hand, pet store “B” offer several cute puppies and they offer a full money-back guarantee that states, “Take your new puppy to a veterinarian within the next 14 days and if it is sick or has a disease, you can return it and pick out a different puppy or you can have a full refund.” Now which pet store would you prefer to do business with? Pet store “A” where all sales are final or pet store “B” where you are protected? The obvious choice is pet store “B”. Pet store B is going to get the most business and will easily dominate sales over pet store B, especially if pet store “B” is smart enough to include their strong money-back guarantee in all of their advertising.

A strong money-back guarantee is also an incredibly powerful sales tool in the service industry. For example, let’s say you own a small business and you have several computers. Now computers being computers, from time to time they will have problems and you will need a computer technician to fix them. To find a computer technician, you go to the yellow pages in your phone book. There you see two ads for computer service companies. You read advertisement “A” and the company looks good, they have been in business for 5 years, they have a friendly staff, blah, blah, blah. Then you read advertisement “B”. In this ad you read that all parts and service come with a 90-day guarantee. If your computer has the same problem within 90 days after they fix it, they will come back to your office and fix it for free. Now, which company are you going to call—the company that offers no guarantee or the company that protects you with a strong guarantee? The choice is obvious.

If you want to instantly increase your sales, offer a strong guarantee and display it in all of your advertising. If your competition offers a guarantee, do everything you can to make your guarantee stronger.

For more information and a no-obligation quote on how I will help you successfully market your product or service, please call me at (920) 471-1638.

To Your Success!

Peter Geisheker, CEO
The Geisheker Group Marketing Firm
(920) 471-1638

How to Easily Get Customer Testimonials

Using customer testimonials in all of your marketing materials (sales letters, brochures, website, advertisements, etc.), is one of the most powerful marketing tools available.

The reason why testimonials are so important and valuable in marketing is that prospects are much more likely to believe a customer testimonial that praises your product or service then they are to believe slick sales text written by the company that is advertising.

Another reason why testimonials are such a powerful marketing and sales tools is that they are very similar to a referral. A testimonial is a person telling other people that they can trust your business and that you offer a quality product/service.

Now that you know how valuable customer testimonials are, you are probably wondering how you get testimonials from your customers. Here are four very easy yet highly effective strategies you can use to get customer testimonials immediately:

1. If you are a new business and you have not made any sales, let several of your friends try your product or service for free. If they honestly like it, ask them if they will write a testimonial that you can use in your marketing. This is very easy to do and should instantly get you several testimonials.

2. If you are an established business and you have made sales, call your customers and ask them what they like most about the product or service they purchased from you. As they tell you, make sure that you are writing down what they are saying. After they are finished praising your product/service, tell them, “wow, that was great! Can I use what you just said as a testimonial?” Almost always the customer will give you their permission.

3. Email your customers and say that you are developing new marketing materials and you would love to include a client testimonial from them. Then ask if they would be generous enough to help you by emailing you a brief testimonial. If you have a list of at least 100 customers, you should get at least a couple of good testimonials by doing this.

4. Mail your customers a thank you card for doing business with you. In the card say you would be very thankful if they would be generous enough to give you a testimonial by either emailing it to you, faxing it to you, or simply calling you on the phone.

By executing the above strategies, you should easily get 10+ strong customer testimonials. Then, make sure to take advantage of these testimonials and use them in ALL of your marketing. By doing this, you will instantly see an increase in response rate and sales from your marketing.

For more information and a no-obligation quote on how I will help you successfully market your product or service, please call me at (920) 471-1638.

To Your Success!

Peter Geisheker, CEO
The Geisheker Group Marketing Firm
920-471-1638

Do You Make These Common Internet Marketing Mistakes?

I have been involved in Internet marketing since the world-wide-web began and I consider myself to be an Internet marketing expert. From my experience helping clients build successful websites, I have learned what works and what does not work when selling on the Internet. To help you avoid costly mistakes, I have listed what I have found to be the biggest Internet marketing mistakes.

