Over the last 20 years, I have been using direct response marketing to help grow businesses and create brands like Sonicare, Clarisonic, OxiClean, and GoPro. Direct marketing with video is designed to evoke an immediate response and compel your viewers to take a specific action, like calling a toll-free number or making an online purchase within a specified time frame.

Direct response marketing is a highly ethical way of selling because it focuses on a specific problem and it aims to solve that problem with education and a set of specific solutions. It is also an especially accountable way to run marketing for any business because it is highly focused on return on investment (ROI).

The key to creating a higher ROI is to successfully appeal to your target audience by incorporating some of the most effective selling strategies of direct response marketing.

 

Four Most Effective Types of Direct Response Offers

 

Save Money

This type of general offer always works well in almost every product category and at all times of the year. It can be presented in many different ways:

• Pay half now, nothing later!
• 50% off if you buy today!
• Get two for the price of one!
• Buy one, get one free!

Hard Offer

This is where the purchase price is shown in the video. You will get fewer people responding, but they will be more qualified prospects.

Soft Offer

This offer does not reveal the product price, but might say something like, “payments as low as $14.95/month.” In my experience, you’ll get many more people to respond to this type of offer, but they will be less qualified, requiring more steps to close the sale.

Free Offer

Of course “FREE” is the most powerful word in the direct response lexicon. It hits the “hot button” almost every time. There are many things you can offer for free: free shipping, free gifts, free bonuses, free trials—all excellent ways to overcome buyer objections. Offering free info is a great way to get sales leads and to build your database of prospects.

Be open to testing different combinations of offers to find out what works best for your product.

A good example of this type of testing is the campaign I did for the Rug Doctor. They make the best carpet cleaners on the market, but until I started working with them, the units were only available for rent at select locations. My agency started a campaign to sell the units direct to the consumer. We must have tested over a dozen different offers, but the one that finally worked was simple: “Payments as low as $29.95, plus $50 worth of FREE cleaning products.” We sold 12 million worth of cleaners in the first year!

Following are some direct response offer combinations that hit the mark.

Rug Doctor

Price: $495 (soft offer). We did not reveal the price. Instead, we said, “Find out how you can get payments as low as $29.99/month!”

Free Bonuses: Cleaning products valued at more than $80, including products like pet stain remover, red wine remover, special OxiCleaner, and spot & stain remover.

Guarantee: A no-risk 100% 60-day money-back guarantee. “Try RugDoctor in your home for 60 days. If it isn’t the best carpet cleaner you’ve ever tried, simply return it for a full refund and keep the cleaning products!”

Upsell: An offer to upgrade to the RugDoctor wide-track unit for $700.

Sonicare

Price: $150 or 3 easy payments of only $49.95

Free Bonuses: 3 extra brush heads worth $14.95 each, plus a video on how to reverse gum disease.

Guarantee: A no-risk 90-day better check-up 100% money-back guarantee. “Try Sonicare for 90 days. If you don’t get a better dental check-up, simply return it and we will refund your purchase price—no questions asked!

Upsell: A second unit (or more) at a 20% discount.

GoPro

Price: $300

Contest Offer: We ran a series of 30-second TV spots with this offer at the end of each commercial: “Go to our website and enter to win one of everything we make every single day!”

Three things happened:

1. People would register for the contest allowing them to build their database and follow-up by email.
2. People would get to the website, watch all of the great video content, then share the videos with their friends, creating a viral effect.
3. People would purchase the product, generating revenue, which was used to buy more advertising, pumping up brand awareness.

Notice the structure of each of these product offers. They all have payment plans, valuable FREE bonuses, a strong and unique guarantee to eliminate risk, and a good up-sell to increase average order value. There are no limits to structuring offers as long as it works financially, so let your creative juices start flowing and see what happens!

FREE BONUS!

To get more great video marketing information, you can download, for free, my eBook, “The Top 3 Most Effective Types of Video Content.” I go into great depth explaining this information, how to create it, and hot it can benefit you.

Have a question? The answer is only an email away.