Here’s One of the Most Powerful (and most ignored) Marketing Strategies You Will Ever Find - Part 1

By Ben Hart…  Your offer is the most important element of your marketing campaign.  A great offer will succeed even if you write a very poor letter.  But the greatest sales letter in the world cannot sell a lousy offer.  This is just another way of saying “Our customers are not idiots. They do their math. They weigh the cost against the benefits they’ll get if they buy.”

Now start paying very close attention.  And read every word of this article as if your life depends on you understanding it. Read to the very end, or you’ll miss the big point.  You’ll find a ton of solid gold marketing secrets in here that can make you a pile of money if you act on them.  Okay, now back to main theme of this article.  So . . . what exactly is an offer?

An offer answers the “How much does it cost, and what am I buying for my money?” question.  It’s the “getting down to brass tacks” part of selling.  It’s the part where you are trying to persuade your prospect to pay, to part with cash. This is the part of the transaction where both buyer and seller get their calculators out, put their green eye-shades on, put pencil to paper and decide if the transaction makes economic sense.

If someone offered you a Mercedes for $10, you would take it.  No sales presentation needed.  That’s an offer. But you’ll go broke if you make offers like that.  The trick for a business is to construct irresistible offers that don’t cause you to go broke.  The way you do this is to deliver a product that has enormous perceived value to the customer, but that does not cost you a lot to produce.

That’s a big reason “information products” are so good.  Information products are very cheap to produce, and can have enormous perceived value to the buyer.  How much would you pay for a weekly one-page newsletter from Bill Gates on how to build a profitable business?  How much would you pay for a one-page monthly newsletter from Warren Buffet on what stocks to invest in and why?

Probably a lot, even though a one-page newsletter does not cost much to produce.  Overcoming The Toughest Hurdle In Selling - Now, the toughest part of any sale is to persuade your prospective buyer to part with cash.

Your prospect must be absolutely convinced about the value of the product before any money will exchange hands.  That’s why people much prefer to pay later.  No one ever wants to pay now.  Of course, people prefer not to pay at all, but they also know that’s not the way the world works.  With this principle in mind, let me outline for you one of the most powerful offers I have run across in my 20+ years in direct marketing.

There are four basic reasons people do not get their pen out and write a check to you in answer to your offer:  

1) They have no interest in what you are offering.

2) They don’t want to pay what you are charging, or can’t afford to pay. 

3) Your offer did not get your reader’s attention, so they never considered your offer.

4) Your reader does not believe your claims.

 The fourth reason is usually the biggest stopper for getting the sale.   I say this because, as an Inner Circle member, you are now an expert target marketer.  So this means you are only marketing to people you know have an interest in what you are selling and can afford to pay for what you are selling. 

You have also packaged your mailing in such a way that it stands out in the mailbox, gets attention, and can’t be missed.   So your letter does not look like any of that other junk mail that shows up in your mailbox every day.  So, now the only remaining question is, “Will my reader trust what I say to be true?”  The biggest challenge we face as marketers is persuading our target audience that we are not lying, that we are not exaggerating our claims.