A Product Launch is the process of building anticipation and emphasizing scarcity in a hungry market, towards the release of a new product / service, positioned to have the potential to make a significant impact on the target customer's life.

In the Internet Marketing world, Product Launches are powerful marketing vehicles used by Information-Marketers to drive a massive amount of traffic on a specific day ("Launch day"), with the goal of converting the wave of anonymous traffic into qualified leads and then paying customers.

For the past 5 years, SPI has been instrumental in orchestrating some of the largest most-successful product launches online, working with leading information marketers on applying time-tested techniques to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in product revenues.

Some of the recent product launches we handled include ListBuilding, GoogleCashDetective, 7FigurePPCSecrets, LaunchTree, AffiliateClassroom, PPCClassroom, DirectResponseMarketing.

Why does it work

Product Launch Marketing works so well because they build on two fundamental human traits:

#1. Herd Mentality - Follow the leaders
In the weeks building to the launch, opinion leaders and peers within your industry, will all glorify how great this product is going to be and why you absolutely must have it.

#2. Scarcity - Desire to want what we can't have
Using a limited number of units, fixed close date, early-bird discounts, one-time-offers and other tactics, the company will build the impression you must act fast or lose the opportunity to own the product forever.

Examples of great well-planned product launches: The iPhone, "The Secret" DVD, StomperNet 3.0, Gary Vaynerchuk's CrushIt book.

In Numbers

A typical Internet Marketing Product Launch these days, yields $1m (One Million Dollars) on launch day, followed by $200k in monthly residual payments from a continuity program.

It is far easier to convince 2,000 prospects to pay $99 a month, than it is to direct-sell a few large accounts in order to generate the equivalent of $200k in monthly revenues.

1,000 users paying $99 a month = $100k a month
2,000 users paying $50 a month = $100k a month
4,000 users paying $25 a month = $100k a month

50% of the revenues are often paid back to affiliates.
20% is the average three-months drop-out rate.

The SPI Product Launch Program

With the "Product Launch Program", we are now helping dozens of companies in various industries, capitalize on this phenomenal marketing strategy.

The SPI Product Launch Program, is not a how-to tutorial, or an online course.

This program is a joint-venture between you and SPI, whereby our company will work with you, hands-on, on every aspect of your product launch in a joint effort to make it a big success.

What you can expect from SPI, during this process:

* Hands-on consulting
* Introduction to leading information-marketing affiliates
* Access to case studies, analytics and proven tactics, used by leading information marketers
* Access to live front-end and back-office systems, so that you can learn what works best
* Professional services: Landing page design, Hosting, Affiliate system, Payment solutions
* PLR: Videos and mp3 files to complement your member's-only content
* Membership system integration (Wordpress+plugin / aMember / SPI)
* Load testing, to ensure your setup can handle launch-day traffic
* Affiliate emails autoresponder kit
* Corporate address, Call center, Help desk
* Ongoing Software development / website customizations / graphic design

Application Process

Our success over the years has made this service very popular. Committed to maintaining our strong reputation, SPI dedicates a lot of resources to every individual product launch we are involved with.

Unfortunately we cannot blindly accept new clients into this program.

Please contact your account manager (or email us here) for details on how to apply.

Whether you are an individual user sending email to friends & colleagues, or use a commercial email-sending service like Constant Contact, it is important to regularly check your sending ip address hasn't been black listed.

Today we released a simple tool that lets you easily test if your mail server is black listed with any popular black-list DNS service:

Email mail server Blacklist Checker



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Don't know your sending mail server ip address? Send an email to yourself, then view the message headers.

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Everyone knows video helps conversions. But most people who incorporate a video on their landing pages, use Amazon S3 to host the video, or use one of the dozen video sites like Viddler, Vimeo, Veoh etc.



Back in 2007, Adrian wrote about how we were migrating all of our videos from YouTube to ScreenCast.

Back then (maybe) it made sense... YouTube didn't have High Quality and we were doing primarily screen-cast type videos.

But nowadays, if you're not hosting your landing-page videos on YouTube, you're missing out big time!

5 reasons to use YouTube for your landing page videos

1. YouTube is where your traffic is



2. YouTube now offers full high definition

3. YouTube is the longest standing video service. Owned by Google, it's future is rock solid while some of the other video-hosting sites are facing financial difficulties.

4. YouTube channels and subscriptions actually work. Offer great content and you'll build a loyal following.

5. PPC traffic to Youtube videos on your landing page equals free traffic.

This is Key:

If you embed a YouTube video on your landing page (use &autoplay=1 to get the video to automatically play as son as the page loads), every page view translates to 1 view on YouTube.

