In Gmail, you can use the “+” sign and insert whatever tag you want between the + and the @ sign — Gmail will ignore everything between the + and the @ and will still consider the address valid. Say your address is me@gmail.com and you want to do multiple tests on a subscription form. Now you can just add a tag such as me+test1@gmail.com.  Your form validation will consider this a new address, but Gmail will still deliver the email as normal.

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If you aren’t learning from your customers and subscribers, then you’re missing a great chance to discover new opportunities and to fix problems.  Open an account at Survey Monkey and create a relevant survey for all of your autoresponders. Ask what people liked about your information and what they didn’t. What are they looking for?

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Want an easy way to increase the sales?  Add two affiliate products to each of your autoresponders. Automatically follow up with buyers of each of your products with additional content. First provide tips to help them consume your product, then mix in some ‘back end’ offers for related products that can provide additional info and perspective.

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Optimization, is a very powerful mindset. It says “how can I get more out of what I already have.” You see, in the early stages of our business, we are so focused on building that we tend to stay focused on building new things while ignoring what we have. If you make more than $1/month selling your own product, focus on increasing to $100/month. Before you know it, you’ll see $10,000/month.

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6 Steps to Creating a Constantly-Improving Sales System

Sometimes, it helps to take a step back and look at the BIG picture of different areas of your business.  When it comes to sales systems, one big picture view that bears examination is the process by which a good sales system becomes a great sales system

If you follow these six steps with some degree of consistency you can’t help but see increasingly better results from your online selling efforts. Of course, the more consistent and focused you are the better your results will be.

Step 1: Plan

Before you start to build your sales system, give it a bit of thought. You don’t need an exhaustive plan, and it need not take you a long time, but make sure you know what you are building before you build it.

I’ve found that the easiest way to plan a sales system is to create a map, like this one…

If you are a VisiOlo member, you can use the set of template maps we have created for you. If not, no sweat, you can create a map easily with a pencil and paper.

Step 2: Build

This one is pretty clear, right? The next step after planning is building.  You’ve probably already built a sales system or two, but I can offer some advice from my experience.

First, it’s really critical to separate the Build process into stages; write the copy, design and format the pages, set up autoresponder, set up ecommerce system, test. When you are writing, for instance, do very minimal formatting, just enough so that it is clear where the headlines, sub-heads, and text emphasis should be.  For instance, if you want a box around a testimonial, don’t create the box, just put a note in brackets saying [box here]. You don’t want to lose any writing momentum you have built by switching suddenly into design and layout mode.

Second, many of the tasks in this stage are perfect for outsourcing. If you can afford to outsource anything, I would suggest starting with the design or ecommerce system setup. For instance, if you use Rapid Action Profits, John Burnette will do a complete setup for you, including testing, for just $45.  He’ll do a great job and you won’t have any of the headaches.

Step 3: Deploy

Now that your system is set up, you need to turn it on and start driving traffic to it.  For brand new systems, I’m not an advocate for a big ‘event type’ launch.  There are plenty of ways to do re-launches, or special events using launch tactics after you get rolling, but until a system is tested and refined a bit, I think glitches, mistakes, and missed opportunities absorb a lot of the launch energy.  Along those lines, many times, I prefer to have a ‘hidden’ launch before I open up the real thing.  A hidden launch is a private offer to previous customers or members of a certain community and it’s a good way to start momentum rolling for a new sales system.  Plus, you’ll get testimonials and some conversion rate history to share with possible JV partners.

After deployment, there is always traffic coming into your system through your promotional efforts, But the focus of this post is not really traffic generation. The Deploy step is more about getting the system up and running than anything else and it takes a bit of traffic to do that.

Step 4: Measure

Now that you have deployed your system you want to measure your results.  You’ll need data on at least two levels 1) a summary level that gives you key metrics and 2) a detail level that allows you to measure conversion rates for each step of your selling process and also how each traffic source is performing for you.  There are ways to get this data with various free tools, but, of course, VisiOlo makes it a lot easier.  This is, after all, what we are best at.  Regardless of how you get your data though, please don’t ignore the overwhelming significance of easy access to marketing metrics.

Step 5: Plan

Based on your measurements, you should be able to identify areas that you would like to target for optimization.  The biggest improvements come from making improvements to your offer pages — perhaps improved headlines, or a sweeter offer.  But there are many places in your sales system where you can either add offers, build feedback loops, remove extraneous steps, or communicate better. Target one part of your sales system and develop a plan for improvement.  Again, your plan does not have to be extensive, but just writing down a few steps will keep you focused.

