Hi,
Do you have an autoresponder, and
an email-list, then use this quickie
to create a personalized webpage
for all the people on that list.
Instead of having your sales letter
say:
Dear friend,
You can say:
Dear Michelle,
Automatically
This quickie shows you EXACTLY how to do this.
It´s quick and effective.
You will build more trust with
your prospects if they see
a personalized message on a
webpage. They aren´t very used to that.
Watch, Download and IMPLEMENT
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The Email-To-Web Personalization Trick
Quickie overview…
In 1998, I realized that the quickest way to make my email marketing campaigns a huge success, was to do something my competition wasn’t. At the time, that meant personalizing my promotional campaigns. The spam era had begun, and I needed something to stand out from the crowd - fast!
Nowadays, everyone is using a “mail merge” tool of some sort, to integrate key demographics of their list into their mailings. Usually, this takes the form name personalization - so “Dear friend” at the top of their emails, becomes “Dear John”, or whoever. It’s personal, and unique to the recipient.
Trouble is, this technique very often under-used - or worse still, undervalued. Personalization is a very powerful tool in marketing, and if you look around, you’ll notice that new trends are following suit. As technology progresses, so too will the power to personalize your business in many ways.
The inspiration..
It’s funny, but the inspiration from this technique actually came from a 12″ pepperoni pizza! I’ve often thought that the greatest marketing ideas, are those that are cleverly inserted into a business model that doesn’t necessarily NEED them, but still benefits from the creative genius behind them.
For me, this was one of these moments. I visited a friend of mine in the North of England, a couple of years ago. His town was pretty small - I’d say, no more than 10,000 people. Still, in that small town, I discovered one of the most incredible ideas I’d ever seen in a place I didn’t expect to see it.
The take-away industry!
One night, we ordered pizza take-out and my friend was so avidly set on choosing this ONE specific pizza take-out, that even I felt suckered to his sales pitch. He was dead-set on choosing this one particular place. So, we did. He picked up the phone and ordered. And 30 minutes later, we tucked into that pizza pie together.
After I’d finished my share, I was kinda puzzled. The pizza was fine, don’t get me wrong, but it wasn’t anything special. Just an ordinary pizza. So why did my friend choose THAT particular place, over every other? If it wasn’t the product itself, what urged him to go back over and again?
So I asked him, and he told me…
When he picked up the phone and dialed his number, the voice said…
“Good evening <name>, would you like to order your regular?”
Ingenious! The pizza girl on the other end, knew my friend’s name, without having to ask! And it wasn’t because she recognized his voice. It wasn’t because he was a key figure in his community, and everyone knew his name. It was simply down to creative planning by the business owner.
You see.. when he dialed the take-away line, his call was initially routed to a computer. Inside of that computer, was a customer database. And inside of that database, was my friend’s phone number, address, and complete order history.
The second his call connected, it did a caller identity check on the line, searched the database for his phone number, and displayed his information on the screen - so even before the sweet-voiced girl on the other end picked up the phone, she already knew her customer!
Pretty smart, huh? And you think about it for a moment, you can imagine the possibilities, not to mention competitive advantages, available to that company — before they even pick up the phone.
How about offering my friend a discount, automatically, after buying his first five pizzas? How about saving my friend some time from his busy schedule, and delivering to his usual address? Or even, how about recommending products he may already like, based on his past order preferences?
All of these things were possible, simply because the owner was smart enough to recognize that building loyalty, is about being personal. And loyalty fuels repeat purchases. It didn’t matter that my friend’s first choice didn’t make the best pizzas. What was important, was the service that gave him.
And that’s what inspired me to create this technique. The more personal you get with your clients, the money money they will give you. It’s as simple as that. I’ve noticed it time and time again. When my competition use marketing tricks - I use them too. But, I use them just a little bit more creatively.
What this technique allows you to do…
Lets say you’ve been collecting your prospect’s details in a mailing list, capturing their name, email address and the country they’re from. Great. Now what about getting that information over to the web? I guarantee you, that 99.9% of your competition will never figure this little truth out…
Most of your selling is done from the web…
So, it’s your website that should be the most personal, not just your email messages!
