Phil Spinelli - Delaware Business Marketing Services

But few people know how. Few people really understand how to force every marketing dollar to work harder - to do the job of 2 or 3 or 5 or 10 dollars. In fact, of all the clients I’ve worked with in the past year, and all those who time wouldn’t permit me to work with, only one came even close to achieving their full marketing and profit potential.

Even this client, as admirable as his efforts and results were, only realized 70% of the profits he could be reaping. Most of my clients, which includes some very savvy marketers, are only realizing 50% or less of their full profit potential!

You’re probably in the same boat. That’s what motivated you to call for this report. Because your marketing is getting lukewarm results. You aren’t getting the number of qualified leads you need. You aren’t increasing your customer base. Sales are in a holding pattern. And you know you aren’t generating the kind of profits you really need to keep your business healthy.

Well, that’s all about to change. Right here, and right now!

I mean it. It’s far easier to do than you ever imagined. In this report, I’m going to show you exactly which factors are limiting your profits. Then I’ll give you 9 simple, inexpensive, powerful steps you can take to leverage your marketing. I’ll show you everything you need to know to make each of your marketing dollars work as hard as they possibly can to increase your effectiveness, boost your profits, and cut your expenses.

By the time you’ve completed this report, you’ll have a comprehensive set of powerful new tools you can use to make sure your marketing is firing on all cylinders and doing what you really need it to: generating more leads, winning more sales, and shooting your profits through the roof!

What Marketing Leverage Is And How It Can Make Your Business Much More Profitable!

What exactly is leverage? For our purposes, it’s the ability to improve a component part of your marketing resulting in the increase of your sales and profits many times. Now, that might sound a bit technical or complicated, but in actual use, it couldn’t be simpler. Leverage is merely the ability to make more money for exactly the same amount of time, effort, and expense.

Here are a few real life examples. The most widely understood use of leverage is in real estate. In most real estate transactions, you can get 100% of the use and financial benefit of a property for just 20% down. So you’ve leveraged your investment by 80%.

Now, let’s look at how leverage applies to your marketing. If I can show you a simple sales technique to get your customers to increase their average purchase amount by 20% with no additional cost or effort on your part, I’ve just leveraged your sales staff. I’ve increased their productivity and your profits by 20%.

Here’s another example. If we change your copy and the new ad outpulls your old ad by 35%, that’s 35% more profit in your pocket for exactly the same cost and effort. In actual application, I’ve seen slight changes in copy increase profits by as much as 300% to 400%. And in his classic book, Tested Advertising Methods, John Caples documents examples of simple copy changes that improved response by as much as 2100%!

There’s one more concept you should understand about increasing your marketing leverage. There are so many areas of your marketing that can be leveraged, the results can be phenomenal. These include ads, headlines, mailing lists, media, prices, offers, publicity, in-store sales, field sales, average purchase amount, repeat sales, referrals, new customer leads, lead conversion and on and on. Taken alone, each of these components may increase your sales and profits just a few percentage points. But get them all working together, and they can shoot your profits through the roof!

9 Fast Ways To Leverage Your Marketing Success!

Now that you understand what marketing leverage is, let’s look at the nine fastest, easiest ways to use it to boost your sales and profits.

1. Leverage Your Mailing Lists And Advertising Media

I’m going to cover this point first because lists and media are the most critical components of any campaign. I don’t care how great your product is, how powerful your offer is, how low your price is, how well written your copy may be, or how striking a layout you’ve used. Mail to the wrong list or advertise in inappropriate media and all of your time, effort, and money is completely wasted.

Here’s the hard, cold truth. A mediocre piece mailed to precisely the right people or run in the right media will get significantly better results than the most powerful piece sent to the wrong list or run in the wrong media.