The more views your video gets, the higher it will rank in YouTube and Google organic searches! Tag your video with the right keywords and include them in the video title. Pretty soon, you'll find you're getting lots of free clicks from Google search results.

You can even turn-off your PPC traffic later on and the traffic will continue.

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We've recently helped two online retailers take their foreign brands global and penetrate the US market.

The process of "Americanizing" a foreign brand typically takes 6 to 12 months, but with the US accounting for almost 30% of the world's GDP, it's well worth it.



There are 4 common strategies for penetrating the US market:

Acquisition

Royal Bank of Scotland. This company built up a strong retail market share in the US, not under the RBS brand, but through a series of acquisitions of regional (not national) banks.

Unique Customer Experience

IKEA. IKEA offers a furniture retailing value proposition and experience unparalleled in the US market. IKEA's location selection expertise and their established global supply chains enable them to offer an exceptional category-killer customer experience.

Low Overhead

ING.*The Dutch bank converted its weakness (no retail branches in the US) into a strength. Taking advantage of its low no-bricks-and-mortar cost structure, ING was able to offer generous rates on certificates of deposit.

Channel Partner

Dyson. The British home appliance maker earned a break when it managed to get a Best Buy buyer to take one of its vacuum cleaners home to test. Best Buy became the first US retailer to stock Dyson vacuum cleaners--other US retailers invariably follow Best Buy's lead.

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Since most companies don't offer a unique customer experience and don't have the big pockets to use the acquisition path, here at SPI, we favor a combination of the "Low Overhead" and "Channel Partner" approaches.

Our US Market Penetration action plan typically involves four steps:

Phase 1 - Test Market Reception

Use existing online-marketplaces (Amazon, eBay, PriceRunner etc) to list company products and test demand,prices,competition with minimal upfront investment

Phase 2 - Build brand recognition

Launch a dedicated US website and use Social Media Marketing to tell the brand story. Start driving all traffic to the brand site.

Phase 3 - Online Marketing

Email Marketing, PPC, Affiliate Marketing and Media buys, driving massive traffic to the brand site.

Phase 4 - Full-blown Traditional Marketing

TV, Radio and Offline media campaigns

Great video that explains Social Media in plain English:



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SPI's Social Media Marketing programs are designed to help unknown brands become recognizable, build a cult following and most importantly: convert all the buzz into business.

Quick note to give a Big Thank you to Gabe Elliott at Yahoo Search Marketing Solutions.

Gabe is our dedicated account manager at Yahoo Search, a Content Network expert, ninja PPC account manager and an all-around great guy to work with.

SPI has been working on consolidating a little over 200 client Yahoo Search accounts, into a single master account, as well as utilize Yahoo Search Marketing API for better bid management.

Gabe's attention to detail, relentless proactive follow-ups and API help, has been instrumental to this effort.

We expect to complete the migration process within the next few weeks.

If any of you SEM professionals out there, are still not taking advantage of Yahoo's reach, you're simply missing out!

In our experience, once you narrow down on the right type of traffic, conversion rates with Yahoo are generally higher.

I was helping a new SPI client today, migrate their email campaigns and email database from Constant Contact to the SPI Email Marketing system.

Constant Contact is a great entry-level "Shared Email Marketing" system.

You can get up and running within a few minutes and spend a low $15/month for a list size of up to 500 recipients.

Similar solutions include: JangoMail, AWeber, EmailBrain, ActiveTrail and others. All are "Shared Email Marketing" system.

What is a Shared Email Marketing system?

Much like "Shared Hosting" in the web hosting world, a Shared Email Marketing system is running multiple Email Marketing accounts on a single server, sharing the machine resources and in most cases - sharing the outgoing IP Addresses.

Sharing IP Addresses means once a rogue Email Marketing client sends a campaign to a bad list and gets the IP Address black listed, your email deliverability will immediately suffer and you're not even going to know about it.

Email sending rate limits

Due to the nature of how a Shared Email Marketing system works, the Email Service Providers (ESP), fanatically try to protect their limited outgoing IP addresses reputation, by applying rate limits, list size limits, forced list re-validation and restrictions on list acquisition.

Our client was attempting to send out a small 8,000 campaign to existing customers. All email activity was abruptly suspended in their Constant Contact account, with these two messages:





The benefit of a Dedicated Email Marketing System

A dedicated Email Marketing system, like SPI Email Marketing, provisions a dedicated server, dedicated set of IP addresses, unique email domain, reverse DNS lookups, DomainKeys and optional whitelisting, per every single client account.

The end result is greatly improved delivery rates and more freedom to apply your own philosophy when it comes to marketing to your customer base (As long as you're not spamming).

If you are no longer using shared hosting for your website, it's time to consider dedicated service for your Email Campaigns as well.

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