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Welcome to Part One of your eCourse I'd like to thank you again for requesting this course and sincerely hope that the strategies I share with you help to massively increase your Business profits. Just so you know how the course is structured, each day for the next 5 days you'll receive an email message like the one that came today, with a link to an article similar to this one. After that, you'll receive occasional updates with additional ideas and strategies that you can use to create additional sales and profits for your Business. You can unsubscribe to these messages at any time if you feel that you no longer wish to hear from me by clicking on the link at the bottom of each introductory email. But gee I hope you don't ever feel the need to do that. ;-) Each article will focus on a specific area where you may not be maximizing the potential of your Business, and where appropriate will include links to other articles and resources that I have found useful during my time in Business. Some of these links are to affiliate products, which means I will earn some money if you buy them, others are not. Every link has valuable information at the other end of it, so I encourage you to visit them all and check them out. It costs nothing to learn... What I have tried to do with this series of messages is give you the information I would have loved to have when I started in Business, particularly when I started my online Business. There are no secrets... There really aren't any 'secrets' here, but I will share some little known techniques that work so well and so consistently that they should be part of every Business owners tool kit. Sadly, for most people, they will remain 'secrets', but not for you... Knowing these techniques will put you miles ahead of your competitors if you use them...but that's the key. You have to take what you will learn here and adapt it to your own product or service, and use it! Now before you move on, PRINT these reports out. You will receive much more benefit from STUDYING this information than simply browsing through them on your computer and then forgetting about what you read. Print this report out, and do the same with the reports that follow, get a highlighter and use it for ideas that interests you, write over the pages and in the margins, draw circles around sections of particular interest. As you go, write down action steps you can apply to your Business, then do them... And if there's something that's not clear, not explained in enough detail, or anything that bugs you at all in these reports, please let me know by emailing me by using the Contact Form. I'd love to hear from you. My goal is to provide you with the best possible information. If I can improve these reports in some way, or if there are other topics you would like covered, please let me know. OK, so now you know what's in store over the coming days, let's get into it with... Strategy 1 – Build A Customer Database, Then Continuously Work Your Leads, Customers and Inactive Buyers 95% of Businesses leave vast amounts of money on the table because they fail to capitalize on one of their greatest assets, their existing database of customers, past customers and prospects. You do have a customer database, don't you? If
not, first thing after you finish reading this, you'd better start
building one. It's going to be your most powerful
marketing weapon from here on in. Instead
of continuously searching for new customers,
you should be spending time each week contacting past customers
and offering them additional products and services. Many people spend thousands of dollars a month on ads trying to attract new customers, and never contact the people who have already trusted them and bought their products or services. Duh! Ask your existing clients to come in and check out a special customer only offer. Find out where they buy similar products and services to yours now and offer them to your customers instead of them going elsewhere. Ask inactive customers why they stopped buying from you and entice them back into your store or Business with a special offer. The first sale you make to a customer is the most expensive one you will ever make to that person. After marketing expenses and overheads, there's probably not a lot, if any, profit left in the first sale you make to someone for most Businesses. The big profits are in the 'back end' sales you make to that person. These are the follow up sales you make over time when a customer has a good experience with you and decides to come back. The super profits are when these happy customers refer their friends to you because they had a great buying experience with you. Why not leverage off the goodwill you have with your satisfied buyers and rather than go for the one-hit sale, create a relationship with them so that they buy from you over and over again for years to come? Turn Your One Time Sales Into Regular Orders Your goal could be to find some way turn every single sale into a monthly, quarterly or annual billing cycle for a related product or service. Or, if this isn't possible, then encouraging your customers to buy a different but related product or service each month is the next best thing. For example -
There are a million (well, maybe not a million...) different ways to turn a single sale into an ongoing profit centre. All you have to do is take some
time out from your Business, sit down in a quiet place to
think, look at your products and services, and work out a
way to earn a revenue stream from some of them instead of
a once off profit. Advertising and marketing to find new customers probably accounts for a large chunk of your expenses, and much of it is wasted on people who never had a chance of buying from you – Radio and television advertising are a good example of this for most Business. Your message is broadcast to hundreds of thousands of people who couldn't care less about you or your product or service. You hear it all the time - an ad for a service club or local Business at one end of the City broadcast out to millions of people who love miles away and would never consider visiting this club or that Business in 100 years, no matter how good it is. Give Something Back To Your Best Customers Why not spend some of this advertising money on offering your existing customers bonuses or discounts for purchases they make with you? Use
some direct response marketing techniques and make them an offer that they have to respond
to by phone, email or in person to take you up on,
rather than the mostly ineffective brand building rubbish that big Business
with their big marketing budgets use all the time. Giving bonuses is a far better idea than cash discounts in most circumstances, because if you give your customer a discount of $100, it actually costs you $100 at the bottom line and you’ll never see that money again. If you give
someone a bonus that retails for $100, its actual cost to you may only be
$15 to $40, but
it’s perceived value to your customer is much higher. And don’t just contact your customers and leads once and give up if it they don't buy the first time. Recent studies have shown that today, with marketing coming at us from all sides, it takes between 7 and 13 or more follow up efforts to make a sale. By giving up after the first, or even the 5th attempt, you are probably leaving 80% of the potential profits you could be making on the table. You have to follow up, follow up...then follow up some more. Research has also found that the best time period or schedule for contacting your customers and prospects is every 21 days. You want to keep yourself at the top of their minds, but you don’t want to look like you are hounding them to buy something every week. What's the best way of following up with your customers? Well if you mail a letter to them all every 21 days, it's gonna get pretty expensive. The fastest, easiest and most cost efficient way of staying in touch with your clients is through an email Newsletter. Do you have a Free customer Newsletter? If not, the next thing you need to do after building your database is start sending your subscribers an informative email message every three to four weeks.
This will help you to build a relationship with your
customers and potential clients. If you have a strong
relationship with your subscribers, and send them regular
offers, you'll make a ton of extra money. You can use both regularly scheduled Newsletters and an email Autoresponder that sends out your messages automatically in a pre-determined sequence to each new subscriber who joins your database. In this way, you can make regular offers to your list with the autoresponder, and offer your customers seasonal specials and special promotions through your regular Newsletter. So what's the best way of following up using email then? Well, most of the pro's use either Aweber or GetResponse for their list management, Newsletter delivery and autoresponders. It would pay to check out both of these guys, and subscribe to their free email courses. The courses are full of useful information and will teach you how to use follow up email messages to massively increase the profits you make in your Business while automating the entire process once it's set up. And of course, if you use Site Build It! like I do you already have the tools you need to send Newsletters and create autoresponder messages. The only downside with the SBI! system is that your follow-up autoresponder is limited to 7 messages, whereas the others are unlimited, but it's a great start... I hope that this first Report has started you thinking of ways you can start to do things a little differently in your Business. Tomorrow we'll look further into using your Newsletter to promote your products and services, plus we'll look at one of the most leveraged ways of skyrocketing your sales...removing the perceived risk from your customer's purchase. If you have found this Report useful, then you might also want to subscribe to my free Newsletter, Local Business Online. It's full of tips and strategies that will help you take your Business to the next level without spending a fortune. To subscribe, simple pop your name and email address into the box below and your subscription will start with the next issue. If you would like to make a comment or talk with me about anything in this Report, I'd love to hear from you. You can email me by using the Contact Form or call me on 07 554632004 in Australia, or 61755432004 if you are overseas. Until tomorrow, Take care, Rocky
P.S. And don't forget to subscribe to my Newsletter, Local Business Online, for regular updates on the latest marketing ideas and strategies to help make your Business even more profitable. To subscribe, please Click Here.
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