You are falling behind. Every minute, 500 hours of video is added to YouTube. It would take you more than three weeks just to watch that minute’s worth of YouTube uploads . How are you going to keep up with all the cat memes, new music videos, and funny clips from late-night talk shows,plus, find time to learn something useful?
More importantly, how are you going to get customers to pay for and watch the videos you offer? Or how are you going to get them to buy and read your books and newsletters? Or how are you going to stop them from quitting your subscription when they’ve already got more than they can possibly consume, with more getting added for free all the time?
A marketing piece for a well-meaning membership program recently. Trying to promote the benefits of his program, he included a photo of water shooting from a fire hose with a caption saying that you’d be so deluged with his information that it would feel like drinking from a fire hose. Your customer is already deluged without you. A lack of information is not the problem.
The opportunity is to motivate, distill, and prioritize information.
Back when we sent direct mail, we had to compete for attention in the mailbox. As a copywriter, I imagined my prospect sorting his mail over the trash can. If I bored him for a split second, the sales letter I spent weeks writing and thousands of dollars delivering to my prospects would be dropped into the trash can, gone forever.
But using email is even harder. Your member sorts email with her finger on the delete key. Your message is one of a long list of messages competing for attention. When she looks at her phone, she’s got notifications from iMessage, email, Facebook, CNN, and dozens of other apps. Then when she opens the email app, there are dozens of messages competing for attention. How do you get her to open, read, and click on yours?
I had three consulting days this month with three different financial publishers, each generating more than $50 million in revenue annually. Each of them dealing with high refund rates— some as high as 60 percent. Imagine the exhilaration of selling $1.5 million dollars of a product over the course of a product launch. Then, imagine the frustration of having to refund $900,000.00! Sure, they kept $600,000.00 in revenue, but still. There were a whole lot of customers who liked the idea of the sales letter but were turned off by the delivery of the product.
This is no different than the several membership and subscription programs I’ve worked with over the last few months, which have 60 percent or more of their new members cancel within the first four months of membership. Same problem, same frustration, and the same solution. Want to learn the solution for these high churn problems?
I’m about to reveal the magic secret of membership — the single most important factor in retaining and keeping your subscribers and members. It’s so important, I’ve dedicated an entire issue of The Skrob Report to explain each concept in detail and provide examples.
You put a lot of time and work into the sales system to generate a new customer. Now that you have this member, your product and monthly deliverables are a monthly sales letter to help stop your member from quitting your program.
How can you solve your members’ problem of information overwhelm? How can you get your member to pay attention to your monthly materials rather than watch endless videos on YouTube? How do you get your customers to read your mail and open your email messages?
There’s no value in information; the value is in delivering motivation, distillation, and prioritization. Deliver these and they will buy, stay, and renew.
About Robert Skrob
