Do you treat your customers well? Do they know who you are when they receive a letter from you in the mail? If you answered “no” to both of these questions, then there’s a big problem. You see, your customers are the bread and butter of your business.
Without a customer database, you don’t have a business. Plus, if you’re neglecting to market to this group of people, you’re losing a lot of unclaimed money that you could be getting.
To make your customers like you, you have to do something special for them. You have to show them that you care and are willing to go above and beyond to make them feel appreciated. There are many ways to do this, but one of my favorite ways is to under-promise and over-deliver.
When you under-promise and over-deliver, people feel good because they think that they got a good offer from you. So what does it take to go above and beyond for a customer? Well, I’m glad you asked. So let’s look at ways to make your customer feel special and build a “relationship” with them.
Send your customers timely gifts
About every three months, I receive a free $100 credit from Google Adsense to redeem in Google Adwords. Although I don’t need it, I still find that it’s a generous gesture. You can do the same thing in your business. Every two to three months, send them a discount or coupon that they can redeem in your business for purchases.
So, for example, if you own a nutritional vitamin store, you could mail out to your prospects about a discount that they can redeem in your store. Many bodybuilders and fitness addicts come to nutritional supplement stores for all of their nutritional needs. And by offering them an unexpected discount, they will flock to your nutritional supplements store and buy things that they have never bought before (leaving you with more profits in the end).
Here’s another way to go above and beyond for your customers.
Start a monthly newsletter
With this tip, you will want to send out a free monthly newsletter to your customers and clients via email. This is a great way to reach your customer base without spending a lot of money to do so. Plus, it’s a great way to upsell them to a paid monthly newsletter that will be sent to their homes monthly.
If your email content is good, you should have no problem converting customers over to your paid monthly newsletter. A good price to charge for it is $10. You should offer more exclusive and “secretive” content in your paid newsletter instead of your email newsletter.
Both of these tips can help you to go above and beyond for your prospect and customers. There are many more ways to make your customers feel special, so focus on ways to keep your customers happy and get them coming back to you for more.
How to make your customers happy?
Want to know a great way to get customers to like you? It’s simple! Send them a birthday card! I recently received an electric razor from this well-known company, and on the box that the razor came in, it said, “Happy 18th Birthday!” Now I’m way older than 18, but I like the strong gesture of thinking about me.
You can do the same thing in your business. Run a quick, direct mail or online campaign requesting to know your customer’s birthday. Tell them that there might be a time when a package will arrive at their door. When done correctly, this can leave a strong impression on your customer. The next time you see them, you can expect to be greeted with a smile and a big “thank you” from your customer.
If you don’t have a big package to send to them, you could always use birthday cards. Go down to your local Hallmark store and find a birthday card that is appropriate for your list. Once you find the car that is just right, sign it personally in blue ink and prepare to mail it off to your customer. Here’s another way to treat your customers good:
Give your customers discounts
People love a deal, and if you can give them a good bargain of what they will receive, I’m confident that you will gain a lot of new business from your existing customers. Of course, to lower your cost while doing these techniques, you also implement online marketing into the mix. For example, there’s something called an “autoresponder” that you can use to automatically send out emails to your customers on a weekly or monthly basis.
Here’s an idea you can use to give discounts via autoresponders: first, make sure that the email is printable. You want to offer them a coupon that they can print out to redeem in your store or place of business. Believe it or not, a lot of people will take you up on your offers simply because you were in the right place at the right time.
You want to use the internet to boost your profits, all while contacting your customers for free. With email marketing, all you’re paying for is the cost to use the program. The one service that I use works out to about $30 a month. This is a very low fee when you consider how much money you could make from driving customers from your email to your store.
I like Aweber because they give you a lot of easy templates to work with, and they give you helpful prompts that will guide you in making your email marketing campaign as successful as possible.
Treating your customers well and making them feel special are important parts of a marketing campaign. Customers are the lifeline of your business, and if they feel like you’re not making them feel special – they just might abandon you.
How to get more customers in your business?
