The Power of Using Urgency In Your Offer

In the world of offline direct mail it has long been understood that creating urgency increases conversion rates.

Is the same true of the web?

Do expiry dates or warnings about limited supplies actually work?

And if so, is there a best way to express urgency, and are there pitfalls to avoid?

The practice of using urgency as a means to drive sales is well established in both offline and online media.

However, using urgency is a powerful promotional tool.

1. The urgency should be genuine and not simply created as a promotional gimmick.
2. Even the legitimate use of an urgent message will still be recognized as a promotional tactic.
3. The use of urgency on an offer page can be a very powerful tool, but is not something you can do all the time. If you do, you will lose credibility.

Seven ways to use direct or implied urgency in your marketing
1. Test urgency messages to your offer pages on your web site.
2. Test urgency within your shopping cart pages and other site pages where you need to encourage immediate action.
3. Test urgency messages in the subject lines of your emails and newsletters.
4. Test urgency in your customer or subscriber welcome emails. Urgency can encourage new members to become more deeply engaged in your site more quickly.
5. Test urgency in shopping cart recovery emails to drive more purchasers back to their shopping carts.
6. Test urgency in subscriber recovery emails when subscriptions expire.
7. Test urgency in your press releases and other offline marketing.


BONUS: Test urgency in your PPC and CPM advertising.

Randy Gaulding is an Visionary and Infopreneur creating mentoring programs for Internet marketing strategies and tactics.

http://www.internetmarketing202.com

Top 10 Guidelines: Successful Affiliates Programs

If you plan to implement or improve an affiliate program to increase the overall ROI of your marketing efforts, keep in mind that many affiliate programs fail. And they fail because companies do not invest enough time and resources, research and program management.

Top 10 Guidelines:

1. Commit to allocating sufficient resources;
2. Invest in a program for in-house solution or invest with a established provider;
3. When launching an affiliate program, give yourself a 12 month breakeven window;
4. While programs make huge revenues with tens of thousands of affiliates, other achieve the same results with a few strong partners;
5. Treat your top affiliates as valued strategic partners;
6. Be generous with your commissions;
7. Provide your affiliates with marketing tools;
8. Give affiliates access to reporting tools;
9. Be open to special request;
10. Listen carefully to top affiliates.

Randy Gaulding is a Visionary and Infopreneur creating One-on-One mentoring programs for Internet Strategies and Tactics.

http://www.internetmarketing202.com

Blogs, Podcast and RSS - What is this stuff?

I was watching TV the other night and caught the MAC/PC commercial. Altogether I think the commercial is interesting to watch, I was drawn to the statement that the MAC was fun for pictures and podcasting, and the PC stated it was fun also, using spreadsheets and graphs.

Since Apple help start this whole swing towards Blogs,Podcasting and VideoCasting, they are now stating to use these terms in their commercials. I think that more people are more familiar with these terms. If you didn't know this, TV commercials are for 25-35 year olds.

Also I am seeing, that at the end of the local news broadcast, they mention to download the stations podcast of the news report.

I work with entrepreneurs in creating strategies and tactics for using the Internet. Over the last 2 years I have seen a large move towards the use of Blogs, Podcasting and VideoCasting.

The reason these three are tied together, it is because they use the same software structure that allows the ease of frequent updating. If you have ever tried to update a website, this is a breeze.

If these are easy to product, update and promote, why not start using them for businesses?

And part of the hoopla, about these three methods, is creating new content on the Internet.

If we spend time in creating new content, what will we do with it? Thus RSS Feeds.

Many of us will stop at this point because what is RSS and why does it seem so hard to understand?

Don't stop.

What is RSS? I like to think of it as when I was a boy and had a newspaper route, I only delivered the paper to those who requested the newspaper. The other houses, I passed by.

RSS Feeds acts the same way. You request the information to be sent to you directly when they publish a new "newspaper".

There is some technology to understand behind RSS Feeds, but that was the simplest form of explaining this technology.

The use of Blogs, Podcasting and VideoCasting has moved pass the original environment of using iPods and downloading music from iTunes.

Individuals and businesses are now using Blogs, Podcasting and VideoCasting in promoting product and services. They are now part of their strategic marketing.

These three methods are food for the Internet hungry monster.

The Internet hungry monster likes to feed on new content and because Blogs, Podcasting and VideoCasting ALWAYS generates new food, the Internet monster will always come back to see what cookies were left to be eaten.

If you are looking to pull traffic to your site, constantly have search engines indexing your site and also use what is working in Internet marketing, look into Blogs, Podcasting and Videocasting.

I have announced a Podasting on Internet Marketing. More information go to:
http://www.infopreneur-you.com/wpblog



See, I want to feed the Internet monster.