price, exclusivity, and service – the battleground of Direct Marketing

Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes

I’ll put this in perspective – mine at least.

In Direct Marketing there are only 3 possible advantages
you can offer your prospects that will get them to buy.

Just 3.

Price, Exclusivity, and Service.

Price.
If you can offer the same goods the prospect wants to
buy at a lower price you’ll get interest. Some of
the great direct marketing fortunes were built on
price appeal – usually having to do with economy of
scale in manufacturing durable goods and food. Of
course you would have to convince your buyers that
what they are getting isn’t substandard crap. Same
thing with digital products – drop the price too
much and people assume you are selling garbage.

Exclusivity.
Do you think there is a reason that people jump at
the opportunity to pay thousands of dollars for
information products? It’s exclusivity, having
something other people cannot have – association
with people they admire and look up to – which,
as strange as it is, is something people do to
people who have more money… like powerful promoters –
Gurus, as you call them.

You can make any product/service exclusive but
obviously you have to back up your claims.

Service.
This is where YOU, the little guy, can compete.
The so-called gurus are buried in customer service
issues – so they have to outsource them to low
paid employees who don’t alwasy do a good job.

If you were to offer true superior service you would
have an advantage.

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To a large extent the goal of any direct marketing
business (which is all of us here) is to get a
Genuine Economic Advantage – meaning you have such
a good long-term profit system on the back-end -
up-selling and client-retention – that you can afford
to lose more money than the competition on the front
end costs of getting the customers.

Yeah, you ARE fighting an uphill battle against
entrenched, better financed competition, but YOU
CAN WIN! by choosing to compete by out-servicing
the larger competition with a narrower niche
market.

The best way I know to start to understand how to
compete is to talk to your potential customers…
on the phone is best. Email and blog responses
are pale in comparison because some of your best
data will come from people who only open up on
the phone – and even then it takes some skill to
get that to happen – it’s called persuasion.

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Just in case you are a reader, one of the better books
I’ve read on Persuasion is also one of the lesser-known
ones:

The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.