Leveraging your list and media usage isn’t difficult. Here’s how to do it. For mailing lists, always use a list broker. In fact, use 3 to 5 list brokers. Once you have your package together, send it to 3 to 5 list brokers and ask them to recommend lists they think will respond well. To start, test those lists that are recommended by more than one broker. Once you’ve had good results with a broker or brokers, test other lists they recommend.

Always ask your brokers what fields they specialize in and try to find brokers with experience in your type of business. By the way, it won’t cost you anything to use as many brokers as you’d like, since the list owner, not you, pays their fees.

For advertising, always use media brokers exactly the same way I’ve advised you to use list brokers. Just keep in mind that media brokers usually specialize by the type of media rather than by type of business. Print, radio, and television are usually represented most effectively by different media brokers. But I’ve also seen good brokers who handle more than one type of media. As with list brokers, media brokers’ fees are paid by the media, so they cost you nothing.

List and media selection are time-consuming, sophisticated activities. A good broker keeps a finger on the pulse of what’s working. Take advantage of list and media brokers’ expertise to amplify the results of your ads and mailings.

2. Leverage Your Credibility - The Key To Making More And More Sales

After the right list and media, credibility is the next most significant factor in selling more of your products or services. If your prospective customers have never heard of your company or your product, you face a tough, uphill climb.

You see, people are generally creatures of habit. Once they’ve found a product and become comfortable with it, it’s difficult to budge them out of their comfort zone.

Think about it. How many different restaurants do you go to on a regular basis? How many different brands of cars have you bought? How often do you change your brand of toothpaste? If you’re like most people, you tend to stick to a fairly limited range of products.

Secondly, most customers are naturally skeptical. Everyone has been burned more than once by products or services that didn’t perform as promised. When neither your company or product have any credibility with your prospects, the amount of education and persuasion it takes to get them to buy can kill you.

So one of your major tasks as a marketer is to increase your company and product credibility By the way, of the two, company credibility is more important to have than product credibility. If people know and trust you, they’ll usually take a chance on a new product that you’re offering. But you’ll encounter much more buyer reluctance if people know about your product but have no basis for trusting your company.

Of all the components of your ad or sales letter that you can change to improve your results, the headline carries the most weight. The headline is the most crucial component of your copy. It bears the responsibility of pulling people into your ad or sales letter. If you can’t attract peoples’ attention and convince them to read further, you won’t make any sales.

Your headline and your offer are closely connected. In fact, many times you’re best headline is a compelling statement of your offer. “Cashmere Sweaters At 30% Below Our Lowest Prices” is a powerful example.

In order to leverage your offer, first you must create a powerful offer. This might sound obvious, but think about it for a minute. How many ads and sales letters do you see that carry a lukewarm offer? Or worse yet, no offer at all? Take a look at your newspaper today or your mail, You’ll see that very few marketers have even the foggiest notion of how to craft and present a powerful offer.

Here’s the secret to formulating an irresistible offer. Use your offer to shift the risk from your customer to your own shoulders. If you can assure your customers that they have absolutely nothing to risk, and a whole lot to gain by purchasing your product, you greatly increase your odds of making the sale.

“Now you can get the finest Cashmere Sweaters at 30% below our lowest prices. You have to feel this exquisite material to fully appreciate it. So here’s what we’re going to do. Wear one of our luxurious sweaters for 30 days for FREE. Postdate your check until a month from now. If you aren’t in sweater heaven after wearing one of these remarkable garments, just send it back and we’ll return your check. No questions asked.” Now that’s an offer few sane buyers could refuse!

The next thing you need to do is feature your offer right up front. Unless you’re an extremely experienced and sophisticated copywriter, burying your offer in your sales piece severely weakens your chance of making the sale. Place your offer within the headline or first couple of paragraphs of your piece. Then watch your orders soar!

5. Leverage The Price Of Your Product

When it comes to pricing, testing is the name of the game. What’s the best price for your product or service? It’s impossible to know without testing.