Mistake 1: Using Flash. If your website is one big Flash presentation, you are making a huge mistake! Why? Because consumers go to your website to seek information, not to watch a "I'm so cool" Flash presentation. Ask yourself, when you go to a website, do you sit there and watch their ego-building Flash presentation or do you click the "skip flash" link to get to the real information?

Another major problem with Flash is that it is only "interesting" the first time a visitor goes to your website. If they actually return to your website, they will do everything they can to skip your Flash presentation so they can quickly get to the information they want. In my experience NOTHING kills Internet sales more than Flash. That is why you almost never see the world's top websites like Google, AOL, MSN, and Yahoo using Flash as the basis for their web pages. If you are making this mistake, get rid of the Flash immediately and make your website a valuable source of information, because that is what consumers want.

Mistake 2: Letting your webmaster write the text for your website. This is another huge mistake that companies make. On nearly a daily basis I get a call from a company that has spent a fortune building a website and they cannot understand why they are not generating any sales. My first question is, who wrote the text for your website? In nearly every case they tell me their webmaster wrote it.

Why is it a mistake to have your webmaster write your website marketing text? Here is a hint-- webmasters are programmers, NOT marketing professional who know how to write text that sells. If you want your website to generate sales, you must hire a person who is an excellent copywriter and knows how to write words that make people want to buy! Would you hire your webmaster to write a display advertisement for you? Of course not! Then why on earth would you allow them to write the text for your website? By having your webmaster write the text for your website, you are ensuring your website will be an awful sales tool. To solve this problem, hire a marketing professional to write the text for your website. We at the Geisheker Group specialize in writing powerful marketing text for websites. For a free no-obligation quote, call us at (920) 592-9595.

Mistake 3: Making your website hard to navigate. Have you ever been to a website where you have to click on various generic graphics or parts of a flash picture to try and find a link to the information you are looking for? Why on earth do companies do this? It is not fun, it is not clever, it is STUPID AND ANNOYING! When designing your website's navigation (links to information) use the acronym K.I.S.S., which stands for KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID! Simple sells. Complex does not. If your webmaster tries to sell you on using parts of a Flash picture for links or some other complex navigation system, FIRE THEM IMMEDIATELY!

Mistake 4: Not having a telephone number on your website. People rarely trust companies that do not have a telephone number. I certainly don't. If I am considering buying a product from a website and they do not have a telephone number, I don't buy. And I know others feel the same way. For example, I have had several clients hire me because I had a telephone number on my website and the other marketing consultant websites they were looking at did not. Therefore, if you want customers to buy from you, make it easy for them to contact you by having a telephone number on your website. In fact, you should have your telephone number on EVERY page of your website.

By following these recommendations, your website will be a far more valuable sales and marketing tool.

To Your Success!

Peter Geisheker, CEO
The Geisheker Group Advertising Agency
(920) 471-1638

FREE New Rules of PR ebook

I am writing to you today because I found a great free ebook on how to market you business by posting online press releases. This ebook was written by PR expert David Meerman Scott and has some fantastic tips that I plan to start using immediately to help my clients as well as to better market my own business. I hope you enjoy it!

Download it by clicking on the following link:

http://www.marketing-consulting-company.com/New-Rules-of-PR.pdf

If you need help writing your press release, I would love to help you. Contact me today by calling (920) 471-1638.

I look forward to helping you!

Peter Geisheker, CEO
The Geisheker Group advertising agency

How to Write a Good Sales Letter

To write a good sales letter, there are several strategies you should use in every sales letter you write:

* At the top of your sales letter, use a strong headline that states the most important benefit you are offering. This headline should be bold and a larger font size than the font size you use for the body text in your sales letter. A great headline promises a specific result. For example, “If our skin care product does not make your face look 10 years younger in 30-days or less, we’ll give you a 110% refund!”

