Selling Your Vision in Your Ezine - Vision
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Vision is what you see as your defining end.
Mission statements and vision statements have fast become corporate fads. Ever since Tom Peters' book In Pursuit of Excellence and other books started insisting that corporate re-engineering is based on "mission statements" and "vision statements," everybody has gotten one.
A vision is quite simply what makes you wake up and go to work every day. Without a vision, you will despise your work. If you despise your work and your business, then it is quite certain that your customers will notice and despise your work too. The first, most important thing in a business is the vision.
We can parallel this point and say the most important thing on your website is your vision. Let's see, Google's vision is to be a "simple free search engine," Amazon is the "biggest online book seller," Digg is an "excellent book marking site," Technorati is all about "blog search," Snap is a "cool behavioral search engine," and eBay is an "anything goes auction site."
Once your user has bought your vision, buying your product is inevitable. You have become more than a URL, and you now "stand" for something definite. You have become a brand.
The Big But
The problem is that most online business owners, or people with a website presence, take the second most important thing in a business as the only thing. Most businesses seem to believe that they are only in business to make money. Well, making money is the most important reason you are in business, however with that as your only reason, you are guaranteed to not make too much of it.
Most website owners want traffic, and a lot want traffic to translate to sales. This is why all the search engine optimization and Internet marketing research is done ad nauseum. Email campaigns are also expected to be successful, hence all the copy writing and building of your opt in database. But a lot of online businesses have no idea what the website is about, which means a lot of pain suffered by the designer/copywriter (yours truly).
Before you can adequately communicate your vision to your users through your email, you must first discover it. Unfortunately a vision is hard to discover if it was not there from the beginning. A good way of checking your vision is by asking what would be the point of your business if you weren't making any money. The person reading your email is not really interested in buying your products, not until they buy your vision.
For example, I get a frankly horrible newsletter once a week that gives stock tips. The design is awful, there is little content apart from "buy before Monday" and there is always an indecipherable part at the end. Now, I also get stock tips from another organization's newsletters once every few months. The design is mundane to the point of boring, but according to their adverts, they want me to "spend more income when you retire," that is all.
This makes me take the second company's stock tips quite seriously -- after all, they want me to retire in ease. That is their vision, not the benefits of buying their mutual funds (which include increases over the past five years, free stock picking advice and other normal benefits) nor the features of their money management schemes (pension schemes, capital appreciation, portfolio management). As a subscriber, I do not really care about what features you offer (unless its unique, then I promise to review it). Benefits can motivate me, but sell me on your vision; it's what makes you go. In this case, "making ME retire" in ease is what makes this mutual fund company thrive.
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