All posts by MarketingStrategy

John Mignano his background is mechanical engineer, he started as business owner with his brick-and-mortar engineering company. The business adventures and crusade goes way back to 1980. And for 35+ years he has been on leading edge in the trenches. Building countless successful online businesses. Mentoring entrepreneurs to higher levels of success. In a bunch of different markets and niches. He can help you start online business or existing online business to generate targeted leads into sales. Are you building a successful online business? What he shares makes a huge life changing difference. Want proven, hard-won marketing strategies? Want sustainable and scalable results? You've come to the right place.

Business Audienece Marketing

06/03/2014 MarketingStrategy Leave a comment

How To Effectively Engage Your Website Visitors And Get Prospects To Your Most Profitable Content

Online business brand building tips – developing your business to business (B2B) brand has it’s own structures and processes, which are different from what a consumer sees and experiences from day to day…

Market alignment in context to all businesses going through cycles where there is growth, change and evolution.

As the market continuously experiences rapid innovation and clients’ expectations change, so does the need to enhance your brand’s digital experience.

Market alignment is to align marketing messages with your target audience, it’s the core reason why most small business B2B sales lead prospecting fails.

business audience marketing — Failing to align your marketing message with your target audience…

Apply what you learn in this jam packed report and your list grows fast. If you’re unhappy with the results just email and say so, thanks…

Kick-start Your Email Marketing

This jam-packed report empowers you to better understand and structure your email list building faster and more effectively.

We’re confident this information gives you the frame work with time to test and refine a bunch of tactics which deliver profitable results.

You’ll discover:

Why building your email list must be priority #1 for your business
Effective list-building tactics discovered via years of experience and countless tests
How to use these results to grow your list faster than ever before
Examples of how other successful business do similar steps to grow their B2B lists
How to apply what we tested and learned into your own business
How other smart and creative businesses are turning website visitors into a powerful email list to grow their business
Why lots of businesses overlook these points and miss out on tons of subscribers…

One big difference between successful email marketing vs failures is successful email campaigns are always better structured for ways to build lists more effectively.

Even if you know a thing or two about email, we’re sure you’ll learn more from this and grow your list even faster.

How to get unstuck! Finally get clarity and stop bumbling around in the dark, dazed and confused about pay per click advertising (PPC).

How to Find Your PPC Make Money Numbers

Find out what does it costs you on average to generate a sale, for example; it costs you on average $20 to make a $22.41 sale.

Question:

Is it profitable?

Is it worth your time?

Can you optimise your website and/or PPC ads?

How do you calculate this number using the results you get from keyword conversions, what do these keyword results tells you:

keyword 1 cost $x to generate a sale
keyword 2 cost $x to generate a sale
keyword 3 cost $x to generate a sale

Add up all of the dollar amounts it costs you for each converting
keyword and divide it by the total number of converting keyword phrases.

That yields your average cost per conversion:

keyword 1 cost $15.25 to generate a sale:
keyword 2 cost $27.98 to generate a sale
keyword 1 cost $21.13 to generate a sale

Add up all the “spends” and this totals to $64.36, THEN divide that by “3” (number of keywords) and the number = $21.45

So $21.45 is what you effectively spend to get conversations across your whole campaign.

This is the magic number you need to beat (assuming you’re already
optimized your bidding, ads, and landing page).

Discover first hand how to save $$$…let’s show you how powerful business audience marketing is in its simplicity as this action plan puts more cash into your pocket.

It is not what you ever dreamed so put this question to rest once and for all and get answers!

How you can save hundreds of dollars on tools and software others are draining their bank accounts. No need to join that crowd…

What if you’re stuck to make even one measly sale?

See for yourself how small businesses are knocking down sales. It is so simple to get results, still are you making the same costly mistake?

What if you’re primarily focused on building a B2B brand online?

there are various factors that have to be weighed in. Not only does a B2B brand cater to a far more niche audience or market but it also has to adhere to the finer conventions of branding and marketing.

Reaching out to consumers at large and to reach out to niche business clients are completely different ball games.

Effective Online B2B Branding Equity

You want to get accustomed with the most effective ways to reach out to your target audience, make an impact right at the onset and continue developing a relationship with your prospective and newly acquired clientele.

It is worth mentioning that building a B2B brand is not just sales or promotions.

Marketing and advertising, product development or client relations are all specific facets of developing a brand.

Domains come together along with many other factors to contribute to the establishing and eventual flourishing of a B2B business.

Take a Closer Look at Segments

You would a list which caters to every aspect of your business development, advertising, marketing including sales and analytics.

