As the first blog entry here on Pragmatic Solutions Now!, I want to address something that will be of interest to the majority of early subscribers, who happen to mostly be folks with Internet businesses of their own.  I tend to see blog posts as being more "personal" than articles, and as such, there probably won't be as much organization here as in my regular articles.  On the other hand, you'll have an opportunity to get a feel for my inner thinking, if that interests you at all.

Anyway, the reason I'm making the first blog post now is because I've started reading a new book, and I think it has a lot to offer those of us who earn our living by selling useful products and services to people online.

After spending years studying everything I could find online about how ecommerce on the Internet works, and investing in several high-level courses such as Jeff Walker's Product Launch Formula, Mike Filsaime's Butterfly Marketing, Frank Kern's Mass Control course, Paul Hartunian's Million Dollar Publicity, Glenn Livingston's Double Your Business Power Pack, several packages by Dan Kennedy and Fred Gleeck, and hundreds of smaller infoproducts, I felt I was pretty knowledgeable in the field of marketing on the Internet.  Well, a little $40 book has just given me a glimpse into a world I'm not sure if the "gurus" even know about.

The book is called, "Direct Marketing", and was written by Edward Nash.  You can find it on Amazon for about $40, and believe me, it's WELL worth it.

In fact, I think it should be the FIRST book read by anyone interested in selling anything online.

Okay, this isn't supposed to be a pitch to buy the book, but I hope I've made that point clear.  Get the book.  Now.

What this post is supposed to be about is the importance of going back to the basics in our businesses.  Many of us have bought into the hype around the $2000 marketing courses, and may even have believed they contained the "holy grail" of making money online.  Nonsense!

Oh yes, they contain great ideas, and even (to some extent) enough contextual information to put together a workable plan to make money online.  But they fall FAR short of giving you everything you need to build a SOLID business that will make you REAL money.  The best high-level marketing course I own in Glenn Livingston's Double Your Business Power Pack, and for the most part, it covers only ONE aspect in any real depth -- market research, which is critical to ensuring your business will be successful from the very start.

As some of my readers may already know, I started a project last year called the "Spiritual Business Kit", in which I planned to record the essence of what I've learned from all the high-level course and my experience in the 7 years I've run my business online.  As I reviewed my notes, organizing them into an outlines, I realized that I would be endorsing a business structure I was not then using -- a membership model, akin to Mike Filsaime's Butterfly Marketing concept.

Wanting to be congruent with my recommendations, I proceeded to convert my main website, which was built upon a shopping cart model, to a membership site.  After doing so, I spent several months tweaking the system until the sales performance was better than my original shopping cart site.  In doing so, I met my primary goal for the year, which was to double the profitability of the website.

In the process, I started using a software program I had purchased a few years earlier -- Split Test Accelerator.  This software package gives you the ability to test multiple variables at the same time, helping you get the BEST sales system with a MINIMUM of web traffic.  It was fantastic, and well worth the current $891 price.  (I bought it right before the price went up, and paid just $495 for it.)

We've all heard how important it is to test different things on your sales pages, and the fancy statistics involved "under the hood" of STA really put this idea into overdrive.  Amazingly enough, even this "high-level" statistical analysis is commonplace in traditional direct marketing!  We "internet marketers" just haven't taken the time to learn about it yet.

Of course, there are many other aspects of traditional direct marketing we haven't yet explored.  Many of us have mailing lists, where we collect names and email addresses from people who have expressed an interest in what we have to offer.  I dare say that NONE of us use our mailing lists with as much sophistication as traditional direct marketers.  Let me ask you a question here.  If you wanted to mail an offer to ONLY those who have not purchased a particular product you sell, could you do it?  Could you segment your list in such a way to mail an offer to ONLY those who have purchased Product A, but not Product B?  Could you mail an offer to any customer who had spent more than $100, but not in the last 6 months?

We concern ourselves with "list burnout", yet one of the easiest way to prevent list burnout is to mail offers to ONLY those who qualify for the offer in the first place!  In some limited way, we do this by creating multiple lists.  A list of people who have responded to a relationship building offer, and another list of people who responded to a prosperity attracting one.  By having multiple lists, we have (in effect) "segmented" our list into multiple categories.  Now, imagine having a single master list, where you can track the multiple interests of a single person.

It's possible, but not with the tools we currently have at our disposal.  Well, maybe there IS a tool, but it's not an option for most of us.  Infusionsoft.  Few of us are willing to invest $200 per MONTH to use a piece of software to run our businesses.  Yes, it may be worth the investment, but there's GOT to be a cheaper solution.

How about a FREE solution?  OpenOffice, which many of us use for word processing and spreadsheets, has a database component, very similar to MS Access.  I've developed applications in Access before, but haven't used the OpenOffice Database program much.  I'll be spending time getting familiar with it in the coming weeks.

As I see it, at least in my situation, I would download the databases from my shopping cart, aMember, and mailing list programs, integrate them together using OpenOffice's Database program, and then upload the combination into the mailing list software to use in segmenting my list, so I send offers to only those who may be interested in them.  I'll need to work out exactly how to do this, however.

Most autoresponders give you an option to record additional data with each subscriber.  This data can be anything, including products purchased, amounts spent, date of last purchase, and so on.  Having this information in an autoresponder makes it so much easier to target your mailings and get better results.

I imagine that many of my readers may wonder if it's worth the effort.  After all, sending an email to the whole list doesn't cost anything, and it's certainly a whole lot easier.  Well, let's take a quick look at the real cost.

First, you take the risk of sending a discount offer for a product someone may have recently purchased.  If they spent $50 for a product yesterday, and you announce a $20 off special, they'll want the $20 discount.

Second, you risk burning out your list for sending out too many offers.  On the other hand, you also risk not being as profitable as you could be, since you could send out multiple non-competing offers to different segments of your list.  Without list segmentation, you have to limit the number of promotions you send out so you don't burn out your list.

The third 'cost' of not compiling a database is that you may not notice buying patterns.  For instance, with a database, you may notice that some products are more popular with European customers, and other products are more popular with American customers.  When you have this kind of "market intelligence", you can target your sales messages to the different market segments and make more sales.  Thus, the 'cost' here is lost sales that COULD have been made if you had the proper market intelligence.

One of my articles posted here talks about how I used a survey to build a mailing list of 1800 subscribers in 2 weeks.  The survey questions I asked were minimal, and asked about preferred learning styles, price points, and favorite authors.  Even with this little bit of data, I could send out offers for audio products to those who indicated they preferred audio products, offers for ebooks to those who indicated they preferred to read, and offers for video products to those who indicated they preferred that type of media.  I could also target offers for low-priced products to those who indicated a tendency to purchase lower-priced items, and reserve the high ticket promotions to those who would appreciate the value they represent.

I realize that all this is rough information, and may not immediately make sense to all my readers.  In a way, I'm also committing the ultimate 'sin' of marketing and telling you upfront that there is work involved.  Oh well, that's life.  It's time to get used to it.

So, what is the "pragmatic solution" in all this?  Simply to always keep the basics in mind whenever you start out to 'solve' the problem of business success.  Learn to walk before you run, and check out the book I mentioned earlier.  It will be the cheapest form of business education you'll ever find in this field.  And when you're ready, start looking into ways you can incorporate as much data as you can into your mailing lists.