Since a mailing list manager and a website are two entirely different things, there aren’t too many ready-made solutions on the market that allow you to transfer information between the two. So, I’ve created this down-and-dirty hack that allows you to help bridge the gap between email and the web, and as a result, increase the personalization of your meanest sales machine — your website!
What you’ll need…
This technique assumes you already have…
— Some kind of mailing list manager. Perhaps it’s a follow-up autoresponder, like GetResponse or Aweber, or perhaps something you can install on your own website (i.e. a CGI script), like the Autoresponse Plus package. It doesn’t matter which, as long as you have been capturing a bare minimum of your prospect’s first name and their email address.
(Note: If you’re not already capturing both, then you should be!)
— A website, with PHP installed on the server that runs it. PHP is a free piece of software that allows you to do all kinds of wonderful tricks with your website. It’s known as a “scripting language”, because it allows you to “script” routines for your website that can be performed whilst you’re not there. Don’t be put off by the geek language. It’s a marketer’s goldmine.
— A “mail merge” feature, of some kind, inside your mailing list management software, that allows you to personalize mailings… i.e. do a “Hi <firstname>” type model, instead of just “Hi friend!”. Most of the good software packages have this. If yours doesn’t, buy a copy of Autoresponse Plus and install it into your site (the link is above) - and then import your old list into it, and modify your capture forms to grab your prospect’s name, from now on.
What it’ll cost…
If you have a decent web hosting account already, and a mailing list manager that allows for mail merging of specific details, then this technique is absolutely free. It won’t cost you a penny.
If your web host doesn’t support PHP and you’re not using any other kind of “scripting language” that you know of, then switch providers. PHP has been a dynamic part of the success of my own websites for as long as I’ve been marketing online, and once you use it, you’ll start to realize why.
Choose any web host with good uptime and customer support. Make sure they offer PHP and plenty of disk space (although for this technique, you won’t need any more than a “normal” site. It doesn’t require any special software, other than PHP and a mailing program).
One that fits the bill for me, is ThirdSphere hosting (owned and run by an Internet marketer). But you’re free to choose. Don’t pay any more than $25 for a simple site. It shouldn’t cost much.
How the technique works…
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Have a great day
MEMBERS AREA
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How the technique works…
This trick works by taking information merged into the URL inside of your promotional emails, and passes on that information to a page on your server - to display it as apart of the sales letter.
Here’s an example…
For this example, we’ll assume $firstname is the tag you are currently using inside of your email messages, to merge the prospects’ first name into your message… so
Hi $firstname! — Becomes… Hi John!
(If your prospect’s name is John, of course).
That’s inside of your email body. So, how do you get it over to your website?
Simple… lets assume your site is called abc.com, and your sales letter is located in a file over on your site, called letter.html
You’d now promote the following URL….
http://abc.com/letter.html?fn=$firstname
Which would be seen by John, as a link showing the following…
http://abc.com/letter.html?fn=John
At the moment, even with the “fn=” bit at the end (which stands for “first name”, by the way - but could really be anything), the website wouldn’t recognise John’s name.
That’s because at the moment, the page is probably made in static HTML which can’t personalize content, and even if it could, we haven’t told it which bits to personalize.
So that’s what I’ll show you now. How to make the interaction happen.
How to implement this technique…
This should take no more than 5 minutes. It’s very easy to do.
Step 1. Open your website sales letter into your favorite editor. I use Dreamweaver to create my pages, but you can use whatever you want. You can even use the Windows notepad, if you want.
Step 2. Right at the top of your page HTML code (even before your <html> opening tag), add the following line of code (you can copy and paste it from the code section of this Quickie)…
<?php $fn = (!empty($_GET['fn'])) ? $_GET['fn'] : ‘Friend’; ?>
Step 3. Now, every place that you want to include the prospect/client’s first name, insert this particular line of code…
<?= $fn; ?>
Step 4. Save the file as a PHP file (by giving it a .php extension), and upload it to your web server.
