Let’s compare direct sales vs mlm because there are tons of folks who have the entrepreneurial spirit and drive but don’t have enough startup capital. Direct sales and multilevel marketing provide ample opportunities to start your own business. While multilevel marketing operates a subset of direct sales, the two approach sales in different ways, which range from product type to structure of organization and costs.
Direct Sales vs mlm Products offered
With direct sales companies, durable goods are the products mostly offered. These goods usually cost significantly and lend themselves to a single sale process. Not many customers will purchase a second and third set of these durable goods. On the other hand, MLM companies usually deal with consumable goods like home care products, herbal supplements, and food products, which cost less but quickly get repeat sales because when a cleaning product or herbal supplement impresses, a customer. They are likely to purchase it again.
The Structure Direct sales vs mlm
Direct sales businesses majorly through centralized manufacturers that produce the product. The companies contract out sales jobs to freelancers who do the door-to-door selling. The salespeople earn commissions based mainly on the number and size of their sales. Most multilevel companies follow a similar structure, but there’s a twist: salespeople can recruit other people into the company who are referred to as downlines who make more sales and earn income. The recruiter then qualifies to earn a certain percentage of revenue based on the sales effort of the downlines. With continued sales from the downlines, the upline (recruiter) will receive residual income on top of what they already earn from their own sales.
Startup Costs Direct Sales vs mlm
Startup costs with multilevel marketing programs are usually lower than that of the average startup. One reason for this is because of the lower costs of products. With multilevel marketing programs, salespeople often maintain limited or no on-site inventory, which saves the seller the stress of having to store or replace products. On the other hand, direct sales business requires that sellers maintain a stock of usually expensive products, which creates higher up-front and recurring costs as well.
Whether direct sales or multi-level marketing, there is a potential for accelerated income, but to do this requires figuring out what best fits your needs with regards to driving lead generation and boosting sales. Email marketing is a reliable way to do this.
In this day and age of the forever changing internet, there is a massive world of prospective customers and downlines waiting to be harnessed, and email marketing is making it easier to reach them while spending less.
How Can I Grow My MLM Business
Growing an MLM business can be complicated or straightforward, depending on how much knowledge you have about building your team and the ways of executing your team building. Most MLM companies recommend starting with a list of at least 50 people, you know. However, the problem with this strategy is that you might find that you are beginning to annoy friends and family. It would do you good to spend time looking for people who are interested in your offering than trying to convince community friends to sign up when they have no desire to.
A great alternative is to buy leads. Although this is not the best option because it means you’ll be spending more and may result in leads that may have no interest in your product or business. Sometimes these leads are not the best.
The best option, after all, said and done is generating leads yourself and reaching out to people who have shown they are interested in what you sell. Here are some things you can do about this. List building for sales is a valuable skill set to acquire.
Set up a website for list building
Some MLM companies have policies regarding websites. Some companies might offer you a website of your own or a page on their website, while others allow you to design your own. The best option is to make your own because you would want to be different from your competitors. If you cannot build one by yourself, you can hire designers from freelance platforms to create your own.
Build an email list
List building is part of your email marketing strategy. Building an email list is crucial to capturing prospects and turning them to conversions. There is a system to it. The first step is making them aware of your product and driving their interest by visiting your website. This is then followed by asking them to sign up for free offers such as reports or something useful from your website. For instance, you can provide helpful wellness guides if you sell wellness products. This will keep you at the top of the mind of prospects or customers. However, take care not to spam them.
How to use Social media to build your list
People don’t usually take to posts on social media asking to join teams. If you are clever, social media can be an excellent tool for generating interest in your business and getting possible leads. For instance, if you are selling weight-loss products, you can post before and after pictures on Instagram. If makeups are your thing, you can upload videos to YouTube that can be shared across other social sites.
Develop a referral offer to build your list
Like every other business, people that others have referred can be easy to convert to a sale than those who weren’t, because they can easily come to you with interest in buying. Many people you’ve talked to might not be interested in buying at the moment, but they might know people who are.
Happy customers may want to share a product or business. You can develop a referral program to incentivize people to refer others to you. For example, they can get a 10% discount on their next purchase for every new customer referred.
How Do I Market My Direct Sales Business
With the number of direct sales businesses that abound everywhere, it seems not many consultants are building highly successful businesses. The industry is getting increasingly competitive. You need to have not just a substantial marketing budget but a robust understanding of internet marketing to explode your direct sales business. Here are some of what you can do:
A blog to build your Direct Sales business
A blog is an excellent tool for complementing direct sales business. It is important to first know the conditions set in your agreement before doing this. Some companies don’t allow sellers to use the company name on their domain, so it’s best to choose a domain that relates to the product.
A blog acts as a supplementary marketing tool that adds more value to what is already provided. Customers would appreciate a blog offering tips and generally enhancing their experience.
Leverage the Power of marketing Content
Social media is, without a doubt, one of the best platforms for direct sales business. However, you might not reach high numbers organically if you are not paying for ads to reach a broad audience. For direct sales consultants on a budget, a practical alternative is content marketing.
Content marketing involves creating posts and articles that provide useful information to clients without spending a dollar to do this. You can then promote the content to spread the word about your business. As your loyal customers share your content, you will continue to get an endless stream of follower with interest in your product.
Create Popping Graphics
Using eye-catching graphics can get heads turning quickly. However, you have to pay close attention to what your direct sales company approves for marketing graphics and rules regarding creating your own. You will have better blog posts with eye-catching graphics going along, and an easy platform to get some great graphics is Canva. You can get many free images and elements that you can use to make professional-quality graphics in minutes.
Network Marketing Recruitment Secret
One problem most network marketers always face is how to recruit people for business success. Going the traditional route of building a list made up of family and friends doesn’t work too well anymore. And even when it does, the list is blown through pretty quickly. Moreover, it is common knowledge that if there is anybody quick to put down your fire and enthusiasm, it is your family and friends.
So what should a network marketer do? Use email autoresponders!
Autoresponders allow you to continuously generate leads, build your own lists of prospects, get referrals, and make more sales. Autoresponders can run on auto-pilot, which means you can focus on other aspects of your business or life. Some people call them email marketing on steroids. Some email service companies do not allow mlm or network marketing to be marketed via their email autoresponder service. That’s is good information to know before you pick a service.
With autoresponders, you can always stay in touch with your network marketing team and communicate with prospects so as to turn them from potentials into buyers and teammates. Without an autoresponder, it would be challenging to do this for a large list.
Free services like Yahoo and Gmail don’t offer this.
Stats have shown that messages can be very useful when people are continuously exposed to them. And this is what email autoresponder will do for you. Rather than contacting people one after another, which would take a lot of time and effort, you can comfortably set your business on autopilot mode by using autoresponders to schedule and send mass emails and relevant content to be sent to subscribers over a period of time.
One essential secret about network marketing with email list building with autoresponders is that you own your list. So if for any reason, an MLM company experiences problems, becomes unavailable, or goes out of business. You will still have your list, switch to another company, and maintain your reputation and never have to start from square one again.
