A Peek Inside My Marketing Crystal Ball by David Ledoux
The scruffy looking fellow sauntered up to me at the back of the meeting
room. His gaze was shifty, his manner nervous. He cleared his throat, stammered
an introduction and stuck out his hand. That's how I met one of the largest
internet lead brokers in the world recently in Houston, Texas.
The dialogue with him was worth the entire price of the plane ticket to the
seminar. He introduced me to two other huge lead brokers. And what they shared
with me blew my mind. Kind of. In retrospect, it confirmed for me what my
intuition had been telling me.
Email marketing is dead. (nearly).
The three huge lead brokers confided in me that they were planning to quit
the online lead business. They moaned about the changes in spam laws by the
states, the vicious ISP mail filters, the bounces, the general malaise of
prospects, low conversion rates and the weather. They were lower than a snake's
belly. These 3 millionaires had all watched their gold mine tapped to near
empty. Problem was they had bought cars, homes, and toys hoping the gold rush
would continue...
When I got home from Texas, I got a call from one of the largest fax blasters
in the world. They used to call him the Junk Fax King. This guy had made as much
as a million a year generating leads via blast fax. The transition to the web
hadn't gone quite so smoothly when new laws killed his fax business overnight.
He offered to sell me his database. He was getting out of the industry
entirely and was going into real estate.
Hmmmm...
I spoke with 2 more online marketers of e-books and newsletters. They both
told me that they have stopped all online marketing and are returning to mail
order. They sold their existing web businesses and are going back to the 20th
century....
The synchronicities kept coming. That night a huge lead vendor called to
pitch me on some penny leads. As much as I wanted, 30 days old, 8 cents each. I
wasn't particularly interested. I told him about the other guys.
"More for me, excellent!" was his response. He owns his own server
bank, has 2 full time staff to make sure his email somehow gets through, and
mails 15 million emails a week. A week!
"This business is for the big dogs now, David!" he chortled.
When the masses zig, the smart money zags....
You know what I'm talking about. If you do any kind of email marketing, you
know that response rates are dropping through the floor. I remember when 1000
leads in a 10 series email would generate 90 leads. Now you're lucky if you get
9.
Here's my advice:
1) If you currently rely on bulk email, you need HUGE numbers. Get your list
over the half million email mark as soon as you can. You can compensate for
filtering and dropping conversions with bigger numbers. Our office can help you
in this regard. Contact Chris for details.
2) Wean the smaller players on your team off dependence on bulk email. Move
them towards generating their own leads through pay-per-click engines like
Google and Overture.
3) Experiment with "Offline-to-Online" lead generation. I am using
drop cards, flyers, posters, signs, car lettering, inserts, and small ads with
some great success. I drive the lead into my online marketing machine for
education and follow-up, without the reliance on email marketing.
4) Plan for the worst. Imagine that legislators kill email marketing the same
way they did fax blasting. What will you do? What will your team do? It could
happen within 12-18 months!
I look at the reliance on email marketing the same way as the tape wars of
the mid-nineties. Remember Dead Doctors Don't Lie and the Ray Cassanno tape? The
bulk mailing of audios died a gruesome death. So will bulk emailing.
For 56 years, network marketing has been a people building business. My
crystal ball tells me that those that are best in being in front of emerging
trends (or RE-emerging trends!) will prosper.
Good luck in your marketing adventures!
I appreciate you!
David Ledoux
