Wildly Successful, Low Cost Leads

Some time ago one of my Marketing System Toolkit customers used his critique certificates to get help on an email blast. Christoph sold rotary machinery sensors and he decided to rent the Sensors Magazine email list. He sent me a glitzy, lovely HTML ad with pictures of his products, which he planned on sending out. It was a techie version of Madison Avenue – you know, clever text about how cool their stuff is with some features and benefits and a link to their website.

No, no, no. I told him to do it like this (also notice the email header – it comes from Sensors Magazine but when people reply, the replies go to Christoph):

OK, so here’s what happens: He sends this to the magazine advertising rep. She says, “Huh? What’s this? You can’t do this.”

“What do you mean?”

“This is not a normal email, nobody does it like this, Christoph. I don’t understand this.”

“The marketing consultant told me to do it this way, so that’s how I want to do it,” he replies.

“Well… Okay. I guess you’re the customer.”

So here’s what happens: He rents 1000 names for 45 cents a piece. They blast out the email.

Next day I get a very excited email from him:

8% response from total strangers. Not bad, eh? Also, 45 cents a piece might sound expensive for emails, but that’s the going rate for professional grade opt-in lists like this. And look at his numbers: He collected these leads for $5.60 each. He got responses from real people at real companies who have real projects or have specific interest in this topic. And he got personal replies, not just opt-ins on a web page.

In the industrial market, $5.60 sales leads are unheard of. Not too unusual in Perry’s land of Guerilla Marketing though.

Important Stuff About How We Did This…

The most important thing you need to recognize is that we set this up so that Christoph would personally receive and process these requests, not an automated robot or web form. That’s probably what the magazine ad person thought was so strange. Why did we do this? Because we wanted an 8% response instead of a 3% response.

This affords another opportunity: A conversation. Because when Christoph sends the person’s PDF back, he replies with this message:

People reply to his email and a conversation begins. The next step is a warm phone conversation, and a cold prospect is converted to a hot lead. Notice how none of this ever looked like, felt like, or smelled like spam. No spammer would ever put “Rotary Sensing Tech Guides” in an email subject line. Plus the FROM field is “Sensors Magazine” which is a trusted source.

Now you know exactly how to bring hot leads to a hungry business, one or two or three days from today. All you need to do is find some email lists and go forth and prosper.

Perry Marshall