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Qualifying Yourself as a Reliable Vendor
Marketing is a numbers game. This maxim is true, although it can be viewed from several angles. Proponents of bulk email advertising and traffic exchanges contend that if you expose your message to a vast number of people, only a small percentage of them need to become paying customers for your business to substantially grow' and they're right.
Conversely, however, if a high percentage of the people who see your message become paying customers, you only need expose your message to a small group of people to see the same increase in business. Both approaches are useful for certain products and certain marketing messages. The nearly unlimited audience of the Internet makes the volume advertising approach relatively easy to pursue. This article examines the second, comparatively subtle art of increasing your customer conversion rates.
The average computer user has become an old hand at deleting commercial emails with barely a passing glance and ignoring flashing banners as they surf the web. So you have a product that will increase their productivity, impress their friends, inspire their children, and improve their life beyond imagination; if only they knew about it. How do you tell them' Answer: don't.
You'll be much better off if they find out from an objective third party, or (better still) learn how great you are on their own. Sounds great, right' Only no objective third party knows (or cares) who you are and the only chance someone will find you on their own is if they type your URL into their browser to see if your domain name has already been taken. Every entrepreneur is in this position when starting out, and the ones who have gotten past it spent their marketing dollars developing a relationship of trust with their customers.
The practice of qualifying yourself as an expert in the field of your product, long before the audience even knows you have a product to sell, yields amazing marketing benefits. Instead of scaling the defensive walls of a wary customer whose looking for the catch, you're sharing expertise with an enthusiastic listener actively seeking information. Once your audience has discovered that you have valuable knowledge in an area, they'll want to know what products you recommend.
A classic example of this type of qualification is media coverage. You'll see a huge jump in traffic and your conversion ratio of visitors to customers if you're mentioned in ......
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