Step 6: Optimize

With your plan in hand, all you need to do is make sure the steps get done.  If you do *anything* to improve your sales system after it is deployed, you will be miles ahead of most people. It can be a simple step, but any step toward improved performance will be well rewarded.

Now, simply repeat steps 4 through 6 consistently, and, over time, you will find you can make substantially more profit, and create substantially more satisfied customers if you follow this process.

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It’s Saturday and I’m just sitting down to do a total re-write of the VisiOlo sales page and sales offer because the current one just is not doing it’s job.

Through testing, I know that the majority of visitors who see the page are not getting to the part of the sales letter that actually talks about features and benefits — they are not scrolling past the very top of the sales letter. I know this because I’m testing a future feature of VisiOlo that very simply measures how deep visitors go into my sales page.

This new testing feature still needs some work before it delivers rock solid measurements, so I’m not going to give you hard numbers, but I have seen enough data to reinforce my intuitive feel that the message and structure of the copy is just not right.

I’m not really that surprised. In fact, in my experience, it takes several months of active selling and focused effort to ‘tune’ a sales message and offer. 

First, you have ‘gross tuning’ in which you decide what the key messages are and how to structure the delivery of those messages.  Sometimes, gross tuning is completed before you start selling the product. But, more often than not, it has to take place in the real world in real sales conditions.  This principle, by the way, is as true for products that are sold face-to-face with a sales force as it is for info products sold online.

Then, you have ‘fine tuning’ which is more about testing headlines, layout, color combinations, small changes in price, etc. This tends to be an ongoing process where improvements are small, but over time, result in steadily increasing conversions.

The VisiOlo sales message is definitely in the gross tuning phase, which means there are people visiting the sales page for whom VisiOlo could be a transformational tool, but they are not even aware of it because what they need to know is buried too deep in the sales letter, or not there at all.  This is not good for me, nor is it good for for my potential customers, so I’m starting over with a blank piece of paper.

I’ve learned several things over the last thirty days that will influence the next version of the sales message, but one thing is for sure. The current introductiory price of $9.99 has got to go.

So, if you are considering a VisiOlo membership, now is the time, before I update the offer and increase the price.

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What is marketing?

Ask the question of 10 business owners and you’ll get 10 different answers.

To some it is an activity…

To some it is a department where brochures are made…

To some it is ‘advertising’…

To some it is ‘sales’…

To some it’s more about the brand…

To some it’s about shelf space…

To some it’s about location…

and to some, it’s about getting out to shake hands.

The answer, of course, is that marketing is all of those things. But how does one make sense of all of those ‘things’ that marketing is?

In business school, I learned that marketing can be more or less equally divided into five Ps: Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

The way you work with these five Ps is called your ‘marketing mix’ which, if you get it just right, will make you rich.  You must have the right product, and the right price, delivered in the right way (place), to a warm audience (promotion).  If you are The Coca-Cola Company or General Motors, then this model of marketing might work for you. If not, it provides no real value in helping people understand what marketing is.

Right about now, the astute reader will have noticed that I only listed four of the five Ps.  I “forgot” the fifth P on purpose because it was added later. While engaged in marketing conversations in academic circles, those that remembered to include the new P were immediately understood to be astute marketers who were on the cutting edge of academic thought.  The new P, of course, was People. Makes you wonder how much research was required to justify the radical addition of this new P.

Also, later, a bunch of academics who apparently either didn’t like alliteration or maybe got tired of explaining that Place really isn’t a place but more of a word to describe a distribution channel, decided that Place should be changed to Channel. So now, instead of the 5 Ps of marketing, we have four Ps and a C, just doesn’t quite work as well. I personally, wish those fancy pants professors would have left well enough alone and let the 5 Ps drift off into obscurity.

I think the 5 Ps are, and have always been, a horrible way to describe what marketing is.

Marketing is more like a layer cake.

OK, it doesn’t look like a layer cake, but this is an old graphic and I didn’t want to try to actually make it look like a cake.  It’s the layer part that is important.  Marketing happens in layers — each has a different flavor and texture, but it all goes together in one fully-baked combination of different marketing ingredients.

It starts with a strong business foundation — the basics of doing business.  For Infopreneurs, it’s a computer, web hosting, some basic desktop software, a legal business entity, telephone, bank account, payment processor, etc.  Without the basic foundational elements of a business, marketing can only be in-effective.  But, fortunately, in the Infopreneur business model, it is not difficult to build a strong business foundation.  In fact, it’s probably the simplest business model you can find when it comes to business foundation.

