Marketing Guides

Archive for March, 2010

Testing And Choosing A Profitable Price Point For Your Products

We do it every day. When you need to buy gas you might go to a competitors station even if they only offer gas 0.03 cheaper than your usual stop. When you go to McDonalds youre thrilled if they started a new 2 for 2 deal. But what if I came up to you and told you Id sell you my Jaguar for only 1000. Youre probably not going to go for it. Why? Because its too cheap there must be something wrong with it. Our instincts are there to protect us.

When youre selling on the net structuring your prices depends on what youre promoting. If its a tangible item that someone is purchasing to have you ship to them such as an Mp3 player then you have to be competitive with other vendors. If youre selling services you have to be competitive as well but in both cases you might come up against a foreign competitor who can slash their prices far below yours so you need to make sure you address that with your potential customers. Your price point must ensure that you profit in the end. That means taking into consideration every single element of investment you have in your ventures. From the domain name to the shipping charges and the time you invest. You want your customers to feel like theyve gotten a good deal but at the same that theyve invested in something worth the money they spent. You also have to take a look at supply and demand. Trends carry a lot of weight with products both informational and tangible. You might find a great wholesale deal on a shipment of iPods or decide to write a Survival Guide to the Bird Flu. Look for newsworthy items online and in the paper and target your products around that.

What Is the Fair Market Value of Your Product? It depends on where youre selling it. If its an eBay item then your customers are going to be bargainhunting more than your average visitor who arrived at your site through a search engine or ad. Is your inventory new refurbished or used? That can affect the price you set. Do you offer a warranty on it? Anything you can do to increase its value means you can charge a bit more. Look at the current competition in the marketplace. If other people are selling something far below what you could sell it for then find another product. If the market is flooded with too many sellers and not enough buyers then their prices will plummet and you dont want to be stuck with excess inventory. However if the competition is doing a poor job of promoting the products and you think you have a chance at excelling in that area then by all means go for it!

Use additional resources to help you pick a target price point. Invest in some trade magazines look at catalogues and see what the manufacturer recommends as the selling price.

For more tips on picking the right price point check out our website at http://www.elearn2earn.com/elearn.htm.

About the writer:  ”Internet Income Made Easy” is one of the best ebooks on the net to cover everything you need to get started and succeed in an ebusiness. It can be found at the publisher’s site http://www.elearn2earn.com/elearn.htm.

Ten Tips To Optimize Your Email Marketing And E-Newsletter Design

1. Do not use too many graphics in your email marketing. Ideally you would have about 60 text and 40 graphics in your emails. It is never a good idea to send an email that is one giant image. Keep in mind that many email clients have images turned off by default so in text you have to give your recipients reasons to open the emails.
2. Provide a link to allow people to view your email as a Web page. Some people just prefer to look at things in a browser and your HTML email may not render perfectly in every email program out there. Most Email Service Providers ESPs include a forward to a friend feature.
3. Use the HTML alt tag for important images. If images are turned off the alt tag will provide a text description of the image so the recipient will know what the images are which can be an incentive to turn on images.
4. Tables are important component of email design and have made a come back as email marketing usage has increased. Make sure to use the table attributes to maximum advantage.
5. If you do use Cascading Style Sheets CSS which many people do in their Web design keep in mind that only inline CSS works with email marketing.
6. Be sure to send a text version along with your HTML version. Many ESPs have a sniffer that can detect if the email client of the recipient can render HTML or not. If the email client cannot render with the HTML then the text version is sent to that recipient. If you neglect to do a text version you could be missing some of your subscribers.
7. Test your emails against a list that includes a variety of email clients including things like Yahoo Gmail Outlook and so on. Do this before you send out your production email.
8. Do not rely on background images. There is no guarantee that your background images will display properly on all the different email programs out there.
9. Don’t forget that you are designing for email programs so be conscious of file sizes of graphics and try to keep the width of your emails to about 600 pixels.
10. Avoid things like flash javascript etc. as many email clients do not support these things properly. Keep it simple.

About the writer:  Neil Anuskiewicz is the Director of Business Development for the StreamSend Email Marketing Service.

Telemarketing Generate Big Revenue From Simple Creative Ideas Small Budgets

Hello This is XX calling from XX company may I have a moment of your time please.?

Statistics shows that Telemarketing responses fetches 4 times more than mailgenerated leads. And you would think that the cost could be exorbitant since large corporations have spent millions of dollars prepping up their telemarketing centers. Well its Yes and No. If you are running a large corporation and looking to expand sales exponentially at a faster pace yes.

But if you run a small business you too can have a piece of the telemarketing pie. There are approaches which from my past experience have proven workable and more importantly profitable to say the least.

The one of the critical issues is to examine suitability of your business for the telemarketing channel of distribution. There are industries which telemarketing has become the norm in generating escalating revenues profits but there are those which do not leverage upon telemarketing not due to budget constraints but that there are more appropriate distribution channels. Take for instance the very familiar credit card call industry. You will see rows and rows of telemarketers calling round the clock to solicit card applications. Conversely if you are in the fruits wholesale distribution business it is highly unlikely that you would resort to telemarketing as a distribution channel.

You will also need to analyze the function of telemarketing as marketing tool in your business. You can activate telemarketing activities for expanding revenue as a sales support tool as well as build rapport. Call supporting activities for the credit card businesses the cell phone businesses for instance would center around aftersales services. Calling clients on service evaluation after sales would be building rapport and generate feedback for product and service enhancements. These are very diverging objectives which separately achieve different purposes altogether. The pitch and script would be highly diverging as well.

The recency of your call list is critical as well. Lists from events and campaigns must be called within the month to ensure higher recall rate. The sooner you call your prospects the higher the recall rate and the better the chances of closing the sale. The catch is of course the National Do Not Call List. So ensure that the potential clients you call are on this list.

Finally your success largely depends on The Reward essentially the effectiveness of your incentive scheme.

I shall share below an example of my past execution of telemarketing as a sales generating tool. In this instance our discussion is centered on the small business with tight operations and marketing budgets.

For effective telemarketing you could consider training one or two existing staff to spend 30 to 50 of their time conducting telemarketing out of a potential client listing generated from your many events and campaigns as well as existing client lists. And Viola!! Leveraging on existing manpower resources you have created a new channel of distribution!

Handpick staff who have tact and are able to take rejection and practice they will start converting the leads to sales and start earning! Remember Telemarketing is a prolong activity channel which yields results over time. Persistence and positivism is essence.

In terms of rewards on top of their usual salary you should incentivize your telemarketers with a generous percentage of telesales revenue generated by them. This is especially viable for business costs which run on incremental variable revenue model. For instance if your business is leveraged upon total fixed cost and any revenue above your fixed cost is variable revenue or profits. Hence any amount generated by your telemarketers is essentially variable revenue on top and above your normal fixed costs and fixed revenue.

About the writer:  Yoshiko Choy is an entrepreneur and a management consultant in business marketing with 17 years of experience in Locals MNCs as well as an avid online marketer. She holds an Executive MBA from the California State University. Read about business marketing management trends at http://www.businessfast4ward.com. Get the latest reviews and updates on niche marketing visit http://www.onlinenichemarketing.org.