Your Assumptions Need To Always Be Challenged By Your Market

Prices are prime place to test your assumptions. Jay  Abraham talks about how in the newsletter business that $69 dollars out pulled $89, $109 and $59 by 300%. That’s a major difference. By testing their pricing assumption not only did they get more first time customers but since they also had a killer back end, they got more people going through their back end buying even more stuff from them. One way of greeting people walking through the doors of a big chain furniture store, out of 33 tested, tripled the closing ratio. Tripled. What was said? The normal way people are greeted when walking into a furniture store is, “Can I help you find anything?” and the normal kneejerk reaction is, “No. I’m okay” because either the person is just browsing or they know exactly what they want and where it is. The winning furniture store greeting was . . . “And what ad brought you into the store today?” This worked so well because it implied the person came in for something specifically and in this context, the power shifts from the prospect to the salesperson. It implies the customer is there to buy. When the prospect said what part of the advertisement brought them in, the salesperson could start asking probing and qualifying questions. Headlines, or their equivalent – subject lines, banner ads, first thing said to someone when they walk into a store or talk to them on the phone, your descriptions on your catalogs, etc. – can be as much as 21 times different in their effectiveness. This reminds you of the Jay Abraham headline that beat “2/3 Bank Financing On Silver And Gold” which had been working very well for the company using it. Jay told them this was a weak headline and got them to test a few that he spent 30 minutes putting together. With only changing the headline, leaving all the body copy the same, to . . . “If Gold Is Selling For $300 an Ounce, Send Us Just $100 and We’ll Buy You All The Gold You Want.” And he did the same variation for silver. And they sold 5 times the silver and gold than any of the other previous ads did. **You Need To Give Concise Reasons Why People Should or Shouldn’t Do Something** When you’re asking people for money or to do anything at all, you’ll get them to comply at a vastly higher level when you lay out a solid reason why it’d be a benefit to them to do what you’re asking them to do. A lack in response doesn’t always correlate to a lack of need in the prospect. It has to do with your lack of fulfilling the need with solid reason why they need this option NOW to service their need. Using Celebrity Endorsements To Cash In One company Jay worked with sold a cassette series called “Where There’s a Will, There’s an A” and it was dedicated to helping kids get better grades in school. It wasn’t selling that well. They brought John Ritter in to be spokesperson for the product and they tripled the number of cassettes sold with no other change to the marketing or the product. Another client of Jay’s who did newsletters for entrepreneurs was getting his ass kicked. They tested out a letter coming from Tom Bosley – the dad from Happy Days – and just with his picture, name and signature on the letter they increased their yield by 40%. There are tons of yester-year or C level celebrities that you can rent for pretty cheap. A lot of them will let you test their endorsement for a small mailing to see how lathered up people get about seeing their name on your piece before you full out rent them for your promotion. Maximizing Entrepreneur Magazine So when Entrepreneur Magazine started, it was more like a newsletter that cost a $100 dollars a year to get. What the content of the magazine was in essence a start up manual for the best emerging small businesses of the time – salad bars, tune up shops, sandwich shops, etc. So they had all these back issues that people subscribing today couldn’t benefit from. They took all their archives and added boiler plate material to them and classified them as Start Up Manuals and sold them for $39 dollars each. They started looking at the business in a different way seeing the sales of memberships as being necessary to cover the overhead of producing the reports. This led to them having to market for new memberships AND having to market reports to the members. And all the profit in their business was in the upsell. Then Jay told them to start selling the reports beyond their customer list. Next, Jay categorized all the reports by low-investment businesses, automotive related business opportunities, low risk businesses, high earning potential businesses, etc. and they sold those for a couple hundred dollars apiece. Another interesting thing he was trade ad space in the magazine for all their inventory of the product they sold. At the time, Entrepreneur could claim to be the most expensive magazine because they had a $20 dollar per issue value. This allowed Jay to price the advertising for magazine exorbitantly high and no one bought it. But he didn’t want anyone to buy it. Instead he wanted to trade ads in their magazine for the inventory they needed to make their tapes and books. This allowed for all their information products to be 100% profit for 5-6 pages of advertising in the magazine. What you believe should work doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is what prospects respond favorably to.]]>

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