What PPE (Pay-per-email) Will Look Like

• It’s going to be a bidding system.It’s impossible to assign a single number to the value of a delivered email.Some mailers couldn’t afford 0.1 cent per email.Some mailers could afford $5.00 per email.But in any case, the more you bid, the more of your emails go through.They’ll only charge you for the ones that go through (I hope).But again it’s just like those Google ads.The #1 position gets twice as much traffic as #3 and pays twice as much per click.So he pays four times as much for twice the visitors.He can afford to do so because his conversion rate is better than everyone else.Yeah, there’s a place for low bidders, but they get the scraps.
• You’ll be bidding against people who are competing for the same email boxes.One email box belongs to a high-flying investor who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars of transactions online.Access to him costs a nickel or a dime per email on any given day.Meanwhile, [email protected] belongs to a Wiccan in Nova Scotia who grows her own food and doesn’t even own a credit card.Access to her: 1/20th of a cent.
• You might still be able to get through for free (or for less money) IF your readers white-list you.Getting them to do so will be the name of the game.Since hardly anybody can get every subscriber to put them on a white list, the ones who are 50%, 70%, 90% successful in getting white listed will pay less than everyone else.People who relentlessly pitch their lists, have poor relationships with their readers and offer little real content will constantly fight an uphill battle against email costs.A cult-following email list will be a wonderful luxury for marketers like you who bring personality, flair and substance to their messages.
• This adds a new dimension to the Unlimited Traffic Technique and the Winner-Take-All Phenomenon.As I’ve been teaching for a long time (and as Jonathan Mizel has been teaching even longer), the Holy Grail of Internet Marketing is achieving a Visitor Value that’s higher than all your competitors.You typically start with Google AdWords, using it as your “traffic conversion anvil” and patiently work your sales funnel until it’s profitable.Then you roll out their product in other media – Overture, ezines, banner ads, affiliates, popups, partnerships, whatever – creating a cash avalanche as the fire spreads.Now email itself becomes another dimension in this formula.It’s both a barrier of entry for unproven marketers and a distinct advantage for those who know what they’re doing.Winners win even more now.
• You can no longer be sloppy about maintaining an up-to-date email list.You don’t want to pay for 3-year old email boxes that aren’t even checked anymore.People who never click on any of your links, never respond to any offers, never even open their emails need to get scrubbed from your list.People with email lists of 100,000 or a million ‘subscribers’ will find out how few they actually have.Many people will find the real size of their email list is one fifth or one twentieth as big as they thought it was.The list isn’t 3 million, it’s 300,000 and the cost to hit the list isn’t $7500, it’s $750.(“Hmm, maybe PPE isn’t as expensive as we thought it’d be, if we do it right.”Would you pay $750 to talk to 300,000 people if you knew most of them were paying attention?)You’ll devise specific mechanisms for sorting the tire kickers from serious prospects, even just within email, to keep cost at a minimum and relevance at a maximum.You’ll do lead generation inside your own list to create segmented sub-lists.
• Offline marketing starts to be taken more seriously by online marketers.If email costs anything at all, then snail mail gets a lot more attractive.Talking to customers on the phone gets more attractive.Doing customer appreciation events or instant messaging with them becomes more attractive.
• Renting space in your e-zine to others becomes more lucrative overnight.If you have a good relationship with your customers and a well-groomed email list, people who do not have those things will be instantly more inclined to pay you real money for that access.
• During the next five years, good copywriting will go from being an obscure specialty to highly prized, mainstream skill.Five years ago, ‘copywriting’ to most people meant people who know how to put that little © on a product.The word is getting out though.Direct marketing is taking over the Internet, and lemme tell ya – when email starts costing money, copywriters’ fees everywhere will go up.Sally business owner will know that if she’s paying for those emails, they better get written by someone who knows how to tell a story.If your copywriting skills are flaccid, then you’d better go to www.perrymarshall.com/marketing/copywriting/ and listen to my teleseminar with John Carlton.And get crackin’ because the clock is ticking.

How This Changes Your Economics – A Typical
Customer Acquisition

Let’s say you sell a software program for $199 and you sell it with a NameSqueeze™ page that offers a free download version of your software.You have an autoresponder sequence that follows up with a series of ten emails.Subscribers automatically get on your newsletter mailing list too.You pay 25 cents a click and 25% of the people who click, fill out the form and download the software.

If that’s your math, then each software download costs you $1.00 before Pay Per Email.After Pay Per Email, each software download costs you $1.10 plus a penny per monthly newsletter.Your marketing costs have gone up 10%.

If your conversion from opt-ins to sales is 1%, then your cost per sale went from $100 to $110.

Is that a problem?Considering it weeds out other marketers, it’s probably not a problem at all.

On the other hand let’s say you sell that software program for $9.99 and the clicks cost 5 cents apiece.The autoresponders still go out at 1 cent per message.Let’s say your opt-in rate is still 25% and conversion rate is 5%.In this case the cost to acquire a customer went from $4.00 to $6.00.PPE adds 50% to your marketing cost.A marketing strategy that is heavily email driven may stop working.

Creating Sub-Lists will be critical to your success as an efficient, effective marketer.If you sell health related products, you won’t want to send headache emails to people who are on the arthritis list.People who want to hear from you once a month will need to be separated from people who want to hear from you every single day.

The lesson here is that if your business is heavily dependent on the fact that email is free, you must re-engineer your business so that you can both afford to pay for the emails you send and that you use other ways to communicate with customers.Otherwise you’re in deep yogurt, dude.

Perry Marshall