* When writing your sales letter, always use a friendly conversational style. Do not try to write “cold and corporate" where you use large words and try to impress your prospects with your vocabulary. All that does is turn people off. Instead, write your sales letter using friendly simply language as if you were talking to your best friend.

* Your sales letter needs to explain the benefits your potential customer will receive. Understand that everybody cares about one thing in life - "What’s in it for me?" Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and ask yourself, "If I was receiving this letter, why would I want to buy the product or service being sold? What’s in it for me?"

* Offer quantitative proof why your product or service is better than the competition. For examples of how to show proof that your product is better than the competition, your sales letter should make statements that you can prove such as, your widget lasts 3.7 times longer, it costs 27% less, our company offers a 90-day 100% money-back guarantee while our competitors offer no guarantee, our widget is guaranteed to last 5 years or we will replace it for free, while our competition only offers a 6-month replacement guarantee, etc.

* Include several customer testimonials to give social proof of the quality of your product or service. Testimonials are one of the most powerful marketing tools you can use, so take advantage of them and always use them in your sales letters.

* To get your prospects to take action, your sales letter must ask your customer to purchase by a specific date and give them a bonus for ordering by a specific date. For example, “Buy our widget by March 25 and get an instant 10% off”, or, “Buy our widget by March 25 and get a second widget at half price.” This strategy works like magic and that is why you see it used so often on TV, particularly in infomercials and other successful direct-response advertising.

* Use a P.S. in your letter and restate your most power benefit and sales offer in it. Most people will read a P.S. first before reading the sales letter, so it is important that your P.S. has a very strong sales message and a call to action.

* To get your sales letter opened, use a standard white business envelope and handwrite the recipient’s name and address. Yes, this takes a lot more time than using mailing labels, but mailing labels scream junk mail! The first key in a successful sales letter campaign is to get your envelope opened, and by handwriting the recipient’s name and address, you can almost guarantee that your envelope will be opened.

* Make your envelope "lumpy" by enclosing a small, inexpensive free gift. Make sure the gift has your company name and contact information on it and that the gift is something a person would want to keep - such as a nice pen, a good highlighter, etc. And, the promo gift should have your company information on it – your company name, phone number, and website address.

* Here is the most important sales letter tip: Use repetition. You will rarely have success with your sales letter campaign if you only send out one mailing. Each prospect on your contact list should be contacted a minimum of four times during a 12-month period.

As a final thought, understand that the national average response rate for sales letters is a little less than 1%. What that means is if you send out 100 letters, a good response rate is for one customer to contact you. However, one way to greatly increase your response rate is to use the tips I mentioned in this newsletter and to make follow-up calls to the contacts you sent your letters to, especially if you are marketing to businesses.

If you would like help writing a good sales letter, please call (920) 471-1638.

To Your Success!

Peter Geisheker
CEO
The Geisheker Group Marketing Firm
(920) 471-1638

The Best Way To Generate Free Targeted Website Traffic

If you have a website, you need to drive traffic to it. Without traffic, you won't make money, sales, get subscribers, etc. What good is a website without any traffic? And if the site is getting traffic, what good is it if it's not targeted traffic?

There are many ways to drive traffic to your site, both free and paid. But we are not going to talk about paid traffic right now. That is a totally different topic.

So, back to free traffic. The best way to get free traffic to your site is by implementing Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is the art and science of making Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) want to rank your website on the first page of results when a person conducts a web search. So, let's say your website sells motorcycle tires. Your goal with SEO is that when a person goes to a search engine and searches for motorcycle tires, your websites is one of the top 10 results that are displayed, and preferably, your website is one of the top 3 websites shown.

By getting your website a top 10 ranking in search engines, you will be getting your customers basically for free. And, that's a good thing! When you are not paying to advertise, your profits increase significantly because there is not marketing cost involved in acquiring them.

