Marketing is a two-way interaction with the public, prospects, and peers to present them with the best face of a business. You do this to inform and persuade them of the benefits of dealing with that business.
Social Media
Relatives vs Family
RELATIVES are the people to whom nature ties you by blood and birth, marriage and DNA.
FAMILY are the people to whom you tie yourself with laughter, tears, experiences and love.
Application of Power
The application of knowledge is power.
Donate In Their Name: Make Your Client The Hero
Most of my clients arrive by word-of-mouth, which is great. I reached out to a prospect the other day, who was referred by one of my existing clients. I offered them a small freebie. The prospect was initially hesitant, until I mentioned that my existing client – whom the prospect knows – had donated this service to them. Wow, were they impressed!
A note of warning – don’t say something like this if it isn’t true! Make sure you check with your existing customer to make sure they don’t mind doing this.
In addition to the prospect being impressed, my existing client was as well. I offered to give something to someone they know, in their name. How cool is that? The product or service you offer doesn’t have to be super expensive, it just has to have a perceived value. The receiver gets something useful, and the giver looks like a hero. And that’s the point.
There are a number of things you can “give” to existing customers to show you appreciate them. I’ve talked about this before in posts about loyalty programs, and customer retention strategies. A discount is great, but a hand-written card is better. Above both of these is letting your customer appear as the hero to someone else.
I make it a practice to ask all my clients about their favorite charities, especially local ones. When I’m sending out holiday or event cards (again, written and addressed by hand), I often include cards to those charities, letting them know that my clients mentioned them as being a good cause. Even though the card is from me, I make sure my client is mentioned prominently. In other words, I make my client the hero. My clients often hear about that card!
Offering to provide a product or service in the name of your client is, very obviously, also a great way to find new clients!
Planning Ahead Is Cash In Hand
For years, I thought I was one of only a few people who didn’t own and use a planner. For over 20 years, my wife would buy me various planner systems, and I barely even looked at them. I was surrounded by people who used planners, spent money on planning seminars, took physical and online courses on what to plan, how to plan, and how to set and accomplish goals. I believed I was a lone holdout.
After my “conversion” (a story too long and sordid to get into here), I began to realize that The Planner People were not a solid majority. Many, many people didn’t use a planner, set goals, or even keep track of future appointments. Yet again today, I was reminded that there are plenty of folks who keep shooting themselves in the foot because they don’t keep track of appointments. I showed up at a new business to HAND OVER CASH, after setting an appointment with the owner 2 weeks ago. The place was closed, his phone went to voice mail, and he didn’t answer a message I sent him.
If you have children, grandchildren, or interact with students, getting them exposed to planning and goal setting at a young age will truly help them throughout their lives. If you can’t teach them, point them towards someone who can.
It Pays to Learn Lessons
I spent years forgetting the lesson of, “Test before committing.” I’m creating the card I’m planning to send out in January, and I had one test version printed at double the cost I’ll pay later on. Not only were the sides printed in the wrong directions (tops didn’t match), the images didn’t have enough white space around the edges – so the text on one side, and pix on the other, was cut off.
I’ve created a 2nd version, and ordered one more sample card – again, at double the regular price. If I have to, I won’t even mind printing a 3rd version.
For the first 10 years of doing this stuff, I would have wasted money and just ordered the entire print run. Lemme tell ya: being overeager is like sticking a long, dull knife in your own eye. Starting early and having patience alleviates that situation.
7 Things to Offer Via Memberships
1: Consumable Content
Text, video, audio, physical products, graphics – each post (or serving, or entry, etc.) expresses a complete idea. “One and done.”
2: Stackable Content
Like consumable content, except that each post builds on the previous entries, creating a larger, more complex item over time.
3: DIY Instructions
Recipes (for food, a physical product, a process, etc.) and patterns allowing the consumer to follow along, provide labor and materials, and create something.
4: Done-for-you Service
A mass creation, or even individualized for each consumer, this is the opposite of #3. You complete a service for your member.
5: Unsorted Library of Content
A collection of products, services, or information “all in one pile” that the consumer must go through on their own. They have to find what they’re looking for, and decide in what order they want to go through it.
6: Sorted Library of Content
Just like #5, except you group the items into categories, or sections, or whatever. You can also suggest an order for the member to go through it, but they don’t have to follow your suggestions.
7: Coaching or Advice
The member is responsible for making a product or performing work. You provide encouragement, advice, mentorship, etc.
No Invoices Until At Least July 1st, 2020
This pandemic is hitting businesses across America hard. A lot of them are shut down, or have seriously limited their workforce. I am committed to doing my part to help.
First of all, I will not bill existing customers for any services until at least July first, 2020. Second, I have no intention of leaving you stranded – if you need work done, I’m happy to do it.
Final point – this is the time to invest in your marketing efforts. There are systems and tools that can help you find new customers, and even make sales. I can help implement these for your business. And while Agile’ is a boutique firm, working with a maximum of fifteen clients at a time, I have room for up to three new clients (who will also not receive invoices until at least July 1st), so feel free to pass along my contact info to someone who might need it.
We’re all in this together. I wish you health and happiness. We will come out the other side of this.
