Category Archives: eMarketing

How To Order Pricing In Subscription Model?

I have been thinking about how to order your pricing in a subscription model. These last couple of months i have been reading; ” Influence: The psychology of persuasion.” One of the models that the author addresses is reciprocity. He states that the compliance rate of the rejection- then- retreat technique is very significant. As an example; if we ask on a campus if a student would be willing to go to the zoo with youth juveniles every week for a year 83% would say no. But if we back off after this question and ask them to at least go once, 50% would say yes. While if we would just ask them to go once, the compliance rate is only 25%. So, by asking a more and then backing off you get your compliance rate to increase with 100%. This principle is caused by a combination of the reciprocity tendency and the contrast mis-reaction tendency. Now to the marketing part; i am wondering, why are all subscription models priced like this; free – $100 – $ 1000 ( from cheap to expensive). Wouldn’t it make more sense to go from expensive to cheap ( $ 1000 – $100 – free). By doing so people will make a concession and take the second option.

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Jay’s Answer: The reciprocity model in the book is about a conversation. Start with a large demand, but with the goal of actually achieving a lessen demand. That works well when there’s one offer in front of a person at a time and you understand what the person needs.

When someone visits a website or reads your marketing materials, there’s likely no one from your company there to influence. The person reading may not be a serious lead, but is simply curious. So, would you rather have a random person interact with your company regularly (for free) or walk away? One common goal is to use the sales funnel to move them from free to very-low cost, and up the chain. You give them a taste and hope they buy a box to take home. If you start with a large price at first, the random person would read no further.

If you have a pre-qualified lead, then it would make sense to offer the $1000 option first.

How To Turn Software License To Subscription?

I currently sell my software for $750, per user license. This is perpetual license, and every year they pay 20% for maintenance. More and more customers are asking about subscription model. I’m looking for successful stories of transitioning from perpetual software license to subscription model – not Adobe, but small software vendors, distributors, without millions of customers. Looking for pricing ideas, how to ‘sell’ new idea to customers.

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Jay’s Answer: In general, subscription means cloud-based software (think SaaS). You could transition your desktop license into a time-expiration version (rolling out a new version to support this “feature”), but it can be tricky to do this right.

From a marketing perspective, these articles may provide the insight you’re looking for:

How Do I Market My Computer Repair Service?

I’m going to be starting a computer repair service. However, I’m not sure how to write articles to generate leads for an audience. How can I find appropriate materials (what kind of news would legitimize my business, that my customers will be looking for) and still market to a local customer base.

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Jay’s Answer: Don’t passively write articles and hope that will generate leads for you. You need to pick up the phone and/or walk up to local office front desks. By the time someone needs you, they need to contact someone they trust – not simply a name that’s anonymous. Join a local business networking group. Offer a free or discounted network security check-up. Offer to help repair a local non-profit’s or church’s computers for free or low-cost to generate some PR. Build up a 5-star Yelp following. Are you a certified repair person? If so, make sure you prospects know that you can be trusted. What can you offer your prospects that others can’t/won’t? Weekend repairs? After-hours repairs? Guaranteed repairs? Free equipment swaps to ensure no downtime?

Using Social Media Contents To Promote

We are a small, minority promotional items company. In addition to promotional products, we also sell custom embroidered & screen printed corporate apparel. Any suggestions for contents that I can use to promote our promotional items on social media?

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Jay’s Answer: Give away products to causes you celebrate, and invite people to nominate good causes.

E-platform Building – Best Practices

I am in the process of helping out to build an e-platform. Can you help with ideas on where to find a good book or interesting information on e-platforms (such as trip advisor, or the food recipes website, etc.)? I would like to have more inputs on what works, what doesn’t, how information should be provided, importance of picture or not, if people should be able to give an advice, etc… Basically, what are the best practices and key principles to build a successful platforms.

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Jay’s Answer: The best practices are those that connect with your target audience. So, it all must start from their needs, perspective, and your competition advantage. From there, there’s a lot of learning from your visitors on what they like and don’t (using analytics to help give you data). Ultimately, it’s about the curated conversations you’re able to conduct with interest visitors. As a clue, ignore the technology initially and focus on the experience you’d like to have with someone visiting your storefront. What image do you project? How are they greeted? What do you ask? How do you encourage them to return. Once you understand the human needs, then translate to a technology platform that supports that quality of interaction.