The tool that I have used to get my website top search engines rankings and to get my clients top search engines rankings is a software tool called SEO Elite.

SEO Elite is the top rated program for getting high rankings in the major search engines and it is the program that the world's top search engine optimization firms use to get their clients top rankings. If you are serious about getting to the top of the search engines, you need this tool.

Click here to download SEO Elite so you can get your website top search engine rankings and free website traffic.

To your success!
Peter Geisheker, CEO
The Geisheker Group Marketing Companies
(920) 471-1638

Split Testing - The Most Powerful Marketing Strategy You will EVER Learn

Every business owner is looking for that golden marketing strategy that works like magic to grow their business. Well, I hope you’re sitting down because I am going to tell you the most powerful marketing strategy you will ever learn. The strategy is called split testing.

“What the heck is split testing”, you ask? Split testing is the process of comparing the results (sales, leads, etc.) of one marketing piece against another marketing piece to see which generates the most sales. Clear as mud, right? To make split testing easier to understand, I will show you an example of split testing using direct mail sales letters.

You write 2 sales letters to sell the sales training course you are offering. Both sales letters are identical except for one thing – they each have a different headline. Sales letter “A” has the headline, “How to easily double your sales in 180 days with this little known marketing strategy” and sales letter “B” has the headline, “Learn the marketing secret twelve small businesses recently used to increase sales by over 173% in less than 180 days.” Then, you send letter “A” to 2,000 prospects and letter B to 2,000 prospects. You then track which sales letter produces the most leads and sales. The results tell you which sales letter is the stronger sales tool – letter “A” or letter “B”.

“But how do you track which sales letter is producing the most leads/sales” you ask? Easy. You add a unique key code to each letter campaign so you can track it. So, for letter campaign “A” you use the key code 111 at the bottom of each letter and for letter campaign “B” you use the key code of 222 at the bottom of each letter. When a customer calls (or places an order), you simply ask them for the key code in their sales letter. Then you track these codes in a spread sheet so you know which letter produced the lead and the sale. After a few weeks to a month, you will know which sales letter is producing the most sales and you can feel confident sending the stronger sales letter to the rest of your prospects.

“What happens if both sales letters bomb and produce poor results?” Then you write two more sales letters and test them against each other on a small scale (sales letter “C” versus “D”). Testing like this is far less expensive than sending a single, untested sales letter to tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of prospects. By split testing different messages on a small scale, you can test the pulling power of a sales message without breaking your bank. And, you learn which sales message is the one that generates sales like crazy and will grow your business. If you want to be successful in marketing, always test on a small scale and once you find a winning message, then market on a large scale. NEVER market on a large scale with an untested sales message or you will almost certainly lose a ton of money.

While testing the headline is one of the most important things you can test when testing marketing pieces against one another, you can also test things like price, ($99 per widget in letter “A” and $79 per widget in letter “B”), coupon versus no coupon, promotional specials (get 3 widgets for $197 versus get 4 widgets for $249). But the key is to only test one thing at a time. Do not test a headline in one letter against a price in another letter because you cannot compare the two. Only test a headline against a headline and a price against a price.

“This sounds like a lot of work” you say. “Explain to me again why is split testing so important because I still don’t get it?” First of all, you are right. Split testing is a lot of work. However, the reason it is so important and worth all the work is that it is the one market tool that allows you to significantly increase your marketing return on investment while greatly reducing your financial risk. Split testing allows you to determine which sales message (campaign) is producing a profitable result while eliminating marketing campaigns that are not producing profitable results. Using the sales letter example above, let’s say that the results of your split test of letter “A” versus letter “B” showed that letter “B” produced 34% more leads than sales letter “A”? Wouldn’t you rather use letter “B” for marketing to the rest of your clients instead of letter “A”? Of course! That is why you do split testing. You do it to find out what sales message is going to generate the most sales and make you the most money! So, split test your way to success.

