by Joy Gendusa
Founder of PostcardMania
http://www.postcardmania.com
© 2005
How often do you sit around and wonder how to
make more money and get more people to buy more from your company?
It’s one of the most basic problems every company faces.
The answer is astonishingly simple. Too simple
maybe. But I’ve
seen it work over and over again with our customers in every
line of business you can imagine.
You have to promote. Your income is determined
by how much
marketing you do. There are many effective marketing methods
and you shouldn’t do just one. Even those whose products
are
strictly sold on-line, you still need to utilize those other
methods of promotion. Your income is definitely 100% affected
by how much promotion you do.
So raising your income is simply a matter of
keeping in touch
with your existing customer base, reminding them you are there,
offering them goods or services they might be interested in, in
such a way that they want to buy more and more often from you.
And increasing the size of your customer base by finding and
contacting potential customers and persuading them to buy your
products or services and then adding them to your customer base
and keeping in touch with them in the same way.
If you have a good service or product and you
make sure you
service your customers well, you cannot fail to raise your
income.
How rapidly you raise your income depends on
how rapidly you do
these actions, how much you promote. Handling the quantity or
volume of promotion is definitely the most obvious thing you
can do on an immediate basis. Believe it or not, if you send
out crappy, crappy promotion, your income will go up. You may
not be happy with the Return on your Investment (ROI) for that
marketing effort, but definitely it will raise your income.
Once quantity is handled and you are sending out loads of
promotion, you want to tweak it and raise the quality of your
promotion. And here are some things you can do.
Use Offers to Improve Your Response.
One of the barriers to buying which you work
hard to overcome
is "no hurry." Why buy it now when I can think about
it for a
few weeks, shop around a little and get back to you, maybe?
Familiar with that "I’m interested. I’ll get back
to you." Or
the card you have designed and mailed out gets put in a drawer
somewhere for possible follow up, maybe next year some time.
One way to deal with this is to reward those
who buy now and
penalize those who don’t. How? With some special offer and
one
that is attractive and one which has a time element attached to
it. "Order your new lawnmower now and we’ll give you
a free
edger. Offer good until the end of May." (Or whatever, you
get
the idea). Obviously the offer must be financially feasible for
you so you’ll have to do some number crunching before you
make
the offer.
You can tie these special offers in to some particular
event or
season (like jewelry for Valentine’s Day or flowers or
chocolates or just about anything for Christmas) but you don’t
have to.
Special Offers help you maximize on your direct
mail marketing
and keep your customers ordering from you when you want them
to. It’s just one more way to be in control of your promotion.
You can control how much and how fast your company
grows.
