by Dr. Jeffrey Lant

The other day the CEO of a network marketing company told me a thing so stupid, I immediately wrote it down. I put it in a box I keep stuffed with the really dumb things people tell me, and if I'm ever blue I take the box out and read these things for a while. It doesn't take too long before I'm cheered up again, delighted that my mamma didn't raise no fools like those.

This time, the nitwit-in-charge said, "I don't like either card decks or the Internet. You get too many leads. I prefer to have my distributors marketing the product to their family and friends. That way they can really concentrate."

Frankly, it's too bad that we don't tar and feather people anymore. This guy would be a top pick for the honor.

All Marketing Is A Numbers Game

Although lots of people in marketing don't like to admit this, marketing is, at root, a numbers game. And the game works like this:

## assess all marketing tools open to you

## use every single one that's cheaper to use than the money you make from it

## closely assess every prospect lead that comes in to ensure that the person you're dealing with is real, has the desire and resources, and could (properly handled) proceed to take action NOW, and

## keep assessing everyone who has bought to see if they're ready to buy again (and to drop them if, upon consideration, they can't or won't).

In short, successful marketing is a machine. And you must run this machine relentlessly. That's where the astonishingly powerful combination of card decks and the World Wide Web come in.

How Card Decks Work

You've probably seen card decks. They're ubiquitous. But just in case you've missed them, a card deck is a package of offers generally printed on post-card sized paper. The cards are bound and mailed to specialized target markets. The major benefit, of course, is low price. Since the markets in question generally range between 100,000-150,000 prospects, you can as a card deck advertiser hit large numbers of prospects at reasonable cost. Just how "reasonable"? Well, my quarterly Sales & Marketing SuccessDek (targeting entrepreneurs, opportunity seekers, business CEO's and directors of sales & marketing) costs $14 per thousand, by far the lowest cost in the industry, with four-color rates just $1.50 per thousand more!

Traditionally the point of a card deck is to generate prospect leads. On a card you put the most enticing message you can to get a prospect to call or fax you or to mail in the card for your information package. Depending on your market and what you're selling, a predictable response ranges between 1/4%-1%, and if you use business reply mail the number of leads (though not necessarily their quality) will probably be higher.

How The World Wide Web Works

The World Wide Web is a means of graphically communicating within the Internet. The Internet is infinite space that you access via your computer and where you can connect with home pages posted by advertisers. These advertisers are shop owners; each individual home page is a store. Unlike traditional stores, however, which exist in one place with traditional hours and ways of doing business, an Internet store is vastly different, to wit it

## exists wherever there's a computer with access to the Internet

## never closes

## can be updated literally every minute

## is infinitely expandable

## can accommodate an infinite number of prospects simultaneously.

Right now now there are between 30-50,000,000 people with access to the Internet (12,000,000 of them Americans) and at least 250,000 more log on weekly. The potential market, in short, is immense.

Linking Your Card Deck Advertisement With Your Home Page

The trick is to bring these two powerful advertising forms together, to start using them in tandem to generate maximum results. To do this, you need to start by conceptualizing your card and home page as a unified package designed to both generate and close the maximum number of prospects with maximum speed and efficiency. Let's be clear about what each aspect of this package should be doing.

-- card deck

Your deck card should

## promote the strongest possible client-centered message. This message must stress the most believable and detailed benefits the prospect will get by acting NOW;

## having stimulated the prospect to respond, the card must then provide a number of ways of capturing prospect leads and relevant data (name, address, phone, fax, etc), including phone number, fax number, e-mail and web site address. Here, you are saying, "I am doing everything possible to control the entire sales process. I have created the strongest possible prospect message to stimulate the biggest and most qualified response... I have done everything possible to make responding easy for prospects whenever they wish to respond, and I have captured all relevant prospect follow-up information."

Generating prospect interest and capturing prospect names is, of course, important. But thanks to new developments in technology, you can now go way beyond this traditional card deck objective. That's because your card deck should also be directing people to an Internet home page where you can include ALL the information the prospect needs about your product/service... as well as the details the prospect needs to order it 24 HOURS A DAY! In other words, your card deck card should provide the means not just of generating prospect interest (and giving you prospect follow-up information) but getting the prospect to buy whether during regular business hours... or not! An Internet home page with fax-on-demand capability enables you to achieve this objective.