The world of business clients can also be categorized into different segments which differentiate prospective clients from those that wouldn’t be prospective leads for your specific product or service.

Identifying target segments, addressing concerns and meeting needs while pitching your product is the name of the game.

You’re creating a channel of compelling communication which is what is benchmark and crucial right at the start of your overall sales cycle.

Convincing a business is more complicated if the product or service is not really a basic necessity for the company you are catering to.

That’s why the use of analytics, the entire mechanism of advertising and promotions, appeal of marketing campaigns and sales pitches would be more significant than consumer products.

There are many facets to get accustomed to get the best results out of each of your initiative pertaining to every objective.

Identify your business audience which matters to your sales cycle because placing online ads involves choosing predefined business audience segments provided by audience-targeting platforms.

You want to get the right prospects which matter most to your business
without a lot of wasteful and ineffective “shot gun” or mass marketing.

You start this process by analysing your existing client database, talk to your sales team to determine which audience segment(s) represent buyers and represent your ideal clients.

You use this market research with business audience marketing due diligence checklist to guide you in your display advertising strategies.

Next step is to establish your branding goals and metrics.

Online branding is not a set and forget it form of marketing. In fact, there’s a lot of problems and pitfalls to understand before you even fall for in love with this myth.

You want to use your goals and timeframe to set-up your marketing campaign strategies and tactics that way you improve your chances of achieving your goals with better/stronger results.

You’d want to know why you ended up short and what to do about it so you’re constantly improving and growing your business bottom line and avoid making the same mistakes which hold you back.

You’re now at a stage where you can test content and ad creatives which are closely matched to your target audience.

You want to create content aligned to your ad creatives.

Why would you want to use this criteria before launching any of your marketing or advertising campaigns?

Firstly, you already understand you don’t want to create ads which don’t matter to your target audience….that’s why you’re testing your ad creative and content using an analytic platform.

This is called split testing, the process is simple, you create two identical ads and use one variable to compare each ad’s performance against each other to establish a benchmark.

The benchmark is basically the winning ad which performs best or what we call the control.

To establish your benchmark, you run both ads at the same time, web analytic software automatically rotates ads on a click by click basis to establish the underperforming ad.

You analysis and see the differences, kill under performing ad and improve performance by beating the control (establishing clear winner) creating another ad with one new variation.

This is all done by using web analytics, which measure and track performance of the ads in context to your target audience vising your website or dedicated landing page.

You’re learning the process of optimisation and why it’s crucial to not waste time an money marketing to prospects which are not aligned to your sales funnel or interested in what your business offers.

In other words you want prospective buyers or prospects which have a track record of taking action.

Web analytics empowers you to decide which marketing programs and campaigns do the best job of converting
prospects to customers at the highest conversion rates…makes sense right?

This marketing strategy allows you to understand client acquisition costs in context to client lifetime value, so you could invest more in the best performing marketing channels with tactics which matter most to your business and your existing and prospective clients.

This is where you really want to leverage the power of your business branding by using a blog.

Branding is leadership, positioning, establishing credibility and trust.

This is where you brand shines and takes centre stage by backing up every promise to connect only to prospects and clients which you want to and can support.

Your blog in conjunction with business brand building reinforces support. The fact your company is a leader and expert, not just another average business delivering mediocre experiences with empty promises.

Your blog allows you to leverage display advertising to create lift and momenteum across many marketing channels.

Why? Because it build your brand, and a familiar brand increases awareness or the type of searches.

You get better results by aligning content to specific ads, which in turn improves your market confidence, all comes back to market to message match across marketing platforms, (e.g; organic search, social media, facebook, twitter, google+, etc…)

You want to set-up tracking to measure value of display advertising beyond pay per clicks (PPC) and click through rates (CTRs).

PPC was at one point the best way to effectively measure the return on investment via online display advertising.

Now because of the every increasing and fierce competition with expansion of the Internet, these days you must be smarter in your marketing strategy.

You want to measure every possible leak in the bucket, in other words measure every process across multiple marketing channels and advertising platforms to include all key performance indicators (KPIs) aligned to time frames and action metrics.

This is the revenue goals basis for boosting sales and profits in B2B advertising and goal for building a targeted audience using defined parameters of cost efficiency with higher returns (ROI).

After you’ve rolled out various marketing campaigns you can plug-in and use social marketing to boost and asset your brand awareness.

The fact is over 1,000,000,000, that’s not a spelling mistake, its one billion people using Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Now you can really assert your brand reach with more marketing dollar fire power by leveraging re-targeting across your website, display, email and social channels, supported by your content management system (CMS) or blog platform.

