No doubt you’ve heard this statement before: the key to selling lies in the follow-up.
It’s true that if you’re an affiliate marketer and earning commissions by selling “other people’s stuff,” it’s rare for a lead to buy what you’re promoting right away. People usually need to see something over and over before they get serious enough to make a buying decision.
Traditionally speaking, follow-ups usually come in the form of an email. We’ve all received emails with strange subject lines from people we don’t know trying to get us to do one thing: make a purchase. The effectiveness of a follow-up email really boils down to a few things:
1) Being able to deliver the email into the recipient’s inbox without it going to spam.
2) Convincing the recipient to open your email based on the appeal of the subject line.
3) Selling the product or service using good ad-copy in the body of the email.
The first task is the job of the email autoresponder service. Deliverability is never guaranteed, even when using the most popular autoresponder on the market. Another problem stems from email services like Gmail that incorporate “promotions” folders that filter certain emails out and decrease the likelihood that the recipient will ever see them.
Even if the recipient saw the email, a decision still needs to be made to open it. For the most part, if someone doesn’t recognize the sender, they aren’t going to open the email. Period. In fact, from a marketer’s point of view, it is actually very challenging to get your leads to open their emails at all. Experienced marketers can achieve impressive email open rates, but the majority of marketers typically see open rates around 6-12%. When you consider the cost of generating leads with today’s pricey advertising, these numbers can seem dismally small.
To be brutally honest, following-up through email is becoming less and less effective with each passing day.
In recent years, companies have sprouted up offering ways to reach people on their cell/mobile phones through text messaging. It’s a brilliant idea, but there’ve been some setbacks. Carriers such as Verizon, AT&T, and others, did not fully embrace the idea and those who forged ahead, found it to be a costly endeavor for their clients.
Auto Recruiting Platform For SMS Marketing
In 2009, a millionaire marketer named Don Glanville approached all the major wireless carriers and made a deal that would change the way affiliate marketers could follow-up with their leads.
In June 2012, a propietary, built-from-the-ground-up platform entered the beta testing phase and a small number of Internet marketers used it to begin sending text message follow-ups. Don’s company, Quicklister, began testing a sales funnel named Auto Recruiting Platform. The concept is to provide marketers with a complete in-house system that combines franchising with online marketing. The point of the platform is to provide marketers with a hands-off approach by automating the sales process – from traffic generation to the close of the sale.
Auto Recruiting Platform is still in beta mode right now, meaning the system isn’t ready for its inaugural launch just yet. However, that isn’t stopping some of the biggest names in online marketing from getting a jump on the action. The SMS marketing platform is a small portion of the complete picture, but it is one of the major features that sets it apart from traditional marketing, which includes email as the follow-up medium.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in marketing, it’s this: those who capitalize on early marketing technology, when implemented properly and designed to solve obvious problems, are the ones who win. Timing has been responsible for making millionaires out of people who otherwise would still be scrounging around, trying to prove that substantial riches in Internet marketing aren’t just a myth.
There are plenty of SMS/text message marketing platforms on the market right now, however none of them, with the exception of Auto Recruiting Platform, have been designed specifically for affiliate marketers to close sales and generate commissions. This truly is a game changer.
Read more and see what others are saying here.
Matt McGivern
Co-Owner, Traffic Genie Marketing