Hey Kids,

NUMBERS NUMBERS AND MORE NUMBERS

       In direct response numbers are everything. Unlike image advertising you have a measurable response.

       One of your Grandfather's favorite sayings was, "only that which is measured gets improved." He also frequently repeated that this business is all about the numbers.

       So, is the AD a big success? Is it a total failure? The answer is….

We Don't Know Just Yet

       In the military, whenever the troops finish an operation or mission, they make what they call an after action report. In the report, they review what they did right, what worked well, what didn't and how to improve. We did learn a lot and it is now time to asses what happened.

       We want to do the same thing whenever we have any results.

       The AD ran on a Tuesday, which is good, but on a day when many people are starting their holiday vacations. The very next day is typically the busiest travel day of the year. This means the response will be slightly less than normal.

       We have little control over when they run, so there is not much we can do about that, unless we want to pay a LOT more.

       The AD was placed in the lower left hand corner which is about the worst place you can be. To fix this, I am thinking of running the next one as a half page vertical AD so the headline is at the top. This will cost extra, but it seems worth it.

       Remember how I told you people like Nancy Jones can really give you good feedback? Well she gave me some great info.

       Another bad bit of luck is we were below the fold. I will see what we can do to make the AD thinner and longer to force the headline above the middle of the page. This will get a lot more attention.

The first thing she let me know is…

       I am not sure if that is because of lousy placement or what, but I am willing to try a step up. I requested the prices on a half page vertical AD and a full page.

       My father usually ran the largest ad he could afford.

       The second thing Nancy did was verify that double day for IBD is a bit longer than regular newspapers.

       Double day is the day when you have approximately half of all the orders you are going to get.

       Since newspapers and magazines don't all get read on the same day and can sit around a long time, orders will continue to trickle in.

       The more frequent and less specialized the periodical, the faster you get all your orders.

       The LA Times doesn't sit around as long as Time magazine. People read and throw away the paper faster. If they don't read the Times that day, they usually don't save it to catch up, because there is another newspaper coming EVERY day.

       If the paper specializes in some interest like finance, people will keep it longer but not as long as magazines. This is true of The Wall Street Journal and our paper IBD.

       Some people will save up the papers to read at the end of the week, but most of them won't hold on to those papers for a month.

       Since nobody is sure when double day is, we can't say for sure if the AD is a success or not just yet.

       Now it is also time to start testing the quality of the leads we are getting.

       Quality of leads is a paradox of marketing. On one hand, you want a lot of prospects and leads so you try to make it very easy for people to sign up. But, you don't want to waste money sending them mail if they never respond to offers. Except in this case, we are sending them emails, which are free.

       This doesn't mean quality of leads is not important, just cheaper to mail to once you have the email addresses.

       The more effort or money someone puts up, the more likely they are interested in your products or services. If a guy floating around the net sees a banner AD at the top of the page with a hot sexy girl in a bikini and it is an AD for skin cream, he may click on it, just to see if there are more photos of the hot girl.

       This guy is not necessarily interested in skin cream and would not be a good prospect. People who type in skin cream into a search engine are far more likely to be buyers of skin cream.

       That is why…

       The best leads of all are people who ALREADY bought skin cream online.

       I am banking on my leads being very good, because of all the steps they had to go through to get on my list. They had to put down the paper and email me. Then they had to wait for a return email that directed them to the website. There, they entered their name and e-mail address again and wait some more for another return e-mail. When that e-mail comes, they then had to click on the link and wait for the report.

       Waaaaay too much in my opinion to go through, but those that did go through all those steps…
MUST be Interested in What I Have to Say!

       Again, as long as they don't unsubscribe, I can mail them offers until the cows come home and it costs me nothing

       To keep them from unsubscribing I have to keep their interest by giving them quality info on a regular basis.

       Online memory is very short. You must stay in their email in-box all the time or you will lose your prospects' attention. Email them too often, and they want to get rid of you and unsubscribe.

       By tracking your test results you can find that sweet spot, where you get the least amount of people to unsubscribe yet make money.

       I am toying with the idea of putting the reports online and asking for email addresses after they read them. They will sign up only if they want to be notified when a new report is available. Just like grandpa's website.

This will ease prospects' fears that I am a spammer, but also give them more of a chance to forget about the website. I'll decide later.

       Tonight, we are sending the people who signed up, the following email.

       Attached to the email, is a great report in pdf format, so everyone can download and read it, but just in case, I made it simple for them to view it on the web incase they are afraid to download it. Online, you must remember people fear downloads because they could contain a virus, so whenever possible, leave them a way to view it online where they feel safe.

       The key test will be how many people unsubscribe. Since I am not asking for any response there is not much else feedback to go on. However, if the number of people who unsubscribe is low, I can assume I have said something that made them not mind if I email them again.

       Later this week we will send out the report "How To Profit From The Bailouts!" This is the first report the prospects will get with a soft sales pitch to sell a Forex trading system.

       When countries bail out banks, insurance companies, the auto industry and so on, they are messing with the money supply. Also, all the different countries changing their interest rates affect the currency markets as well.

       The report hopefully does a good job of explaining these connections and ends by saying if this sounds interesting to you, I do know an expert in this and if you want more info click on this link.

       The link will take them to a webpage that sells one of my partners' courses on trading the Forex.

       If just one person from my list ever buys one copy of that course, my campaign is a success, because my costs so far is $1,500 which was the cost of running my AD.

       Now I just checked again and we have 120 so far. That is pretty good. However, we have to deduct a few because we put some in there ourselves.

       We will get more names too, because my father's fans now know about the website and may be checking it out too.

       So let's go ahead and use 100 names and say that is the result.

       We take the AD cost of $1,500 and divide that by 100 and we get $15 a name. That sure seems like a lot for an e-mail address but that all depends on the quality of the leads.

       We do already know that the AD is worth tinkering with and that is good but frustrating.

       Had we not used Nancy Jones, we would have paid three times that and each name so far would have cost us over $45.

Again, Thank God for Nancy Jones!

       She also surprised me with some news that our AD was actually even cheaper than we paid and we are getting a refund of $100. This makes our cost per lead drop from $15 to $14.

       In the end I think we will do better on the next run and our cost per lead will continue to drop.

       As it is, the cost per lead drops every day and soon we will have a good idea of when double day is.

       More importantly, we shall see if the leads generated by running ADs are better than the ones generated by traditional online marketing because we are going to gear up for an electronic marketing blitz.

       I'll tell you more about that soon.

       Love and kisses,

       Pop