So, index.html becomes index.php, letter.html becomes letter.php, etc. This tells your web server that it should be treated as a PHP file, and be “parsed” and interpreted as such. Some web hosts allow you to use different extensions. Some don’t. If you don’t like the .php extension (personally, I don’t think it matters), then ask your web host about it. It shouldn’t make a difference, though.
It stills loads up in Internet Explorer as a normal page, it’s only your server that distinguishes it differently - and knows to process it as a PHP. All the existing HTML code will remain untouched.
Step 5. Test it out! Lets assume your PHP file is called letter.php, and you’ve uploaded it to yoursite.com. Try this…
http://yoursite.com/letter.php?fn=John
And also try this…
http://yoursite.com/letter.php
Noticed what happened each time?
If it worked, the first URL should show “John” on the page, and the second URL should simply show “Friend”. The PHP I wrote for your above automatically uses the ‘Friend’ placeholder when the first name isn’t specified (or more accurately, when the ‘fn’ bit isn’t added to the URL).
You need to add the ? sign, simply because that tells your web browser to send ‘fn=John’ to the PHP script. Your web server will do the rest.
Step 6. Repeat as many times as is needed, with other bits of information. Watch the video included along with this Quickie for more information on how to do this.
Conclusion…
This is a very simple PHP trick that can help you personalize your sales literature quickly and easily.
What I’ve shown you today is the bare minimum of what you could do with PHP, or with this entire concept for that matter. Big sites like Amazon.com and eBay.com have even gone so far as to tie in their customer databases with both email and the web, to create a full-blown, entirely personal experience for each and every separate customer and prospect that lands on their website.
With a little creativity and either the help of a good PHP programming guide or a programming friend, there’s no limit to what you can make your marketing do.
Further reading…
PHP is just one “scripting language” that can achieve what I’ve shown you above. I chose to use PHP because it’s easy to learn, installed on most web servers already, and there’s a ton of different books, guides and free resources scattered around the web and in your local bookshop that can help. Here are a few recommended resources for you, if you want to go that little step further…
Books and guides
— PHP / MySQL for dummies, with CD-ROM
If you’re absolutely new to PHP, then grab this book from Amazon or your local bookstore. It explains, in real simple language, what PHP is, what it’s about, and moreover, how to integrate it into a web database too - so you can do all kinds of neat things (like build an extended customer marketing system, and anything you can think of. It sells for around $20, and is a good guide for beginners.
— PHP Cookbook
Provides some good quick reference code samples that you can quickly integrate into your sites. Definitely worth the investment, if you want to delve into PHP more. You can get it for around $27 on Amazon.
— PHP/MySQL Programming for the Absolute Beginner
Superb guide if you’re brand new to PHP, and programming in general.
Free online resources
This site is a gem for those who simply want to find a ready-made software solution, and integrate it into their sites without the fuss or the hassle. There are a ton of free PHP scripts on that site you can integrate and use for just about any purpose, and many of them can be used creatively as apart of your marketing campaigns.
Go check out the “Mailing list management” section and see what you can find. There’s probably a few free email management scripts available on that site, too.
This is a PHP programmer’s goldmine. There are tons of free articles, tutorials and help guides on just about every area of PHP development that you can think of. I often refer to this site to turn my ideas into some kind of working reality.
Find a programmer
All of this PHP and coding stuff should be secondary to your main aim, which is marketing a quality product on the Internet, and turning a profit from your sites!
For that reason, I don’t recommend that you do all of your coding yourself. Your time could be better spent. But, if you’re on a budget and you only need to do a couple of things, then give it a try yourself. Sometimes, it’s just quicker and more cost-effective to do the little tasks yourself. For all other times, you can hire a programmer here…
or
Both sites allow you to tap into hundreds of freelance programmers who are ready to take on your project today. Because it’s used all around the world, it means you can also find people in a country in a lower overall income bracket, so your dollars can be stretched further for the same quality of work.
Hopefully, this Quickie gives you inspiration on other ways you can embed personalization techniques into your main marketing model. The sky’s the limit!
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