Sometimes raising the price of a product can actually increase your sales. Or increase your gross revenue even if the number of sales drops off. Here’s an example. Let’s say you sell a newsletter for $79. And you get a response rate of 3%, which means you sell 30 subscriptions for every 1000 letters you mail. Your gross sales are then $2370.

Now, if you raise your price to $169 and your response rate drops to 2%, you’re only making 20 sales for every 1000 letters mailed. But your gross revenue increases to $3380. Also, you’re fulfillment costs are reduced. And, you may experience a lower rate of cancellations when your perceived value is greater.

Here’s another tip for making more sales when you increase your price. The additional revenue allows you to offer other bonus items as an incentive to get your customers to buy. These bonuses can increase the perceived value of your package and result in many more sales.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that the only way to adjust your price is up. Sometimes lowering your prices can result in a significant increase in sales. It’s been my experience though, that most companies tend to under price their goods.

Bottom line, the only way to determine your optimum price is to test and test some more.

I’m going to let you in on a major secret. If you want to increase your profits by 25% to 75% quickly and easily, concentrate on repeat sales. Concentrate on selling more products to your existing customers.

I’m going to show you why you should concentrate on repeat sales and how to generate the maximum volume of repeat sales. But first, I need a minute to mount my soapbox. Accept for a moment that what I’ve just told you is true - that you actually can increase your profits substantially by putting more effort into repeat sales. My question then, is why don’t more companies do just this?

I have to tell you, it absolutely baffles me that very few, if any, companies reap the easy profits available from repeat sales. In the last year, of all the clients I’ve consulted with and all the others who wanted to hire me, only one of them was doing what they should to collect these windfall profits! O.K., enough of my lecturing. Here’s what you need to do to get your fair share.

First, it’s important to understand why repeat sales are so easy to make and so profitable. It gets back to the issue of credibility. Once you’ve made a sale and you’ve delivered the benefits you promised, you control a tremendous amount of credibility. Your customers now believe in you.

Offering them other products that you stand behind completely is the easiest way possible to make more sales. You can even offer the same product you’ve already sold them. They now know how good it is and may want another. They probably want more for their family and friends too.

You don’t have to spend a cent convincing your existing customers to take a chance on you. You’ve already cleared that hurdle. And you don’t have to spend the kind of money it takes to find new customers, because you have all the information you need.

You couldn’t come any closer to a sure thing!

How do you go about consistently making repeat sales? It’s simple. All you do is systematically contact your existing customers at least once every month. Offer them great prices, special selection, stronger guarantees, or bonuses to do more business with you.

You’ll be amazed at the response you get. Customers love to do business with someone they can trust. They’ve been taken advantage of so many times, all you have to do is treat them fairly and deliver what you promise and you can sell them over and over again for years.

Without exception, businesses today spend far too much time looking for new customers and neglect the gold that’s buried in their existing customer list.

Try this out. It isn’t unusual to make more profit off repeat sales than from any other area of your business.

8. Leverage The Average Dollar Amount Of Every Sale You Make

Another tremendous way to generate more profit is to increase the average dollar amount that your customers spend whenever they do business with you. You’d be surprised how easy it is to increase your profits by 15% to 40% just by making a minor change or two to the way you do business.

Here’s how it’s done. First, it’s important to remember that the easiest person to sell more of your products to is an existing customer. But to extend this concept one step further, you can really make some serious money when you realize that the easiest and most convenient time to sell more to your current customers is right at the time that they’re buying from you.

Look, you already have the person in your store or ordering from you if you’re selling by mail or phone. They’ll never be more willing to dig a little deeper into their wallets than at this point of sale. All you need to do to capitalize on the situation is offer your customer a strong incentive to buy more right now.

Getting your customers to spend a little more at the point of sale is a snap. The way you do this is by using a technique called the upsell. Here’s how the upsell works. Essentially, you offer your customers the opportunity to buy even more of what you sell at an attractive discount once they’ve made the commitment to buy something else at the regular price.

