What is the Motivated Marketing System (MMS)?

Motivated Marketing System (MMS) is a software package that was written by Glen Barnhardt and Eric Holmlund in 2006.

It is designed to be an integrated system to manage your email list, affiliate product sales, and follow-up sales.

Motivated Marketing system provides functionality to:
• Allow people to sign up to your email list.
• Manually manage your email list (manually add or drop members).
• Offer One-Time-Offers to subscribers or to customers who purchase your products.
• Track sales through Clickbank, Paypal, or Authorize.net (or others with some manual setup) and provide you statistics on your sales.
• Automatically add customers to your email list (which can be separate lists for each product).
• Offer several incentives to your affiliates such as pre-made emails, banners, and auto tracking and notification of sales and commissions (In other words, basic affiliate management).
• Send follow-up emails to customers (specific to each product).
• Globally send one-time emails to customers (either of a specific product or all products).

Bear in mind that MMS itself doesn't’t act as the affiliate sales agent. You would go through Clickbank or Paypal, for example, but all sales are routed through MMS to track them and automatically add customers to the mailing lists or to send the One Time Offers.

How is Motivated Marketing System Installed?

Motivated Marketing System is a server-side software package. By that I mean that it has to be uploaded to your Web server. You’ll need the following to use it effectively
• The ability to FTP files to your server
• The ability of your server to run PHP (no CGI is needed however).
• The ability to change permissions on files uploaded to your server.
• The ability to run CRON jobs on your server (if you wish to set up follow-up emails to customers).

What comes with the download?

Along with the software is a .pdf file called MotivatedMarketingGuide.pdf by Eric Holmlund. It’s a 58 guide that doubles as Internet marketing training principles and how to use various aspects of the software. However, it is not an all-inclusive users manual of the software.

Besides the insights about how the various modules of the software work, there is a lot of valuable information about how to set up name-squeeze pages, with lots of examples of good and bad pages.

This manual also talks about some general philosophies about motivation (both you and your customers) and selling in general. He talks about morality and ethics in advertising (for which I applaud him).
Here is the table of contents from the manual:

MotivatedMarketingGuide.pdf Table of Contents:

• Introduction Pg. 5
• Is This the Only Way? Pg. 7
• The Motivation Principle Pg. 8
• Motivation or Manipulation Pg. 9 [A must-read in my opinion – on ethics in sales.]
• Motivating Visitors to Join Pg 12 [Excellent overview of writing effective name-squeeze pages.]
• Motivating Prospects to Buy Pg. 25 [Covers basic principles of selling, like creating urgency, focusing on a single actions, and many others. Good stuff, although basic.]
• Motivating Customers to Become Affiliates Pg. 40 [Introduces the viral aspect of selling by encouraging word-of-mouth sales via the carrot of commissions. Introduces the functionality of MMS to send follow-up email to customers.]
• Motivating Affiliates to Promote [Highlights the functionality of MMS to provide sales tools to affiliates.]
• Motivating Your SELF Pg. 52. [An almost obligatory call to get to it and be successful.]

Also included in this package I got the following
• ProductCreationSystem.pdf. A 107 pg eBook on writing your own info products, from the creativity phase to tips on how to make it a great seller.
• ProductLaunchSystem.pdf. A 74 pg eBook on principles of launching your own product. It’s a 2-week step-by-step approach to preparation, listing all the resources you will need before you launch (an affiliate program, auto responder, low-end product, follow-up high end product etc.). Then it goes into another 2-week approach to the mechanics of launching – step-by-step. The whole guide is a four-week overview of how to launch a product. All very nicely done.
• BackendSalesSystem.pdf. A nice 61 pg discussion of the way to use follow-up sales in your overall sales plan. It is somewhat theoretical but contains lots of practical points.

These additional pdf files may alone be worth the price of the product, but only if you really used them to make changes to your methods that will result in a few extra sales.

Of course, as always, a single one-sentence idea is worth thousands if you use it to make more than its price in income. It’s very difficult to put a price value on products. It all depends on how you use them.

These bonus files aren’t exactly earth-shaking, but reading them does motivate me and give me some great ideas – which as usual I really ought to apply someday when I get some free time :-)

Motivated Marketing System Positives
Motivated Marketing System does automate many of the most basic building blocks of successful Internet marketing that we all know we should be doing, but far too few people do – that is, the seamless integration of affiliate selling, building our email list and follow-up selling.

The fact that it runs on a php script on the server is a very nice touch. Almost all hosts support php, and it is less cumbersome that cgi.

The interface is fairly straightforward, although sometimes a little light on documentation – which I’ll talk about in the ‘negative” section.

In all, it is wonderful piece of software. It isn’t EVERYTHING you’ll every need. It does, however, provide much of what you SHOULD do but probably aren’t doing. Nearly every decent training system on Internet marketing tells you that the basic building blocks of sales are affiliate programs, email lists, and follow-up sales. Those are probably the top three most recommended methods. MMS integrates them very well.

Motivated Marketing System Negatives
First, it has gone on for quite some time with poor support. However, that appears to be getting better. There is now a forum and a new support person Phill Coxon who supports the software and is working hard to upgrade it and add items from reader’s wish lists. So this negative has now become somewhat of a positive.

There are some bugs. Again, many are being worked out. Apparently there are some issues with payment interfaces between some payment agents and the MMS software.

As Phill Coxon himself says in the forum “I like MMS and feel it has great potential as a product but I also feel it still has too many bugs and security issues. I know that many, many MMS users feel the same way.”

