Recently we used a marketing technique called the “eblast” to launch my new book, RiskBuster. Within a few hours the book made #1 in the Home Based Business category and the best seller list in three categories both on Amazon.com and on Amazon.ca. What most authors might find interesting about this fact is that it wasn’t an accident; it was a planned effort and it wasn’t expensive to do.
An eblast is the act of partnering with opt-in list managers who agree to email their subscribers on a pre-arranged campaign timeline, usually 24 to 48 hours. List managers who participate are known as joint venture partners.
The idea is that, during the campaign period, all of the partners email their lists a warm invitation to visit a landing page or sales letter. If all goes well, the sales letter compels visitors to buy the product. This was the third time we’ve used the eblast method, with similar results in each case.
Although an eblast can bring amazing results, it’s not free to set up, and there are number of challenges that can thwart entire effort. Here are some of the complications that can kill an eblast:
- A partner doesn’t send out the email invitation to his or her list. Considerable effort goes into building relationships with partners whose subscribers are potential buyers. It takes a fair bit of jostling to get the right partners to mail during the scheduled timeframe in order to build momentum and traffic. For a variety of reasons, the emails sometimes just don’t go out, which reduces the volume of emails and limits the potential for sales.
- Targeting the wrong lists. If the eblast is to be successful, you will need to partner with list managers whose subscribers are interested in your book or product. No number of emails will result in sales if the target recipient doesn’t need what you’re selling.
- Bad sales copy. All the email hits in the world are for naught if the sales copy on the landing page is uninteresting or ineffective. A well-written sales letter will catch the visitor’s interest, answer all of the main sales objections and lead the visitor to click on the “buy now” link.
- Broken links in the infrastructure. In our case, we wanted to drive traffic to the Amazon website to buy the book, and then return to our website and enter a confirmation number in order to receive a handsome number of bonus gifts. The website infrastructure included roughly 35 different web pages. Any broken or missing links between the pages can result in frustrated or lost customers.
- Technical failure. If for any reason your server or your website goes down on the day of the campaign, all your efforts are lost. Fortunately this has not happened to us, but we’ve always had technical people handy to deal with any glitches.
The good news is that all of these challenges are manageable, and the risks can be minimized.
An eblast is an Internet marketing method that should be of interest to any author attempting to sell books in today’s marketplace. I recommend the technique to authors as one part of a multi-pronged marketing strategy. The biggest win of all is the expanding global network of marketing alliances and the amazing friends we’ve made in several locations throughout the world.
Interested in joining Team Oasis? Become a RiskBuster Business Plan Oasis affiliate. We offer 55% commission on ebooks and 25% commission on membership and printed books.