Financial Newsletter Marketing - Let’s Look at Investor Place’s Product Ladder
July 30, 2008 by John_Newtson
I’m probably pretty annoying when I start preaching to clients.
I don’t care though because I’m working to make them money. And since I have quite few (maybe too many) clients in the financial markets all of a sudden I’m starting to sound like a broken record.
If you’re trying to build a large, multi-million dollar financial publishing business it pays to examine the structure of the biggest financial publishers. So as part of an ongoing Financial Marketing series I’m going to post my analysis of quite a few financial publishers.
We’ll start with examining product ladders because they are fundamental to both your back-end marketing and building a profitable financial info-publishing business.
Today I’m breaking down a snapshot of Investor Place’s product offerings for you.
Investor Place started out as Phillips Publishing, a financial newsletter publisher run by renowned direct marketers Tom Phillips and Bob King. (Rumor had it Tom sold off each of his three divisions of Phillips Publishing for $100 million a pop — Investor Place is just what became of the financial division.)
So let’s take a look. They have a wide variety of product offerings:
- 11 FREE e-letters — These email lists are their lead-generation tools and part of their communications/ editorial platform. When you have a reason to email prospects and customers regularly with content you engage them so that you can also email them promotions, from which you make money.
- 7 “Front-end” products– These are paid newsletter services that I’d categorize as front-end products which you would use to acquire as many new customers as possible with. The goal of front-end products are primarily 1) get new paying customers so you can sell your profitable back-end products to them. 2) to help capitalize your new customer campaigns and pay for the media
- 15 “Back-end” products and services — Direct marketing is the business of the “second sale” because all the profit is usually made on your back-end sales. Investor Place has 15 backend products ranging in price from about $395 a year up to over $5,000 a year.
If you’re in the financial publishing business you would want to look at the subject matter of those products, the price-points and the offers they structure to get testing ideas, product ideas, etc.
To put this in terms of building explosive sales growth look at what this product ladder means:
- They can drive leads through multiple online media — ppc, seo, syndication, sponsored emails, etc — to 11 different e-letters which serve as a platform to sell other products and serivces. (And probably act as an additional revenue source from advertising).
- They can capitlaize media like direct mail, pay-per-click, banner-ads, rented email lists, etc — with 7 different front-end newsletters. So if they are effective at marketing in 3 paid sales-channels that gives them 21 potential customer acquisition campaigns running at any given time assuming they don’t have multiple creative campaigns running at the same time for each product.
- They can sell 15 different high-price (and high-revenue) products to all the customers and leads they are generating. So they can promote more than 1 high-price product a month to all year long if they want. Or if one is selling phenomenally well they can redirect customers and leads from multiple front-end campaigns to sell them the best-performing product.
In short, this is one financial marketer who has a considerable amount of options available to them because of their robust product ladder.
Click here to view or download a PDF of their full product ladder with price-points inlcuded.
Yours for faster profits,
John Newtson
Chief Direct Marketing Officer
Explosive Direct Marketing
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[...] Click here to see the front-end products and back-end products for InvestorPlace. [...]