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Virtual Marketing in a Tangible World
One of the greatest challenges facing business
owners and managers is finding a way to cost-effectively
communicate frequently and consistently with their
target markets.
It is nearly impossible to profitably hire enough people to
personally maintain frequent and regular contact
with your existing clients, let alone profitably seek new clients.
If you company grows in size or becomes busy, at some
point a few (if not significant numbers) of your clients
and prospects will fall through the cracks. It's
inevitable. Especially if you are using human beings to
try and stay in touch one-on-one with each client.
Even companies with deep pockets have found that trying
to hiring enough people to communicate
monthly, weekly, and in some cases daily with all
of the clients within the organization is just plain ludicrous.
The high cost of human-to-human contact makes it
impractical to attempt to implement a steady stream of
consistent personal communications with every lead,
client, or prospect who's come in contact with your business at some point.
A common solution is to set aside a certain number of
clients, the cream of the crop in profit potential, and regularly communicate with
them, while forgetting the remaining clients. It
becomes a game of economics. The problem is, these
neglected masses of clients often make up 80% or more of
a company's income. So isolating them from
communications can be a big mistake.
There is a better way. Due to the internet, regular communication
with ALL of your clients and prospects is now possible.
No one needs to fall through the cracks. The
internet makes it possible to maintain regular contact while at the same
offering additional valuable services. Internet
eCourses and Webinars in place of in-person courses and
seminars has proven profitable for many companies.
Electronic seminars (eSeminars) are similar to real
seminars or real courses that you attend at a local
college or meeting facility.
Just like real courses you have a fixed term or time
period in which to complete the course, and a fixed
subject to discuss.
For example let's say you sell automobiles and you want
to maintain regular communications with your automobile
buyers.
What you could do is conduct an electronic seminar every
month which discusses a new facet of maintaining the
vehicle or informs the course participant of new
developments in the industry that may affect them and
that they may be concerned with.
The purpose of the eCourse is not only to provide a
valuable service by keeping your clients educated, but
to insure that they remember you now and into the future
when they are ready to buy again or refer business to
you.
The more contact you maintain the less likely they are
to forget you. The less contact you maintain the more
likely they are to forget you :(
A side benefit to regular communications is that within
your course you can refer to other products or services
that you offer, provided the discussion remains within
the theme of the electronic course.
If your course drops into hard selling or hucksterism
then most people will drop out of your course or add
your email address to their spam filters.
That’s bad!
So keep the discussion centered on topics that are of
real value to your course participants and they will
remain with you for as long as the course continues.
These virtual seminars eliminate most, if not all, costs
ordinarily associated with communicating with clients on
a regular basis.
You can now afford to reach all clients, not only those
considered to be ideal.
This is possible because your electronic messages will
be available online 24 hours, seven days a week--without
the need for any employees to maintain the contact.
Now don't get me wrong I’m not saying that the Internet
can completely replace people, especially in areas where
high personal contact is necessary. I’d forego a virtual
handshake for a real one any day. However the strength of the Internet is such that it can
decrease the common costs associated with communicating
to large numbers of people on a consistent and regular
basis.
This is important because the more frequently you
communicate with your target market the greater the
chance of their remembering you, and the greater chance
of their buying from you again in the future.
Even if they don’t buy from you right away,
communicating regularly helps maintain the relationship
you worked so hard to build. You're able to eliminate losing your clients to your
competitors as a result of letting even one person slip
through the cracks.
To keep things simple communicate your electronic course
or electronic seminar via email. Though MS outlook or
other email client could do the trick, I don’t recommend
that.
The workload of conducting an eCourse with hundreds or
thousands of clients via a normal email client would be
tremendous. It could easily become a full-time job to
send messages, subscribe members, unsubscribe members,
avoid sending duplicate messages, and so on.
Doing all that 'junk' via email is completely unnecessary.
Sure, there are several stand-alone programs that are designed
specifically for electronic courses. However I do not
recommend any of them.
This is because you can simply accomplish exactly the
same thing by using an inexpensive remotely hosted autoresponder instead
of spending several hundred (or thousand) dollars on
autoresponder
software programs that run on your own computer.
A better solution for operating your own ecourses is to
use remotely hosted autoresponder service like
aweber.
Aweber
handles all subscribe and unsubscribe requests for you.
Using a remotely hosted autoresponder is ideal for conducting eCourses because
once the autoresponder is setup it requires no daily
maintenance from you. Ever. You set it and forget it.
Software that you run on your computer however requires you to
start the software daily, import and export contact info
of subscribers, process subscribe requests, process
unsubscribe requests and other general daily maintenance
tasks. and then there's always the risk that a hard
drive might fail, virus attack, or some other hassle
that ruins your data. I'm speaking from experience on
this one. I have more than a dozen dead hard drives on
the shelf near me. Each has died, taking critical data
along to hard drive 'heaven' with them.
A real drag. You are protected from losing your data
when you use a remotely hosted autoresponder service
such as aweber.
And the nice thing is, you can load a series of
sequential lessons or messages into your autoresponder,
set the frequency of communication whether that be
daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly and sit back and
let your messages get communicated to your market.
Your autoresponder handles all the tedious tasks for
you.
The beauty of this is that whether you're communicating
with one person or one million, the daily workload to
communicate with the course participants is exactly the
same.
Zero.
Another way that you can implement eCourses or eSeminars
is to tie your autoresponder messages in with multimedia
formats like MP3 files, flash animation, and even live
video.
You simply preload your autoresponder with instructions
on where to access the next lesson, set it and forget
it.
Each day, week, month, or quarter your course
participants will receive instructions and you will
maintain regular communications with them. All on
autopilot. This is a win/win for everyone.
The choice to use email, flash, streaming audio or video
is best decided upon your circumstances and your
technical ability.
I strongly recommend keeping things simple though. Stick to
email autoresponders.
However if you hate typing then
at the very least record the information with an audio
recorder such as All Sound Recorder. Upload the audio
recording and use your autoresponder to inform your
clients and prospects that the information is available
for download.
That way you communicate the same information with less
typing involved. The downside is that multimedia
files will increase your monthly bandwidth significantly
compared to sending a text-only email. If you have tens
of thousands or millions of clients and prospects
downloading your multimedia files, you might want to stick to simple
text-only email eCourses. Take full advantage of all the virtual
marketing tools available so you can gain tangible assets you can deposit into
your bank account while at the same time continue to provide valuable
information to your market, remain in touch with them, all while keeping your
life as simple and stress-free as possible.
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Andre
Bell