Become a friend and people will buy from you - REALLY?

I think you should test your theory....

Start mailing your list treating them like they are nothing but email addresses with paypal accounts or credit cards...Let me know how it works out

Good answer. They make bajillions because they have built
relationship with their buyers.

I think he's just blitzing the board right now with a bunch of these posts. At least that's the way it looks from the number of posts (not necessarily a bad thing).

Who knows, throw enough stuff against the wall and something's likely to stick.

Maybe he should put them in his blog.

Just sayin'...

~Bill

Now why does this have to turn into an insult?

And, the impression I get from your reply is that since a few people agreed with you, that it should be "case closed", and the whole point of my original post is that I question this "commonly repeated theory" that's all.

I wasn't asking for help, I was questioning a commonly held belief.

If there is anything I did wrong it's not communicating the point better in my original post that I was not asking for advice, just presenting a contrasting opinion and seeing what others thought

You can disagree, that's fine.

And, just to repeat something Armand Morin said. You DON'T want a list of friends. You want a list of people that are your FOLLOWERS and there is a difference.

And in my opinion, the 3 names I mentioned do not write emails to their list as you would write to a friend, they write their emails as if they have something to sell to a list of possible buyers.

They didn't get me to like them, and they didn't get me to know them before the tried to sell me something. They perhaps got me to trust them by giving me some information in exchange for my email address.

Have you heard other marketing experts say that the prospects' excitement for what you have to offer, is greatest when they first come in contact with what you are offering.

You will get your highest conversion percentage of prospects to buyers when the prospect first made contact with you and then the percentage decreases the longer time passes from that first contact.

I've been getting emails from filsaime for years and armand morin even longer, and they haven't changed their email style at all.

I wanted to reply, but it was quite a bit longer than this post should hold.

So I put it on my WF blog.

10,000 of my closest friends

Enjoy!

Ross

If I have a choice between two identical looking sets of features and one sales page/person is talking to me with respect, seems to care about my feelings, and looks like they'll be good natured about a refund, if necessary, then I'll pick that one instead of the one that's simply highly professional.

If highly professional is $27 instead of $47 then I'll take $27 and my chances.

I've joined various memberships over the last year that have more or less new information. I've cancelled some I didn't really need. I'm still hanging on to one that I don't really need but that I like the way she puts the info, like the way she interacts in the forums and asks for our input and lets us know what's going on with the development of the additional classes and that she decided to move x section earlier because so many people were asking about it.

If it cost twice as much, I'd likely still have cancelled.

As others have said - it's not necessarily about the word "friend" but all other things being equal, I'll buy from someone I feel like I know and like. And as a marketer myself I try to figure out how to be someone my potential clients can know and like.

I'm also a product development chemist by day. As such, I'm one of the gateway influencers for new raw material purchases, although the salesman still has to get through our purchasing department.

There are salesmen that I've liked and enjoyed spending time with whose companies just won't price their products in a way that makes sense for us. There was one that we had lunch with and kept saying no to for years. But we always took his appointments, even when we didn't really have the time, and listened to new offerings - occasionally offering some low-volume business. Until it became a matter of strategy to have a second source everything we could. And we picked that company over three with prices within 5% of each other to get 20% of a high-volume raw material. Because he - and the various other people from his company that he'd brought in over the years - treated us like "friends" and gave us the opportunity to know and trust them.

You don't need to do it. You can be a great business without it. But it can be a difference maker in individual sales and in whether or not people refer you to others.

Sounds like the debate is largely about the "Liking" and "Authority" principles that Robert Cialdini talks about in the book "Influence". We're influenced by people we like (hence, people advising that you write emails in a friendly tone) and we're also influenced by people we see as authorities (hence people saying they don't need to feel like the emails coming from a friend as long as the sender is an expert on the subject).

The OP didn't mention specific examples where people recommend to "write like a friend", but I'm pretty sure that expertise on the subject should be taken as a given. No matter how friendly your tone, if the reader doesn't think you know what you're talking about, then you have no credibility. So the question should be, taking it as a given that you're communicating expertise and authority on the subject, does a friendly tone increase conversions?