MINUTE BY MINUTE MARKETING, OR HOW TO MAKE MONEY FASTER USING E-MAIL TO
SELL SCARCITY
by Dr. Jeffrey Lant
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The advent of e-mail has changed marketing forever. People who understand this, and know how to use e-
mail, are already making money in the dawning Golden Age of Marketing. The rest of the pack is still
trying to make a buck the old fashioned way, which is harder and harder to do.
Consider this common scenario. Say you sell a service, any service. Your "marketing" consists of
. developing a brochure
. renting or otherwise assembling a mailing list
. mailing the marketing communications out, then
. sitting by the phone, waiting for it to ring.
Phone doesn't ring often enough? Why, then, repeat the entire process again...
. purchasing more brochures (or maybe designing a different one altogether)
. renting still more names
. paying to mail the whole package out again, and, yes,
. sitting by the phone, waiting for it to ring!
Does this just about sum up what you're doing!
Well, friend, this may have been acceptable a few years ago, but now doing this is just plain dumb.
With E-Mail The New Day In Marketing Dawned
E-mail, or electronic mail, has changed everything. With e-mail you pay a basic monthly access charge
(ranging from $10-$30) and can send UNLIMITED messages. Say your access charge is $29.95 a month. If
you send one message, it's $29.95. If you send 10,000 messages, it's $29.95. In other words, the exact
opposite of traditional marketing where if you send one letter the postage cost is 32 cents and if you send
10,000 (with bulk mail) it would be over $20,000. And that's just the cost of postage! This transformation
means you cannot approach the business of marketing the same way. If you do, you lose.
Because there is no additional cost sending thousands of messages, instead of hundreds, you're now in a
position to speed up the entire marketing process and to maximize its profitability by
1) selling scarcity and
2) hitting the prospect sufficiently often to motivate faster action.
Again, think back to the kind of traditional marketing now practiced in most businesses.
Let's say that the business sells lawnmowers. They want to sell these lawnmowers in May. Ordinarily, they
might develop a circular and send it out once. If the lawnmowers sell, fine; if they don't, that's life.
Ordinarily it's just too expensive to develop another circular and send it out.
E-mail marketing changes all this.
Key Factors In E-Mail Marketing
E-mail marketing starts from the proposition that everything that is being sold is limited and that the game
(for that's precisely what it is) is to motivate a sufficient number of people to act within a designated period
of time to acquire the limited number of goods and services available. The key is letting the designated
market know that the supply of goods and services is dwindling so as to maintain the pressure on prospects
to make a decision.
Savvy e-mail marketers know that prospects are more likely to move if something they want is running
out... than if they think there's an unlimited supply of it.
Problem is, most marketers act like they have that unlimited supply, though in absolutely no case is this
true. If you're an interior decorator you can only take on so many jobs at a time... if you're selling wine,
there are only so many bottles of any given vintage.... if you're selling a card deck (like I do), there can only
be so many advertisers per issue. In other words, in every single case, product and service are limited. It's
just that with traditional marketing, the cost of letting prospects know the dwindling nature of supply has
been generally prohibitive. Now that's just not true.
The All Important E-Mail Address
The key to profitable e-mail marketing is developing a house e-mail list by getting e-mail addresses. Let me
start by making it absolutely clear that I am NOT talking about bulk e-mail here. That is, where you
purchase a list of e-mail addresses stripped off the Internet; addresses of people who don't know you and
haven't asked for your information. Bulk e-mail is invasive and highly controversial. Whether it is illegal or
not is still for the courts to determine. Developing and using a house e-mail list is an entirely different
animal. Here your prospects have given you permission to contact them via e-mail.
Because of the critical importance of the actual e-mail address, you need to be creative in getting it. Here
are just a few ways to do so:
. ask every prospect. When you speak to people, be sure to get their e-mail addresses. The more you do this,
the more you'll find people having one. What's more, the younger your audience, the more likely they are to
have e-mail. Within a few years, e-mail will be as common as the telephone.
. put your e-mail address on everything you distribute. As people communicate with you, capture their e-
mail addresses.
