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Sunday, 27 May 2012
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Choose
Bonus Gifts Carefully
by
Ted Nicholas
It was almost impossible
to find direct marketing mentors when I started in business.
Therefore, much of my education was by necessity trial and error.
One of the many marketing blunders early on in my career was
this.
A book I published through my company, Enterprise Publishing,
that was written by a prominent lawyer was my first big flop.
Of course, I had lots of remaining copies in the warehouse.
And this was after I had tried several
different copy approaches to sell it.
So, I came up with what I thought was a brilliant idea. I would
beef up and enhance the offer of a very successful $70 book
I was then marketing. How? By simply adding a free copy of the
failed $25 book. My assumption was overall sales would be even
stronger than without the free gift. Of course, I wrote some
sales copy.
Much to my amazement, sales not only didn't go up. They went
down by more than 33%!
Tip: The important marketing lesson is this. If you can't sell
it, you can't give it away successfully either. If people won't
buy it when offered in an appealing way, they don't want it,
free or not. Period.
Lesson learned: With any failed product, after you have gone
back to the drawing board and exhausted every creative approach
you can think of and it still doesn't sell, get rid of it. Write
it off. Burn it or toss it if you have to. Just don't try to
sell it, or try to use it as a free bonus gift. You will waste
lots of time and money.
I was again reminded of this important marketing principle
above just recently.
A big client of mine who is highly successful catalog marketer
asked me to take a look at three recent covers of his catalogs
(I write all the copy for this entrepreneur, but I haven't always
chosen his free bonus gifts which are featured on the cover).
He informed me that sales response was down on these particular
catalogs and asked me to please take a look and comment as to
what may be the reason.
When I looked at the covers, everything looked really good.
The headline and subheadline copy (which I wrote) as well as
the photos were well done graphically.
But there was one glaring problem that popped out to me. The
free bonus gifts featured on the cover complete with photos
were not at all appealing. Therefore, there was little or no
added inducement to order from that particular catalog (actually,
a company employee in the marketing department purchased the
three free gifts because she was offered a special low price
by the supplier. It's easy to see how the decision to choose
them was made).
Tip: To do its proper job of increasing sales, what counts
is not your cost of a free bonus gift. The key is that it must
be appealing enough to your customers to induce an order, especially
from "fence sitters".
I'm sure with better selection of bonus gifts (that I have
now been asked to approve before use) my client's future catalog
sales will undoubtedly be much more successful.
Tip: To increase sales on any offer, add the incentive of free
gifts. Everyone likes free gifts. I've never seen any offer
that didn't get a more successful response when the inducement
of appealing free bonuses was added. In fact, many offers today
online and offline will not succeed or even cover front-end
costs without them.
By all means use free bonus gifts. But choose them carefully.
They can be terrific sales builders. I've seen sales double
on a previously successful offer simply by adding hot bonuses.
In
the field of copywriting, Ted Nicholas is right up there among
the legends, or he wouldn't be conducting seminars to thousands
of people since 1991, a year when he 'retired' himself. Access
past articles by Ted here.
To learn more about Ted Nicholas' products and and services,
visit www.tednicholas.com.
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