If you own a retail store, you set up a special selection of items close by your cash register. Whenever your staff rings up a sale, they tell the customer that because they’ve purchased X dollars worth of goods, they’re entitled to certain items in the special section at a discount of 15% (or whatever figure you choose).

Now the items you feature in your special section should be very popular, quick moving items. They should also be items that have a fairly high profit margin so you can give a liberal discount and still make a decent profit.

Successful upselling is a function of numbers. You’ll find that 15% to 40% of your customers will take advantage of your special offer. But in order to reach these levels of additional sales, your sales people must present the upsell opportunity to every customer at the point of sale.

Using the upsell in direct mail or telephone selling is done in a similar way, but it’s usually limited to just one upsell item. Offering people too many choices by mail or phone can backfire and actually dilute your sales. Also, when upselling by mail or phone, the upsell item should be related to the original item.

For example, if you sell cookware by mail, a good upsell item would be a cookbook. Another would be a set of kitchen utensils. Again, the upsell item is offered at an attractive discount, but only when the customer buys the original item you’re offering.

Upsells are simple, they require almost no additional effort or expense, and they work like wildfire!

9. Leverage Your Profits By Participating In Joint Ventures

Joint ventures are an exceptional way of adding sizable profits to your bottom line. You can use joint ventures to sell your products to the customers of other businesses. By doing this you’ll not only profit immediately, you’ll also add new customers to your list. This is called a Host Endorsed Joint Venture.

Or you can use joint ventures to sell other companies’ products to your own customers and virtually add or test additional product lines without risking a cent of your own money. This type of deal is called a Guest Endorsed Joint Venture.

For a Host Endorsed Joint Venture, you need to connect with another business that sells products that appeal to the same type of customers who buy from you. This host company will be sending a letter endorsing your product to their customers. You’ll create the mailing and pay all the costs of sending out this offer. In fact, your host incurs no expense whatsoever. In exchange, the host receives 15% to 30% of the net profit. It’s up to you and the host to determine what’s fair to both of you.

By endorsing your offer and playing off of his credibility, the host can easily generate response rates of 10% to 40%. The money you make can be tremendous, plus you get to add these new customers to your list for many more years of repeat sales.

All orders are received by the host and forwarded to you for fulfillment. There are two reasons for this. First, it’s essential to make the offer appear as if it’s being made by the host. It’s the host’s credibility that carries the weight here. Second, this allows the host to accurately track the number of orders generated.

Considering what you’re getting, trading a percentage of profits to play off all of the time, effort, and money it took to build the host’s customer list is an exceptional deal. You can use deals like this to build a substantial list of your own in a fraction of the time it would normally take.

A Guest Endorsed Joint Venture is similar, but here you act as the host to endorse your guest’s product to your own house list. The guest should pay all expenses and reap the lion’s share of the profits.

In a Guest Endorsed Joint Venture, you’re gaining ancillary profits with very little effort and no cost on your part. It’s purely found money. At the same time, it gives you a risk-free way to test other products you might want to consider adding to your business.

Conclusion

Congratulations! You’re now on the road to becoming a direct marketing leverage expert. You’re now ready to start compounding the results of every marketing dollar you invest.

I’m sure you’re pleasantly surprised by the broad selection of marketing areas you can leverage significantly. Ads, headlines, prices, publicity, mailing lists, advertising media, new customer sales, average purchase amount, repeat sales, upsells, lead generation and conversion, referrals, offers, copy and more! The opportunities for improving your profits are nearly endless.

But there’s one thing I must warn you about. Don’t let yourself get confused when considering the wide variety of areas you could possibly leverage. Don’t get bogged down by all the possibilities and all the details of each. Start small. Pick one area to get started on. Pick the one that looks like it will provide the most return for the least effort. Then kick it into gear.

The important thing is to get started. Once you’ve seen the results you’ll get by actually leveraging a single area you’ll be highly motivated to take on a few more.