-- home page with fax-on-demand capability

Traditionally, card decks (like other forms of space advertising) have existed to generate leads. Once advertisers got the lead, there was a whole lot more work -- and expense -- in store for them, including:

## designing and printing information packets

## storing same

## mailing or otherwise shipping same

## launching often time-consuming follow-up to same, etc.

In short, getting the lead only began the sales process.

But this is horse and buggy marketing in our space age world!

When you've got a home page with fax-on-demand capability you

## do everything in your ad as before to stimulate your prospects' interest

## provide them with all the usual means of connecting with you (phone, fax etc).

But you also

## tell prospects to get on the phone (at their expense, mind) to get complete details (including an order form, remember) via fax-on-demand, and

## direct them to your Internet home page, where you can include as much information as you need to completely explain your product and service (benefits and features) and sign the prospect up immediately.

I want you to be very clear on what I mean.

On your card deck card, in addition to providing your phone, fax etc you will also provide a 24-hour-fax-on-demand number... and a web site address where your prospects can access all the information they need about what you're selling... including order forms. The fax-on-demand number they use at their own expense... the web site they can access for free (or as part of the service they get by paying a provider like Prodigy or America On Line.) Either way, it doesn't cost you ANYTHING -- a real change from the old-fashioned (and expensive) way of connecting with prospects you're probably using now.

Your Home Page Is A Virtual Reality Store

Because the generally used words "home page" aren't very accurate, lots of people are confused about what a home page is, can do, and how it should be operated. Well, let's set the record straight here and now. A home page is a store, pure and simple. However, as I said above, it's not like any other store you've been in, and offers unique advantages that no physical store will ever be able to match. However, when you've got a home page, you're a shop owner... and must behave like one. This means...

## working to capture the prospects' interest from the first moment they're at your shop. Headlines must focus on what prospects want (gain) or what prospects fear (pain). They must say, as pungently and directly as possible, "when you enter my store you get <benefit> or you avoid <what they want to avoid.>" You don't have time to pussyfoot around in cyberspace. The very phrase "surfing the net" suggests how "visitors" (which is what prospects are called) approach the net: they come in, sniff, and move on. If you don't snag them immediately, you've lost them.

## having gotten past the first problem (grabbing their attention), you need to move quickly to solidify your position. Don't drone on about what you've got... hit the visiting prospect with one specific benefit after another. Say, "You get this... and this... and this." Here the best rule of successful copywriting makes sense, "Lead with benefits. Follow with features." If your visitor likes the benefits, he'll hang out to find out more; if the benefits don't entice, the features of what you're selling and who you are certainly won't.

## don't stop with benefits, however. Add a page of features... descriptive information that makes it very clear to the prospect what he's getting. A physical store has this advantage: a prospect can pick up the item for sale, look at it, sniff it, squeeze it, use other senses. You can't do this -- yet -- on the 'net. But you can do something no traditional store can do; you can provide the most detailed information imaginable about what you're selling, and as much of it as you need to make the sale. Thus, include a complete description of what you're selling... and provide a list of commonly asked questions and answers. Spice up the text, too, with color photographs, flashing text, color separators, icons and all the other bells and whistles which make Internet home pages so interesting and eye-catching.

## include an order form. Don't just use the Internet to generate prospect leads, use it to close deals. People can download your order form and fax it to you so that when you walk into your office in the morning, you'll find you've already made money -- the best possible way to start the day!!!

Note: with the best will in the world, the most compelling home page, every visitor is not going to buy. Thus, do two things:

1) give away a freebie that the prospect can get only by leaving his/her name, address, phone, fax, e-mail, etc. Freebies, like everything else in marketing, must be focused on the benefit they bring... not just what they are. Thus, don't give away a "catalog." Provide a "free year's subscription to a quarterly 30-page business success catalog featuring dozens of ways to make your business more profitable NOW." See the difference? The one is a feature... the other offers an exciting benefit. And the only way for the prospect to get this benefit is leave complete follow-up information. "Sorry, we can't send this exciting benefit without your phone number."

