Making Your First Million.pdf - Association of Net Entrepreneurs and ...

Making Your First Million
Chapter 16 - Who Do I Sell To By
Mail-order?
There's a school of thought which says who you sell to is more significant to your profits
than what you sell or how you sell. In mail-order this is certainly so. You can produce a
wonderful ad or brochure that meets all the criteria I've mentioned and it could fail
abysmally. Equally, you could produce a lousy ad which sells its head off. The difference
is who you market it to.
If you were to take an ad for an anti-aging cosmetic and place it in a magazine pitched at
pre-teens you would certainly produce poorer results than if you placed it in a magazine
pitched at the over 45's. Equally if you mailed out an ad for a hunting knife you would
get a far better response from a list of 4-wheel drive owners than from a list of Mills &
Boon book-list subscribers. The variability in response with who you mail to can be as
great as 20 times, whereas the variability in response with what you say (content) and
how you say it (style) might only be 3 to 6 times.
It's crucially important, therefore, to carefully define and specify who you sell to.
Fortunately we have a lot of help available. Whatever you choose to sell, there is a target
magazine, Internet user group or mail-list available. The proliferation of special interest
magazines is so great now it has radically altered the appearance of news-agencies. When
I was at school I can remember you could count the number of Australian magazines
available on your fingers. Wheels, Your Garden, Women's Weekly, Woman's Day, New
Idea, Pix, Post, and perhaps a couple more. There was no such thing as a separate newsagency.
You bought papers at the fruit shop, the news barrow or the grocery store. Today,
there are literally thousands, certainly more than a thousand Australian titles available
regularly, and many thousands more foreign mags.
You have an embarrassment of choice. Which introduces its own problems. While you
can target your market very precisely with specific magazine titles, in order to get an
across the board spread you'll need to advertise in a number of magazines. The broader
the appeal of your product the more generalist, and therefore expensive, the advertising
you need to do and the lower the response per dollar, while the more targeted the product
the more you will have to use specific, narrow bandwidth, high-response magazines. This
becomes costly as you spread your dollars across the spectrum of magazines to secure
sufficient turnover. What's the answer? Database marketing
The secret lies in creating your own 'magazine'. Instead of tagging along with someone
else's advertising in a national magazine or newspaper what you have to do is produce
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