3 Different Levels of Loyalty Programs for Businesses
There are three types, or levels, of loyalty programs you can implement:
1) Basic
2) Intermediate
3) Advanced
Let’s look at each of them individually.
Basic
Just about as simple as it gets for both the business and the customers. A basic program is great for places that want to promote one or two main products or services. All you need is some type of record for purchases, like a small card. The point here is to drive repeat business, make the customers get used to buying from you. You just need to train the people who interact with these customers to offer upsells and additional products.
These types of programs work great for shops that sell products like coffee, donuts, burgers, and hot dogs. If you have a business that provides a simple service, like rug cleaning, lawn mowing, or pet grooming – anything where a client might use your service on a fairly regular basis – you could also set up a basic loyalty program.
The program is a simple equation: pay for X number of products/services, get the next one free. The salesperson just has to ask if the customer has a membership card. If not, they provide them with one, and mark the card to show a purchase. When the customer’s card is completely marked, the salesperson takes the card and gives the customer the donut/cleaning/whatever for free, along with a new, unmarked card.
Instead of a physical card, you could also invest in producing an app people can download onto their smartphone. This obviously is more of an upfront expense for most businesses, but depending on how fast you go through cards, it might be more cost effective over time.
Pros: Low cost, ease of setup, and immediacy are the three main pros for starting a Basic loyalty program. If you put it together yourself, you could start a basic program for about $20 (500 cards and a small ink stamp). Spend more money for overnight printing, and you could start your basic program tomorrow.
Cons: You’ll be relying almost entirely on your point-of-contact salespeople for everything – promoting the program and driving additional sales. You also get absolutely no information about the individuals in your program, so you cannot make customized offers. You have no contact info for your customers, so there’s no way to get in touch with them and either ask them questions (”What else can we offer you?”) or give them information (”We’ll be carrying red widgets starting next week.”).
Intermediate
These take a little effort and cost to set up, but aren’t that difficult. Most loyalty programs I’ve seen fall into this category. The main tools used here (see the chapter Tools) are –
1) A list with personal information (first name and email address, at minimum) from each customer
2) A contact mechanism, like an email autoresponder, or text message sending system (SMS)
3) A series of automated messages
4) Offers – discounts, buy X get more free, etc.
These programs take a little more planning, a little more time, and a little more money. Your costs in time and money will depend on how complex you want to make your program, and what you want to get out of it. You can have people self-register for the program, and then have the program make offers to members and dole out rewards (like discount coupons, etc.) automatically. Or you can make the system behind the program more complex, and segment your members into groups and sub-groups, providing each segment with different offers and rewards. If you reward people for their loyalty, they are more likely to reward you with detailed information, like important dates (birth date, anniversary, and so forth), physical addresses, and shopping preferences.
Intermediate loyalty programs can help you expand the purchasing decisions of the members, allowing you to suggest related products and services. If they know, like and trust you, they are much more likely to buy additional products and services from you than to go looking elsewhere.
Pros: Most intermediate programs can be highly automated. With just a few minutes each week, a single person can examine the statistics generated by the program, and make minor tweaks to improve the process. Most of the cost in labor and money comes upfront, and allows you to almost “set it and forget it.” The person managing the system only has to spend major time when the system parts change, or when adding new complexities like additional products, services, or list segments. Because of the moderate amount of personal information you can acquire, you’re able to offer higher-profit products and services at the right times to the right list members.
Cons: Someone has to understand the program, and be in charge of managing it behind the scenes. They’re in charge of training point-of-contact people on what to expect from program members, like coupons and so forth. They also need to regularly read the data the system generates, interpret it, and make decisions based on that information. Learning all this can take considerable time and effort at the beginning. While intermediate programs do not have to be super-expensive, a decent system is far from free.
Advanced
By their nature, advanced loyalty programs are much more complex, much more expensive, and require a recurring investment of time by a team of people. However, most advanced systems track a tremendous amount of information, and the data provided by these programs can help you almost micro-promote to each member. A lot of membership programs run by major corporations are advanced systems. Wegman’s – a major grocery chain on the East Coast of the US – knows what its members shop for down to the individual SKUs, and their automated system can offer coupons for items the customer has shopped for in the past. I regularly get the same type of coupons from BJ’s Wholesale Club. Advanced systems can offer promotions via printed coupons sent through the mail, via SMS messages sent to a member’s phone, or even through custom apps that members use to shop. A truly advanced system will know how often you make purchases, the quality of products and services you prefer, the brands, the individual items. It will be able to offer you incentives based on important dates like holidays and birthdays. They can tell how much time you spend shopping, and prompt you to come in when they haven’t seen you in a while. The more information your membership program tracks, the more you can do with that information – including aggregating it and selling it to third parties. But that’s a whole other discussion!
Pros: Tons of information, depending on how much info you collect and how complex you make the collection system. The more information you collect, the more granular you can make your promotions. Offer a discount not just on widgets, but on yellow left-handed widgets; or to people in a certain zip code who get their lawns cut only on Thursdays. Track your costs, schedule needed supplies down to the hour, plan for increased profits.
Cons: Expensive investment. Set-up costs in time and human resources are much higher than either of the other categories. Tracking the system, as well as interpreting and using generated data usually takes a team of people, and is an ongoing investment. The more data points you track, the more the program parts need to be tweaked.