With the holidays approaching, there’s no time like the present to think about how to market your business to new and existing customers. Ready to ramp up your sales? Try these five quick tips for making a lasting impression this holiday season: Beef up your customer service. There’s no quicker way to turn away customers than with poor or nonexistent customer service. Include contact phone numbers and email addresses on your Website that make it easy for customers to get in touch with you regarding ordering questions and other needs. Even if your customer service department is just you, answer phone calls and emails like a big business — professionally and courteously, with a goal of solving the customer’s problem and ensuring they come back for repeat business. Let them know you care. Customer appreciation emails that include a promotional offer “just for VIPs” make customers feel special. Send a few of them throughout the holiday season — say, offer $25 toward a future purchase with any purchase of $100 or more. Make sure they are limited-time offers that take place during the holiday season so customers sense the urgency in taking advantage of the deal. Use social media. Use Facebook, Twitter and other social networks to announce special promotions and capture new email addresses. Start conversations that spark interest among your audience and get your customers talking about your brand. Reach out to inactive customers. Do you have some customers who haven’t bought from you in a while? Tell them you miss them with a special email offer during the holidays. If the deal is good enough, they might come back and become active customers again. Cross-promote. Work with another local business to cross-promote offers in your newsletters or in-store locations. A bakery could team up with a coffee shop, for example, so the businesses can offer a special discount to one another’s customers. Simple yet effective, these five tips will give you the extra push you need to increase your sales during the holidays and beyond.
So you’ve created an email newsletter and a blog. You’ve filled them with relevant content, promotional offers and information about your company. Great! Now ask yourself: Can you keep up with it? Unfortunately, many small businesses find they don’t have the bandwidth to churn out new content on a regular basis. As a result, things like e-newsletters and blogs go stale and lose readership due to the lack of new content. The good news is, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you want to create a new e-newsletter or blog post. One easy way to do so is by repurposing existing content. If you have great content on your blog, for example, you can feed it into your newsletter template on occasion. Just be cautious about reusing your content on your site too many times, or else Google will penalize you for content duplication. You also can reach out to blog owners whose blogs you like and ask for permission to feature their content in your newsletter or on your site—or invite them to be guest bloggers. As long as it’s not a competitor, you can simply highlight a useful blog post and relate it to your own company. Don’t forget about user-generated content, too. Your social networks are ideal places to ask users questions and invite feedback. One small business I’ve worked with has a question of the week on her Facebook page. She answers the question on Facebook, but she also highlights these questions and answers in her newsletters. What a quick and easy way to create content! Remember, the goal of your newsletter is to entertain while also creating a relationship with users that encourages them to shop with your company. The more personal and relatable you can make your newsletter, the more likely they are to read it and respond.
In today’s digital universe, finding customers sometimes can feel like a game of “Where’s Waldo?” While there might be people everywhere, you don’t need to be a marketing guru to figure out that not all of them are going to buy from you. So what’s an entrepreneur to do in order to find the right customers? One place to start is with good information. That’s why I wanted to tell you about our new Market Profiler and Customer Profiler reports — two valuable resources that can help you find out exactly who your customers are and learn more about the markets where you do business. We have three different reports, and two of them are free, so this is a perfect opportunity to find out some information on your customers such as age, household income and length of residence. The upshot is that you can use this information to find more customers, and voila! Your marketing returns improve significantly.
Despite the proliferance of email, direct mail remains a critical component of any good marketing program — but it must be engaging and interactive to be effective. Creating personal connections with your customers via direct mail will help to get your mailers noticed and will produce results. To ensure you send the right messages, follow the quick tips below, and create direct mail that will help you grow your business: Follow up on a purchase. When customers buy a product or service from you, use your direct mailer to recommend additional items that complement their recent purchases. Let’s say your customer bought some running shoes. Now your direct mail can recommend running apparel or gear. Include a special offer, such as a percent or dollar amount off, and increase your response rates even further. Get personal. Certain types of direct mail lend themselves to personalization, whereby you can address customers by name. For instance, you can thank your customers for their business — maybe even include a personalized URL (pURL) that takes them to a landing page customized for a specific need. Your customers will feel significant if you let them know you value your relationship with them. Get social. Ask customers to submit reviews of their purchases on your Website, and incorporate social links to Facebook and Twitter, so that customers can easily share their reviews online. The viral nature of social networking will extend your brand’s reach. While direct mail is costlier than email, it should be part of your multichannel marketing efforts. Make your mailers stand out with strong messaging and calls to action, and watch your business grow exponentially.