Phill, I couldn’t agree more.

I suggest you drop by the forum and read some of the comments about problems and wish lists people are talking about before you purchase. Here is the address http://MotivatedMarketingForum.com

Now here’s the biggie – Motivated Marketing System is not for the weak of tech-mindedness. You’ll have to do a lot of setup with your server, and do a database setup. If you want to use third party auto responders or less-common payment agents there will be code to alter.

Of course there is the forum and Phill Coxon to help you, but Phill is doing this free of charge and his time is limited. The forum should be a lot of help. But if you’re not prepared to do the server-side setup, and do some HTML or php alteration then beware.

According to the installation instruction file (which is hidden in the software package as “instructions.html”) there is an option to have it installed for you for $75. A bit spendy since you’ll likely only pay about $95 for the software to start with. The link to the install request has moves, but the old link still directs you to the correct one.

My experience
MMS only took me about 15 minutes to install and configure. However, I have experience with setting up SQL databases, uploading server-side scripts, and setting permissions. If you’re new to all these things expect a steep learning curve. It will require you have some means of FTPing the files to your server and using CHMOD or its equivalent to change permissions. Then you’ll have to set up your own SQL database on your server (usually through the control panel) and establish a database name, username and password, as well as determine the hostname.

If all this if Greek to you (actually I studied Greek in college so that may not be an apt phrase) then you may want to consider whether you’re ready for it.

Once installed you have the following menu items.

First – here’s a screenshot.

The entries are a little hard to read here, so here it is as a list:

• Home
• Change Login
• Admin Settings
• Signup Settings
• Product Management
• Product One Time Offers
• Automated Follow-up Emails
• Third Party Autoresponders
• Member Management
• Affiliate Tracking Payments
• Marketing Emails Management
• Marketing Banners Management
• Outgoing Emails Management
• View Statistics
• Mass Mail
• Logout

Some of the selections are self-explanatory, such as Change Login and Logout, so I won’t spend time on those here. Here are what a few of the others do.

Admin Settings
In the Admin settings you set up certain email standard elements, like a Help address and a Removal address. You also set up you settings from authorize.net which is a credit card and e-check acceptance processor.

Signup Settings
Here you tell MMS whether you want subscribers to be given a One Time Offer when they sign up. If so you set up the OTO campaign here.

Product Management
This is an affiliate tracking system. It will keep statistics of each sale you make. It is designed primarily for products you sell through Clickbank. You can use other vendors, but doing so requires you manually alter the javascript. It’s a little messy for the non-techie.

Product One Time Offers
The same as the Product Management page above, except it is set up only for One Time offers. It includes expiration elements that you fill in for the allowed delivery window.

Automated Follow-up Emails
Allows you to set up MMS to automatically send follow-ups for purchases routed through MMS. You can set up different follow-up campaigns for each product you sell. However, getting it to deliver the messages will require that you set up Cron jobs (scheduled tasks) at your server. The instructions on setting them up are a little skimpy. You will need to be a little techie to know what you’re doing.

Third Party Autoresponders
If you do not wish to use MMS to send your sales emails you can route it through the auto responder of your choice, such as GetResponse, or 1ShoppingCart, etc. It’s pretty simple, You simply put in the email address you use for sending email through the third party system like asrp@yourautoresponder.com and the subject and body of the email.

Member Management
This is where you directly add or delete members of your mailing list.

Affiliate Tracking Payments
If you wish to track affiliate sales through anything other than Clickbank, authorize.net or Paypal you have to manually set it up here. However there is a link to the instructions on how to use it that doesn’t work. Actually it works, but doesn’t link to the correct path, so you get a 404 File Not Found error when you click it. You’ll have to either manually alter the URL with the path where you installed MMS or alter the original php code to make it work. For example, the link tried to take me to “http://phenomenix.com/admin/built_in_tracking_instructions.html” but on my server it should have been “http://phenomenix.com/mms/admin/built_in_tracking_instructions.html”
The “/mms” was missing.

Once I found the instructions, I found it would take some work with setting you your html thank you page and integrating it into your MMS.

Marketing Emails Management
Here you would set emails to be used by your affiliates to sell your products. In other words it’s designed to help you provide marketing tools to others for your products. It’s a simple Fill-in-the-subject-and-body form.

Marketing Banners Management
Again this is a marketing tool development page where you simply fill in the URL of a banner and associate it with a product in your lineup. You would then provide that to your affiliates.

Outgoing Emails Management
Here you set up the following stock emails
Emails sent to . . .
1. First time customers when they purchase
2. Affiliates when a payment is made to them
3. Admin (you) when a sale is made.
4. Existing customers when they make a purchase.
5. Admin (you) when someone signs up to your email list

Mass Mail
This is used to send a global email to all customers of a certain product or all products.

Conclusion
In all, I really liked MMS in that it helps get you doing the basic things you should be doing - building your email ist from your customers, getting your customers to be affiliates, and managing your mailing list. The support seems to have really come a long way and update-development is very active. However, it is still a bit too techie for many people. It is a program you'll have to commit some time to managing. You;ll have to get your One TIme Offers in place, set up your emails, and your opt-in form.

If you're going to commit yourself to some time with this, it will be profitable for you. I'm very confident these activities are some of the main missing pieces most would-be Internet marketers are ignoring. You don't need this software to do it, but it is pretty cool.

Motivated Marketing System (MMS) ($97) This link goes to the sellers description and order page. It opens in a new window.