Common Advertising MISTAKES

 
One of the mistakes most often made, is not looking at your product
or service announcement from the point of view of your customer.
Stand back and look at what you are offering, how can you present
that service or product in such a way that it will appeal to you. If
you are offering a service, why should someone buy it from you,
rather than the other 1000 people offering that same service?
Sometimes it's a little tough to be objective when looking at your
own ad copy. I look at ad copy everyday and to be honest I'm really
shocked at some of the things that I see.

I'll save space here by not repeating all of them. Rather I will
list a few ways to get your offer, be it newspaper,direct mail or e-
mail, thrown in the trash immediately. There may be some things here
you don't want to hear or believe, but take my word for it the
things I'm listing can make the difference in success and failure.

I will talk only about your initial contact advertising, follow up
contact takes a completely different tack. Listed here, not
necessarily in their order of importance, but rather in the order in
which they can get your message trashed are just a few of those
Mistakes.

1. Not addressing your offer to the recipient. (I know, you can't
take the time to address all that mail)I would say at least 50% of
the people receiving e-mail not addressed specifically to them, will
immediately hit the delete key. If your offer is so fantastic that
you can loose 50% of your audience right out of the gate, by all
means send out mail with your self, both as the sender and the
recipient. Or addressed to friend@whatever.com. You get the idea.
You will also find this tactic addressed in the anti spam
legislation. ( Note: This does not apply when sending mail to an opt
in list. )

2. Using a vulgar or unrealistic sender address, I'll leave the
vulgar to your imagination. As far as the unrealistic,
dontmiss@this.com or just4u@me.com again you get the idea. You will
also find this tactic addressed in the anti spam legislation. For
the sake of ease (math was never my long suit) let's say this tactic
looses you another 10%.

3. No Subject or a subject that causes an immediate delete. Now what
could be a subject that could cause that? Well, how about. EARN A
MILLION DOLLARS WITH JUST 1 TIME INVESTMENT OF $20. 00 or any
variation of that theme. Again you get the idea. Now you may well be
saying to yourself, but that's what my program offers. That's
wonderful, but in order to get someone interested in that program, a
different approach is needed. Something like:Income Opportunity 5
minutes of your time could be the difference. or:Home business
opportunity! Let's Talk. What can a grandiose subject line cost you,
we'll say another 10%.

4. The cc: field filled with dozens of addresses or the To: field
for that matter. If you need to send the same e-mail to more than 1
recipient use the bcc: field. If your mail program does not offer a
bcc: field GET ONE THAT DOES! There are so many reasons for this it
would take another entire article to address all of them. But the
main one in my opinion is you do not have the right to advertise
those addresses to the world. It is very bad netiquette. You loose
another 10%

5. HTML other than url's. There are many, many people out there that
don't have the $10,000 set up that you have, and their mail programs
DO NOT translate HTML into anything but gibberish. If you want your
message to be read, write and send it in plain text. The percentage
here is probably higher but again we'll say 10%.

6. Sending e-mail the size of War and Peace. Here again there are a
number of reasons not to do this. Besides the main one, there are a
lot of people out there that are limited in the amount of space
their mail server will allow. Mine (yes, I still maintain one of
those free addresses) for example is 2000k. When my inbox, saved
mail and drafts exceeds that amount my mail STOPS. Not 1 day goes by
that I don't receive at least one 75 to 100k e-mail. 20 of those and
I'm out of business. The other important reason, the recipient just
won't take the time to read a book in there e-mail. A message of
that length needs to be on a web page. Opp's we lost another 10%

Ok, let's examine what happens when we make all those mistakes in
sending out 1000 of our e-mail ad's. Right off the bat we loose 50%
by not addressing our offer to the recipient. That reduces our
mailing to 500. We loose another 10% for our return address. Were
down to 400. 10% more for no subject, now were at 300. We decided to
advertise those addresses our up-line sent us to the whole world and
lost another 10%. Now were down to 200. Our new e-mail program is
really neat and we put flowers and red, white, and blue stripes on
our outgoing messages, now were down to 100. We had such a great
story to tell and we were just so excited about all the neat stuff
we spent 2 whole hours writing down every detail. You just lost your
last 100 potential customers.

Granted, I have never received a single e-mail that contained all of
those mistakes, but it only takes 1 or 2 to significantly reduce
your response rate. You can't afford to let all your efforts and
hard work go to waste by making these easily correctable mistakes.

"Your Success Is Our Success"

jbp

About the Author

[ jim Peters is Manager of HREF="http://NetServeInt.com">NSI "SOLUTIONS". NSI
specializes in custom website design,promotion, maintenance, HREF="http://registeryourdomainforless.com">domain
registration ,site
hosting ,site and graphic design, as well as e-commerce
packages for small to medium sized companies. In other words
"SOLUTIONS".]

 jim Peters

More Articles 

The Deception of FFA Advertising - Dan J Fry
FFA, or Free For All sites are the next generation of internet marketing. Or at least that's what many want you to believe. FFA sites are places where anyone can post a short ad with a link, as long as they agree to accept emails from the...

Did You Know That Coupons Help Track Your Advertising Dollars? - Rhonda White
It's not just the cost of a product that is on the customer's mind. Customers want to save money. They know that if they save a dollar, that's another dollar still hidden in their pocket. All though there are still a big percentage of shoppers...

Web Surfers Revolt Against "Pushy" Advertising - Jim Edwards
(c) Jim Edwards - All Rights reserved http://www.thenetreporter.com ===================================== As the Internet continues to populate with websites trying to turn a buck, two drastically different schools of thought have developed on...

Push vs Pull Advertising - Henry Coleman
Push vs. Pull Advertising - Understand the Consequences for your Product or Service You will save yourself a considerable amount of time and money if you first determine your product’s (or service’s) suitability for "pull" and "push"...

Don't Just Advertise, Track Your Advertising! - Pat Singleton
Advertising is not an exact science, so you need to give yourself every advantage, when it comes to determining where to spend your budget! When you place your Contact or Autoresponder info at the end of the ad, do it so it's a simple clickable...

5 Common Advertising Mistakes You Can Easily Avoid - Bob Leduc
5 COMMON ADVERTISING MISTAKES YOU CAN EASILY AVOID Copyright 2002 Bob Leduc These 5 common advertising mistakes cause you to lose sales. But you can easily avoid these mistakes once you become aware of them. 1. STOP AND GO ADVERTISING Many...

Targeted Ezine Advertising - Marla Bland
So... what does "targeted ezine advertising" mean? It means placing your ads in ezines that are related to the product or service you are promoting. The readers of these ezines should potentially be more interested in your offer. Let's get...

Pixel Advertising Site Takes Off - James Allsopp
Pixel Advertising is increasingly becoming the most popular and cost affective way to advertise on the internet. A year ago pixel advertising wasn't heard of and didn't exist, that was until a student named Alex Tew invented the idea...

Business Promotional Items - How to Stimulate Word of Mouth Advertising - Cindy Carrera
If the promotional items you give out end up in the attic or shoved in the back of a desk drawer, they are probably not doing what they are supposed to be doing. However, if items you passed out to clients and customers are being seen again and...

Taking Advantage of the BEST Advertising Around - Joe Bingham
There simply is no other form of advertising that is as effective as ezine advertising. Think about what the good ezines do. They offer information, education, and entertainment to readers. They target specific audiences. They go out regularly to...