A Glimpse Into The Future…

Well, the times are certainly a’changin’ in the online marketing space. It is a gradual change but I can see a trend developing that makes online marketing a heck of a lot different from what it was just 5 years ago.

Let’s think about what is needed by an online marketer.

Well, they need a product to sell but let’s assume that they have that sorted…They need a way to sell the product, process the payments, make sure customers are segmented onto the correct workflows and lists and then they need a way to automatically and securely deliver the product (and remove people who refund or cancel payments).

Historically, most people have used self hosted sites (previously HTML and more recently WordPress) for making sales pages.

Since 2011, platforms like JVZoo and WarriorPlus have been popular to process sales and provide affiliate functionality (in spite of the fact that the take your customer list and promote your competitors’ products to them!).

For delivery, most people again use WordPress with a membership plug-in.

I see a trend, though… people are centralising by using SaaS products and putting things under one roof. In fact I know of one fellow marketer who recently cancelled his hosting as he is using SaaS platforms for everything now.

SaaS products like Clickfunnels and Instasuite have become popular as they have everything in one platform. The issue with that is that, while they may do some parts superbly, other parts are lacking. Also, if the platform goes down, so does your entire business.

Where I see more growth, however, is in choosing SaaS software products that do one job superbly – and linking them together.

Convertri is a fantastic landing page builder. Lightning fast and totally customizable. You can do anything with this and it is so easy to use. Put that together with Thrive Cart which I believe will develop into the market leader for cart and affiliate solutions in the next few months. Thrive Cart is not yet publicly launched but you can get a special lifetime deal (at the time of writing) here

Then there is delivery. One WordPress plug-in that keeps getting better and better is MemberSonic. It integrates seamlessly with Thrive Cart and is very robust and feature rich.

There is a new SaaS product delivery and membership platform (one to watch and take a punt on)  is Product Dyno. It is not perfect yet – they have a lot of improvements to make but it has potential (and is open for a special deal for glorified beta testers as I write this – click here)

Let me know what you think. Do you see these same changes? Are they a good thing? let me know your opinion!