It is a fact that most people do not buy a product the first time they see it, it usually takes three or four times before there is enough product recognition to create a desire to buy. Most retail outlets post new products in several places in the store intending the repeated exposure to the product will create an awareness and then a desire to try it. Book authors send out press releases and post posters well in advance of a signing to create the same product awareness and to increase sales. This technique works especially well for products like "StickySheets" which are pet hair clean up products. The grocery stores, place them in the pet aisle, the household cleaning products aisle and to increase the awareness, they place them on an end-cap of an aisle.
The same technique of increasing awareness for a product is as easily applied in Internet marketing as it is in good old fashioned door-to-door marketing. Take the example of John Craig, now author of Secrets to Creating Passive Income. As a young man on break from college, he decided to invent his own job and paint address numbers on curbs on summer. In the first neighborhood he visited, almost no one responded to the young man knocking on doors and explaining his service. In a flash of inspiration and possibly a weariness of saying the same thing over and over again, he decided to print up flyers and leave them on the doors of his future customers one day before he knocked on their doors. "I left the flyers there with an introduction, explanation of the service, a good reason to do it and the price. The next day, I got more than 80% of the people to hire me to paint their curbs." He primed the customer with an expectation and then they were actually looking forward to his visit, some of them told him they were glad he came by when he did because they were afraid they were going to miss him because they had to leave for a while.
An online version of this same principle comes in the form of the recorded phone call (phoneburner.com). Most people with 'Caller ID' ignore numbers they do not recognize and let the 'machine' pick it up, which is exactly what this Internet entrepreneur wants them to do. He leaves a recorded message on his potential customer's answering machine about an e-mail he plans on sending them. This Internet guru reports that 90% of the people he then sends an e-mail to actually open it. 90% open rate for any piece of mail, electronic or otherwise is a stunning result.
EJ Thornton, publisher at Books to Believe In suggests to her clients who buy print advertising to buy two print ads in the same magazine. Her belief is that once the book has been seen in the magazine, it has registered in the psyche of the reader, and the second time the reader sees it, they immediately remember it and check back to see if the book is actually the same book. When they realize it is, it solidifies name of the book in their memory much more so than seeing it only once. She also encourages her authors, for the very same reason, that if a magazine does an article on a book, that the author take out an advertisement as well.
Prime your customers and expose them to your new product repeatedly is a great way to boost sales and marketing success.
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