To Your Success!

Peter Geisheker, CEO
The Geisheker Group advertising agency
920-471-1638

The Differences Between Great Marketing and Terrible Marketing

The Differences Between Great Marketing
and Terrible Marketing

by Peter Geisheker

As a marketing consultant and copywriter, I see horrible marketing everyday. The most common mistake I see is what I call, “me too marketing”.

“Me too marketing” is when a business creates a marketing piece (advertisement, brochure, sales letter, website, etc.) that looks and reads like an exact copy of their competition’s marketing. Instead of demonstrating why their product or service is unique and offers outstanding benefits, they say exactly what their competition says.

For proof of “me too marketing”, go to your phone book and look at advertising in almost any category. You can basically exchange the company names in the ads and the ads are identical. Nearly everybody is using the same dull clichés such as, “Our customers are #1”, “Serving your needs for xx years”, “Family owned”, “Best Service”, “Friendly Service”, “Great Selection”, etc. This kind of advertising is SO BORING and overused. That is why it produces such horrible results. If you want to have marketing that generates a lot of quality leads and puts you ahead of your competition, you need to be different and prove why your product or services offers the best benefits to your customer.

To make your marketing great so it consistently generates high quality leads, here is a list of the differences between great marketing and terrible marketing:

1. Great marketing includes an attention-grabbing headline that calls out to the target market and makes a benefit-based promise. Bad marketing does not include a headline and hopes that the reader will find the graphics interesting enough to read the marketing piece. Big mistake!

2. Great Marketing focuses on a powerful benefits-based sales message and promise. Bad marketing focuses on aesthetic graphic design and being “cute and creative” and using as little sales text as possible. A great sales message is a message that promises a specific result. For example, “If our skin care product does not make your face look 10 years younger in 30-days or less, we’ll give you a 110% refund!”

3. Great marketing offers quantitative proof of why a product or service is better than the competition. Bad marketing just says, “we are the best.” For examples of how to show proof that your product is better than the competition, your marketing should make statements that you can prove such as, your widget lasts 3.7 times longer, it costs 27% less, our company offers a 90-day 100% money-back guarantee while our competitors offer no guarantee, our widget is guaranteed to last 5 years or we will replace it for free, while our competition only offers a 6-month replacement guarantee, etc. You need to make your marketing promise so strong that people would have to be a fool to do business with anybody but you.

4. Great marketing uses customer testimonials to give social proof of the quality of a product or service. Bad marketing does not. How many times have you purchased something because you read a lot of customer testimonials praising the quality of the product? I know I sure have. Testimonials are one of the most powerful marketing tools you can use, so take advantage of them and use them in ALL of your marketing. You will instantly generate more sales.

5. Great marketing asks the customer to purchase by a specific date and explains step-by-step how to place an order. Bad marketing does NOT ask the customer to buy and does not have a time-limit for the offer. To make your marketing great, you must ask for the order and give a specific time-limit for taking advantage of the offer. For example, “Buy our widget by March 25 and get an instant 10% off”, or, “Buy our widget by March 25 and get a second widget at half price”. You may think this is a cliché but it works over and over. That is why you see it used so often on TV, particularly in infomercials and other direct-response advertising. I promise you that these companies would not be making these offers if it was not leading to a lot of sales and profits.

If you apply these simple strategies in your marketing, I guarantee you will see an increase in sales. Remember, fortune favors the bold.

To Your Success!

Peter Geisheker, CEO
The Geisheker Group advertising agency
(920) 471-1638

InstantBuzz by Mike Filsaime - complete garbage

An Internet Marketing Tool You Should NOT Buy

I recently purchased the product InstantBuzz by Mike Filsaime and I have to say that it is worthless. Even signing up for the free version is a waste of your time. I made the mistake of buying an upgrade and lost my money. I hope you will not make the same mistake I did.

Peter Geisheker
The Geisheker Group marketing company