2) provide means for the prospect to follow-up, including your name, address, phone, fax, e-mail address, etc. Different people act in different ways. You've got to be prepared for all of them.

The Fax-On-Demand Component

The company that places your home page on the web should also be capable of providing you with fax-on-demand capability. If not, go elsewhere. (Unsurprisingly, I provide that service.) Here's how fax-on-demand works best:

## use your deck card (along with your yellow page ads, other space ads, business cards, brochures, etc.) to promote your fax-on-demand number along with the benefits of calling that number NOW (24 hours a day). Tell your prospects to "get on their fax machine to get the benefit information they want right this minute."

## ensure that the information they get back is more than hype. Fax-on-demand works best when you use it for more than merely stimulating prospect interest. Remember, you've already done that... or they wouldn't have called your fax-on-demand number. What they want now is hard core information about what you're selling. They want to know the benefits, to be sure... but they also want to know the features... and they want to know precisely what they have to do to get the product/service.

Thus, your fax-on-demand transmission should be composed of these parts:

## page 1: benefits. One benefit after another, including testimonials from satisfied users

## page 2: features. What is the product/service composed of? How does it work? This page includes key details about what you're selling that would interest a qualified prospect who has already clearly expressed an interest.

## page 3: order form.

Clearly, you can extend this package. Your feature page, for instance, may end up being two pages long. I have also found that a "commonly asked questions" page works wonders to cut down on the time you need to spend with prospects going over things you can easily deal with this way.

Note: keep in mind that you can change your fax-on-demand transmission daily, even hourly if you want. The benefit of fax-on-demand transmission is that it's always up to date. This means you can use it to promote special offers, provide details about stock on hand, etc. In short, you can use it not just to transmit information but to do what's necessary to motivate faster buyer action. And the delightful thing is: customers get all this at their own expense, not yours!!!

A Few Tricks Of The Trade For Successfully Using Card Decks And Home Pages (With Fax-On-Demand Capability) Together

By now your brain should be boiling with ideas. This stuff is pretty neat, no? To conclude this report, here are a few "tricks of the trade" to improve your results even more.

## don't just provide a fax-on-demand number and web site address on your card (or other advertising). Tell prospects what they're going to get: "Dial <number> now and you'll get a FREE three-page report that will tell you how you can get <benefit> now." Or, "when you access our home page you'll get <all the benefits you can think of>."

## make your fax-on-demand transmission and your home page easy to read and visually interesting. These days people don't read; they glance. If it looks "hard" they may say to themselves, "I'll come back later." But, they never do. If you want people to get the information that's essential to your well being, you've got to make it easy, easy, easy with more than a dollop of fun and good humor.

## change things around. If you were running a traditional store, would you leave the window displays the same for months on end? Of course not! You've got to rearrange things, use the new graphical developments (they're coming at breakneck pace now), update your benefits, add new testimonials. In short, you've got to think like a store owner and not an advertisement placer. Once you've read an ad in a newspaper or traditional marketing source, you've read it. Finis. But people will return over and over to an interesting home page... if you make it valuable for them. Note: a good systems operator/mall manager sees it as part of his job not just to upload text... but to advise advertisers of the latest developments to make their home pages more interesting. In my malls, for instance, we provide advertisers with free weekly marketing tips on what's "new and hot". They can then decide which items they wish to add to enhance their home pages and stay competitive in the constant battle to attract and hold fickle prospects.

Conclusion

The traditional card deck is a threatened animal. Since 1994 paper prices have risen by over 50% with drastic postage increases imposing even more costs on hard-pressed card-deck owners most of whom had to raise prices substantially to stay in business. In the process, lots of advertisers were squeezed out of the market thanks to these developments; unsurprisingly, many decks got smaller, with several going out of business altogether. Then, like some deus ex machina, the World Wide Web phenomenon intervened to make card deck advertising -- when linked to the Internet and fax-on-demand -- even more profitable for even more advertisers!

When you link a card deck card to a home page with fax-on-demand capability, you're not just generating prospect leads any more. You're getting leads and actually closing sales. What's more, you can do this 24 hours a day, not just when you're physically available, while cutting your own costs of doing business. Now what could be better than that?

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