On top of the business foundation, you have the Marketing Foundation — it’s made up of four blocks: Market, Product, Channel, and Brand.

These are the true foundations of marketing for any business.  You need a market — an audience of prospects who have needs that you can fill.  You need a product that matches the needs of your market.  You need to be able to reach that audience through a sales and distribution channel. And, finally, if you don’t stand for something, you will stand for nothing. Your brand communicates who you are and it is equally as important as the other blocks.

On top of the Marketing Foundation, you build a Promotional Structure. This is the series of steps your prospects go through on their way to becoming customers, repeat customers, and evangelists.  For the Infopreneur, the promotional structure is really a combination of copy, design, and technology.  Our customers follow a clear, one-way, path from sales letter to download page… to problem solved.  And, if we are doing it right, we have other solutions to offer to those same customers.

Your promotional structure is, essentially, your customer-making factory.  And we are fortunate. Just think how complex the promotional structure is for a business that has 50 or 60 field sales reps, 5 customer service reps, and 4 inside sales reps.  As Infopreneurs, the basic building blocks of our ‘factory’ are simple and measurable, something you won’t find in many other business models.

And finally, you drive Traffic into your promotional structure.  Traffic is the juice that runs the machine and, if you build your Marketing Foundation and Promotional Structure correctly, you won’t have much trouble generating all the traffic you want.

Now doesn’t that make more sense?

Sure, it takes a little explaining, and the words don’t alliterate nor do they rhyme, but I’m going to go out on an ego limb here and say that I think the Four Layers of Marketing makes a whole lot more sense than the Four Ps and a C.

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I’m sure it is abundantly clear that I place a high value on being able to measure marketing results.  I mean, I went so far as to create software from scratch so that I would have the *right* measurement and analysis tool for my business — that software is now available to you.

But people who know me commonly assume that the reason I am so focused on measurement and analysis is because I’m a ‘numbers guy.’ And that couldn’t be farther from the truth.  The reason I am so focused on marketing metrics for Infopreneurs is because I know three things: 1) nothing is more important to an Infopreneur’s business than the effectiveness of their selling system, 2) if Infopreneurs don’t make good decisions about the most profitable places to spend their time and resources they won’t survive and 3) with with a little bit of focused attention, taking small steps to optimize a sales system over time can transform a mediocre business into a profit-pulling powerhouse .

When you *know* these three things, there is only one conclusion you can draw — it is vitally important to be able to measure and analyze the performance of every component of your selling system so you will know where to focus your optimization efforts in the future.  It’s not a choice of if you are going to work to improve your marketing results next month, it’s a matter of what you are going to choose to focus on.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/spacepleb/ / CC BY 2.0

It’s all about focus — the decisions we make about where to place it.

What really determines your focus are the strategies you choose.  Metrics only tell you what happened in the past and where you might focus your optimization efforts.  Strategies, guide your activities and great strategies give you the biggest return for the time and resources invested.

Since choosing strategies wisely is such a critical skill, I thought I would invite my readers to work out their strategic thinking muscles with a little optimization strategy challenge.

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I’m sure you’ve heard the term “it’s a numbers game,” in fact, you’ve probably heard it so many times you are tired of hearing about it.

But today, I want to talk to you about a different ‘numbers game’ — one that can have a profound effect on your business.

You see, most people when they say ‘numbers game,’ mean that if you throw enough sales opportunities against the wall, some of them will stick.

This is, of course, true, but when it comes to online selling, there is a much more important and profitable numbers game that you *need* to be playing if you want your business to reach it’s full potential.

What I’m referring to is the process of using numbers to measure the effectiveness of your online selling systems and using the insight gained to improve your results.  In other words, using numbers to *optimize* your selling systems for better conversion and profit.

You can’t optimize your results unless you have an effective way of tracking your ‘Key Performance Metrics’ — which are the numbers that tell you how your sales system(s) are working in terms of conversion, sales, and return on investment.

Most people already know that tracking, analysis, and sales system optimization are critical to success, but until recently, it has been very difficult to get the *right* kind of numbers in a way that doesn’t chew up an entire day of looking up stats and creating spreadsheets.

I say “until recently” because, if you sell info products online, it is now easy to get the numbers you need…

I’ve spent the last year and a half developing VisiOlo Command Central into a tracking and optimization tool that will help you win this numbers game.

This tool was designed specifically for Infopreneurs and it will give you all of the critical information you need– right at your fingertips.

I highly recommend using this numbers game to your advantage and VisiOlo is just the tool to help you — you can register now and reap the rewards of ‘founder’ status.

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