Sales Genie has stuck their neck out and taken a big leap of faith by advertising during Super Bowl XLI. They’ve signed up to pay over $8000 per second to air their ad. If their ad is compelling and their message hits home, their gamble will pay off by encouraging hundreds of thousands of visitors to their web site over the following 48 hours. Then, the essential key to the success of the ad is Sales Genie’s ability to convert those visitors into paying customers.
Long ago, I visited the Salesgenie site. They were advertising on Fox News, I happened to be watching and I went to check them out. I have to admit, I found the whole promotion process employed by Sales Genie to be deceptive. They didn’t convert me into a customer and I can’t help but imagine that hundreds of other site visitors won’t be reaching for their credit cards any time soon.
Sales Genie’s ads claim that you can take their services on a trial run. They offer a FREE trial with a list of 100 names.
FYI: A list of 100 names in a direct mail campaign is defined as a TEST run. Since direct mail response rates run in the 1-3% range, mailing to a list of 100 names might net you 3 interested prospects. If your closing ratio isn’t in the 33% or above range, you probably won’t close a sale from your test, but you can see if the names one the list are legit. You’ll be able to see if there is ANY possibility of value by the number of returned mail you get. (By the way, you can NOT expect 100% deliverability from ANY direct mail list.)
When I visited the sales genie web site and clicked to begin my free trial, I was greeted with a form submission type screen which asked for the basic information. Name, address, phone, email … you know, the basics, which I provided. (OK, I confess… I didn’t enter a valid phone number and the email address I used is one I use for “junk.” Oh, and I may not have provided my “real” mailing address either.)
Once I submitted my information, I arrived at ANOTHER screen. This time, I had to input my credit card information to start my “free” trial.
WHOA! I thought this was a free trial! I don’t know them well enough to share my CC information with them!!! (Heck, I didn’t know then well enough to share my REAL contact information with them! Their site is very “content light.”)
I stopped there, but found myself on the sales genie emailing list. (Someone with a similar name in Nebraska may have found themselves answering a few telemarketing calls as well, but I wouldn’t know since they didn’t get my real phone number.)
Now that I think about it, I’m sure that is part of Sales Genie’s plan. The information they collected for the “free trial” is now in their database, to be sold to other potential visitors. If that is the plan, it has to be “plan B” because Plan A SHOULD be to get people to pay the $150 per month subscription fee!
Ever since, they’ve sent me dozens of email messages. I recently posted about this one below. It’s where Sales Genie is preparing me for how crappy their Super Bowl XLI ad is going to be. I share this screen shot with you so you can see how an HTML email arrives for most people.
See those blank holes? I know the thumbnail is small, but see the side bar to the right? That’s supposed to be where an image lives. Any text contained within that image has been lost. The only way I’ll see text within this image is if I tell my email client to “trust” this address. I know what this message contains because, fortunately, they didn’t hide this essential text inside an image.
I digress though. Sales Genie is preparing to spend $8500 per second on an ad which will air February 4th during Super Bowl XLI. This ad probably won’t differ much from the ad I saw on Fox News. Hopefully, the end result will be 173,330 visitors to the site with 1 out of ten becoming a new monthly subscriber. (17,333 X $150 first month subscription = $2.6 million)
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