. offer a specific benefit for giving you an e-mail address. One effective, inexpensive way of motivating
people to provide you with their e-mail address is to give them a free report containing lots of useful
information in your field. This report, of course, should also contain some of your best offers as well as
basic information about your business. In other words, it should be informational AND sell, too.
. make sure to include a guest-book in your web site, so that you can collect the e-mail addresses of
everyone stopping by.
You get the idea. The key is to make it easy and in the prospect's interest to give you this vital e-mail
information.
Proper Storage For E-Mail Addresses
Just the other day I talked to a publisher I know who told me he keeps all his e-mail addresses in a box. I
was shocked! The place for an e-mail address is on your house e-mail list or lists.
At the beginning, store the data in the "favorites" area of your e-mail program. If you're using a popular
program like Eudora Light that's easy to do. The names are listed in alphabetical order. Having one list
might seem inconvenient, but at the beginning you can pick and choose which names get which message.
This makes target marketing very easy.
As your list grows, you will find it more convenient to create multiple lists, such as prospects, buyers,
buyers of specific items, etc. There are several inexpensive programs you can easily download for free off
the Internet. Go to Yahoo or another major search engine and type in "email software". You'll find
hundreds of email software programs to chose from. One good shareware program is WWMail. You can
download a copy from http://www.wizardware.com. The cost to receive the registered version is $39.95.
The important thing is that you log every piece of e-mail data as you receive it.
Use These Data Immediately
Data can only make you money when they're used. Thus, start using them immediately.
Within literally minutes of giving you e-mail data, the person providing it should hear from you. To make
this work, you need a series of templates about what you sell.
Key Components Of Successful Templates
Templates work when they contain certain key marketing components:
. benefits
. complete product/service descriptions
. testimonials and
. offers.
Let's look briefly at each.
-- Benefits
People want to know what they get when using the product/service being sold. It's your job to tell them.
Whatever your marketing communication, traditional or e-mail, you must "lead with benefits, follow with
features." That means, starting with your most motivating benefit first, the thing that will most transform
the life of the prospect. Then follow with the second most important benefit, then the third, etc. In
marketing you never lead up to the main point, you always start with that point.
-- Complete Product/Service Descriptions
What, precisely, are you selling? Don't leave the prospect in doubt. One of the major benefits of e-mail is
length. In traditional marketing, you pay more for sending more. That's not true in e-mail. Thus, make sure
to give the prospect what he wants... complete details about what you're selling.
-- Testimonials
Quote the benefits received by real people who have used the product/service. What results did they get?
What did they have to do to get them? All people want to know just what kinds of benefits they can expect
to receive from the product/service. Testimonials let them know, in the words of real people, people willing
to stand up and say, "Look at what I got!"
-- Offer
An offer is a proposition designed to stimulate faster response. "If you act now, you will get this thing that
you will not get if you do not take immediate action." Offers are always important in sales, precisely
because they get the prospect to stop in his tracks and take a good long look at what's being sold. Offers in
e-mail are absolutely vital. The entire thrust of e-mail marketing, and its fast moving minute-by-minute
marketing subset, is to stimulate the fastest possible action. Offers do just that... which means when you
seriously want to market by e-mail what you send must always be distinguished by the most client-centered
offer you can come up with.
Thus, never just send out information... always e-mail an offer that rewards immediate action.
Personalizing Your Template
Just before sending your template, personalize it with a short note at the top of the form, thus "Bill, given
the fact that you cannot meet until after 5, I'd be more than happy to schedule an appointment then at your
convenience. Here's the information I promised you. I'll call you tomorrow to see just when it will be
convenient to get together."
Follow Up Appropriately
Your job is to keep control of the marketing process. If you need an appointment with the prospect to move
to the sale, gather all the information you need and let the prospect know you'll be calling her!
If the prospect buys directly from the information you've sent him, then don't just acknowledge the
purchase by e-mail, send additional information designed to stimulate another purchase. Once a prospect
purchases, you have a glimpse into what really interests him. Make an offer so that he'll want to purchase
other, related goods and services NOW!
If the prospect doesn't buy, send out another message in 48 hours, asking where the prospect stands on what
you've sent. Is there anything else she needs to make a decision? In other words, use e-mail to keep yourself
and your offer squarely before the prospect at all times. Never leave the game in the prospect's hands.