There are a lot of ways to improve your business revenue. But as we all know, only a few of these techniques will bring us the most money. So instead, I want to show you some ways to get more foot traffic into your place of business. All of these strategies are low-cost and don’t cost a lot of money to get started.
Before I get into the list, know that I use these techniques in my business today to generate targeted leads. I get leads from all over the place. The internet, direct mail, postcards, referrals, etc. If you put these techniques into action yourself, I’m willing to bet that you can achieve the same results that I do.
Now let’s get into the list. Here’s the first strategy that goes overlooked in the offline marketing world:
Classified advertising
Believe it or not, people still look in the classifieds for a good deal. The trick to making this work for you, however, is to run a ton of them. There is a guy named John Peterson who ran classified ad after classified ad, and it made him a millionaire. All he did was run classified ads – and it made him extremely wealthy.
You can still make classified advertising work for you if you follow a few simple techniques. First, you want to ensure that you’re still using the default template of direct response advertising. Start with a headline, go into the body copy, and end with a strong close.
Your headline is the first thing that people will see; so make it good and attention-getting so that your lead doesn’t wander their eyes to some other place.
Once you’ve written the ad, it’s time to start distributing your ad to the marketplace. First, run an ad in your local newspaper and also in those free publications that you see in stores. These are two great places to advertise your message.
Let’s take a look at another element that you could be using to get your message across:
Postcard marketing
I like postcards because they’re small, personal, and they don’t have to be opened. However, if you were to run a postcard campaign, make sure you focus on generating a lead. There’s simply not enough space on a postcard to get your message out to the world, so don’t try it.
Make sure you have a headline, good body copy, and a sound close. Offer your prospects more than one way to contact you, and include a picture if you can. The picture should be related to the free offer that you’re trying to give to them. Pictures are known to boost response.
These two methods of classified advertising and postcard marketing are things that I still use in my business. It doesn’t matter what kind of business you’re in. You can still use these two mediums to boost your sales and profits. Just be prepared to handle all the new business you will acquire from using these two techniques alone.
Keep these tips in mind when marketing your products and services.
How to get referrals from your customers?
Getting referrals is easy if you have a game plan to go about getting them. The best way to get a referral from your existing customer is if you stay on their mind monthly. What I mean by this is that you have to contact them at least once a month so that you can be on their mind when they’re ready to buy.
This is easier than it sounds. You have two options: you can either send out a letter to your list or mail them with a postcard. I like postcards because they’re unconventional, quick and easy, and if you put an image on, it can help convey your message better than words can. Now direct mail letters can do the same thing, but postcards are so fun to work with that it’s better to run a test campaign using postcards instead of letters. Plus, they’re incredibly cheaper than sending out a package.
Anyway, back to what I am saying, getting referrals isn’t hard at all. One way to stimulate a referral from a customer is by offering them a gift of some sort. People love to receive gifts, and most people will more than likely be happy to send a referral your way if you do your job to treat them like royalty.
You see, your relationship with your current customers is far from being over. You can extract lots of value from your existing customers using a mixture of offline marketing techniques and online methods. One of the easiest ways to stimulate referrals is with an autoresponder.
An autoresponder is an email gadget that sends out periodic emails to your list on a set schedule. So if you have a customer list of around 10,000 With each email you send to these people, you could be making a hefty profit. I would know because I’ve tested time and time again.
Integrating email marketing with direct mail letters to stimulate referrals is something that can make you very wealthy. In addition, direct mail letters will increase your response rates for your offers, and this alone is something that many offline businesses overlook. But for the sake of acquiring a new customer for free, I think it’s more than worth it.
It’s still important to make your customers happy, which you should strive to do every day. Send them gifts every once and a while to make them feel special. These are the people who will pay your
mortgage and car notes, so treat them like gold and watch the profits stack up.
Part of getting a referral always revolves around excellent customer service. Respond to customer requests quickly, and they’ll keep you in mind whenever the opportunity to promote your business becomes available.
Your customers don’t mind spreading the word out about your business. In fact, a lot of customers will be more than thrilled to promote your company for free. So keep these things in mind each and every time you get a new customer.