Marketing With YouTube

Marketing With YouTube(Photo by Esther Vargas)

If you’ve worked hard to get your website ranked well in Google (or if you’re just starting out, and trying to get your website ranked highly), don’t forget to create a video for your business (even if your business isn’t highly visual or you are camera shy). While Google is the #1 search engine, the #2 search engine is YouTube! The following are some basic tips I suggest to my clients:

  1. Title. Treat your video’s title like you treat your home page’s title. You want a title that will entice someone to click on it and also support your website’s SEO (search engine optimization). Make sure that you use proper keywords in the title.
  2. Description. Like the title, you want the description to be a balance between human-enticing text and appropriate industry buzzwords. Your description should support your title and promise to the viewer (why should they watch it)? Be sure to include in your description a link to your website – since that will help your search engine ranking (a good “backlink”).
  3. Keywords. YouTube allows you to also describe your video using additional keywords. If you’re not sure what to use, start by looking at your competitor’s video keywords.
  4. Audio. If you can, use a microphone to reduce background noise. We forget that a poor looking video with good audio is watchable. A beautiful video with poor audio isn’t.
  5. Video. Unless you’ve hired a professional who knows better, use a tripod to ensure your video isn’t shaky.

If you’re marketing something high-end or with a high-aesthetic, hire a video professional to ensure that your video quality is consistent with your branding promise. Otherwise, your first video doesn’t have to be perfect. The goal is to showcases the experience a prospective client is likely to have with you.

No one will know how many times you goofed up in recording your video. Don’t be too hard on yourself on how you look or sound. Simply having a video is likely to set you apart from your competition.

Don’t Miss The (Marketing) Boat!

Do not miss the marketing boat(Photo by Nahid V)

If you’re like many business owners, your mailing list isn’t well-segmented. That means that you can’t simply send a email blast to just women, or just people that have purchased from you in the last 3 months, or just people who live in a 10 mile radius of your store. But you have a new offer that you want to ensure the “right people” see. What can you do?

You make sure that the offer contains the magic words: “…For you, or for someone-you-know-who-is-the-right-person…“.

The key is that the reader of your message is likely to immediately make a judgement about your offer. If you’re selling a product to women, and the reader is a man, they’ll likely stop reading as soon as they figure out the message is not for them. Therefore, make the message apply to them as well (“For you…or for the woman that you love/know…”). That will help to frame the message as as “beneficial gift” for someone they know, which may elevate their own status.

Ideally, segment your list so you can market directly to your target market with images, language, and an offer that resonates for them. But until then, try to be logically and emotionally inclusive.

How to Draw Search Engine Traffic?

What’s the best way to refresh our Web site content to draw search-engine traffic? How often should we post new white papers, new blog entries, new uploads, and the like? Is it true frequent updates attract the engines and increase our rankings?

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Jay’s Answer: The first step is having the search engines find your new content. If you have a traditional website, then you’ll have to wait (passively) until the next time the search engines crawl your site. The higher the page rank of your site, the more frequently your site gets crawled. Google’s Webmaster Tools  for example, lets you see your crawler statistics. If you have a blog, when you update your content it generally pings the search engines (using a tool such as: http://pingomatic.com/ ) to tell them proactively that there’s new content. By pinging the search engines you increase the speed for people to find your new content. You can also post a message/link on other’s blogs telling them about your new content (creating a ping to the search engines), Twitter about it, use Social Bookmarks (such as: http://delicious.com/), etc. (all to increase the visibility of your information). If you have something truly notable, distribute a press release touting it (the press release itself can be SEO-optimized).

The content that you post should be well-crafted to achieve two goals: improve your search ranking (for the keywords you’re targeting) and achieve your business goals (get more clients, get more inquiries, get more traffic, etc.). Make sure that you don’t focus too much on the keywords and miss out on the human element: compelling copy that will cause prospects to take action NOW.

As for how often you should post content: it depends on newsworthiness of your content. If you have something that answers a problem that’s a “current problem of the day”, then by all means get your content into the discussion. Otherwise, release information that’s “quality” as you create it. You want your content all to be well-focused on your target audience without any distractions. You want to teach your prospects that you value their time.

Social Media To Promote Equality And Diversity?

How can you promote equality and diversity when communicating with your customers via social media?

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Jay’s Answer:  For a moment, ignore the tool (social media). Focus on the message itself. How can you promote equality and diversity in all your conversations (not just externally)(and not just “talk the talk” but also “walk the walk”)? And then from the perspective of your customer, why should they care about this message from you? Once you deeply understand the answers to these two questions, then you have the seeds for sowing in all your communication, and for instilling it in your social media channel(s) as well.

Online Marketing & Opting Out

I heard that a new regulation might come up in Singapore about online marketing, companies will need to go from an opt in to an opt out default settings in their website. Have you heard about this new regulation? Do you think that would be a bad news for a lot of companies and their online marketing?

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Jay’s Answer: It means that those that choose not to opt out are likely to be better prospective customers. It also means that you need to provide a great reason for people to not opt out.