When you've got e-mail you're the captain of the ship, sitting at your console, keeping all the marketing
reins in your hand, sending out both introductory and follow-up messages at a brisk pace, always reminding
prospects of the benefits, never letting them forget that you have these benefits to distribute... if only they
take action NOW to acquire them!
Full Speed Ahead: Minute By Minute Marketing
Now you're ready to be introduced to the highest form of e-mail marketing, what I call "Minute by Minute"
Marketing. Here you determine how many units of products/service you have to sell in what period of time;
in other words, you set the objective. You then develop all the templates you're going to need, including
both your introductory message and follow-up communications. In other words, you plan before you
execute. This means understanding that while some people will buy from the first communication... most
people will not. Either way you must be ready.
Say that you're selling discount cruises. You have 29 of them in inventory. Your introductory e-mail
communication makes the benefits clear, provides a smashing client-centered offer, AND lets prospects
know just how many there are.
Send this offer to your entire list. Given the nature of your offer, you may well get responses within
minutes of the transmission hitting. Indeed, one of the first things you'll notice about e-mail marketing is its
quite astonishing speed. Whereas traditional marketing could take days, even weeks, to generate response,
with e-mail marketing, you get responses within hours, or even minutes.
Obviously you'll do what's necessary to sell as much of your existing inventory as possible. This means
attending to your prospects promptly, taking their questions, moving them to an immediate sale -- in other
words, looking sharp and staying on top of the situation. You're not just doing this, of course, to make that
immediate sale... you're doing it to lower the available inventory and so increase the pressure on prospects
that comes from dwindling inventory.
Crucially, this dwindling inventory, and increasing pressure to act, must be communicated to your
prospects as soon as possible.
Thus, have you sold one or two units within a couple of hours? Why, then, send out your second e-mail
transmission to the remaining prospects saying so; (note: make sure people who have already bought the
item are deleted from subsequent prospect mailings). These people must understand how popular your
products/services are... how quickly they're moving... and so understand that if they snooze, they lose.
Note: your second transmission need only be the first appropriately modified with the new information on
the top about how many units have been sold, how many remain. In other words, you don't have to develop
an entirely new communication.
Someone Will Complain
As you increase the number of transmissions, you're virtually certain to get a growling response back from
someone, someone who say "Don't call me. I'll call you," or worse. Shrug it off. Marketing is and always
will be to a considerable extent a numbers game. You are not going to be loved by all the people, so not to
worry. The objective, remember, is to reach your objective. If a few people along the way complain, why,
that's just to be expected. Simply tell them you'll be deleting them from your list and that, sadly, this means
they won't be receiving advance information about your specials anymore. Whoa! That's not what they
wanted! You'll find under these circumstances that many of the complainers will stay put, on the off chance
that they'll want the next special coming down the line.
Last Words
I've been experimenting with "minute by minute" marketing now for sometime, particularly selling cards in
my quarterly card deck. During the critical two weeks in every sales cycle when the bulk of the deck gets
filled, I send out 5 e-mail marketing messages a week to the same targeted prospects, often more. Not even
1% of those receiving my very punchy, pointed and pushing sales messages say, "Quit it!" More
importantly, this focused e-mail selling fills my deck faster, with fewer problems, and more cash. In short,
I'm never going to stop using these techniques. They just work too well! As you'll see for yourself as soon
as you start implementing them.
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Resource Box
Internationally renowned marketer Dr. Jeffrey Lant is proprietor of the quarterly 100,000 circulation Sales
& Marketing Success Card Deck. For information use 24-hour fax on demand (403) 425-6049, document
#3; e-mail drjlant@worldprofit.com or call (617) 547-6372. He is also co-proprietor of the 10 Worldprofit
Malls at www.worldprofit.com, now receiving over 5 MILLION visits a year. For details on having
Worldprofit host your web site or link your web site to the Malls, get a banner ad or your own domain, e-
mail webmaster@worldprofit.com, fax on demand doc #1, or call (403) 425-2466. Also visit
worldprofit.com/advertise. Call (617) 547-6372 for a free subscription to Dr. Lant's quarterly Sure-Fire
Business Success Catalog.