Yes, you want to leverage every dollar in your pocket by staying true to what your clients want.

On targeted advertising works better, because you’re even more relevant, connecting and engaging interested audiences.

Retargeting reuses your existing advertising to increase awareness and frequency of ads shown across multiple channels.

Retargeting starts with your target audience and magnifies overall effectiveness of messages with ad placement to precise behaviour of target market at the exact time their interest is at peak.

Business Audienece Marketing

Direct Mail Marketing

Direct Mail Marketing or Telemarketing?

20/02/2014 MarketingStrategy Leave a comment

Make this mistake with direct mail marketing and you’re finished…

Yes A Lot Of Direct Mail Marketing Gets Thrown Straight In The Trash

Direct mail is one of the most important pieces of your marketing plan. Developing and executing the campaign can many times be a costly mistake, because today’s mailing regulations can get complicated…

In fact, postage rates are changing as costs makes it harder to profit and if you’re not clear about your target market and how to stand out.

The right message is crucial and must get to target prospect in the right way on a frequent follow-up sequence.

Capturing your reader’s attention has to happen fast (in 9 seconds or less) and your reader must be engaged and motivated in order to take action…

Direct Mail Marketing

Let’s focus and talk about how to use direct mail marketing so its geared towards your full advantage.

Direct mail marketing is one of the most common and recognised forms of awareness or engagement with a brand.

This direct measurement of direct mail marketing is often achieved by using a specific lead generation ad.

In the digital space you’d leverage a specific landing page, which is specifically designed for the traffic source going to your website.

Tip: The landing page must be relevant in order to match message to target advertisement.

Direct mail campaigns are generally organised geographically and sent to all postal customers in an area or to all customers on a list.

It is posted mail which advertises your business and its products and services. Direct mail marketing campaigns encourage engagement with good relationship building.

Get focused on improving customer response rates by precisely tailoring messages to target audiences, empowering prospective customers to read your advertising without being distracted by competing advertising.

Types Of Direct Mail Marketing

The most common types of direct mail marketing include:

Catalogues – bound, multi-page promotions of products
Self-mailers – created from a single-printed sheet that has been folded
Envelope mailers – with inserts inside the envelope
Postcards – with your promotional message on one side and the customer’s address on the other
Snap mailers – folds and seals with pressure
Dimensional mailers – for example, a small box
Intelligent documents – printed with personalised information from a database.

Direct Mail Marketing Tips

A reliable, accurately defined mailing list and quality mail advertising improves the open rates of response to your direct mail marketing.

You can buy lists of addresses in the postcodes you want to send direct mail to or lists of customers who have opted-in to receive offers from third parties.

Australia Post’s Open Up to Mail initiative gives tips for buying a direct mail list. Find out about Australia Post’s direct mail services.

You don’t want to cut corners on research, your presentation and design are crucial because you want to get the highest conversions right?

Engage a designer and brief them on the end result you want so you can design your direct mail marketing material for greatest impact and for your particular target audience.

Keep your messages sharp, focused and brief with the help of a professional copywriter.

Limited offers with promotional incentives such as discounts can improve response rates, but make sure you have the budget to deliver on your discounted offers.

Always follow-up with a second direct mail marketing or telemarketing if your advertising spend allows, because you keep your customers’ attention on your products and services.

Know your responsibilities before undertaking any direct mail marketing because here in Australia you must understand legislation on collecting and holding personal information.

Direct mail marketing campaigns are often responsible for holding information records that are protected by privacy rights regulations.

The National Privacy Principles (NPP) on Australian Government’s privacy website explain how businesses should collect, use, secure and disclose information about individuals.

Taken into consideration the huge success direct mail marketing has and the availability of computers, these can be used as a powerful marketing tool for your continued success.

Here are key steps to putting together a highly effective direct mail marketing program:

List all benefits customers get from the purchase of your products and services
Pick single most powerful benefit on list in alignment with customer’s problem
Build an attention-getting headline around that one specific benefit
Remember to use emotion to fulfill the desire (i.e, to be beautiful, young, wealthy, desired, popular, successful, etc)
Develop a sales letter using powerful headline to grab attention
Provide information and motivate customers to take action
Put together supplementary items (i.e brochure, order form, reply envelope or note to encourages them to read the letter)
Rent or purchase quality mailing list which matches your product or service
Test and compare cost of mailing vs. cost per order
Measure results and calculate ROM (Return on Mailing) dollars
Code your mailings to measure response
Mail frequently to a smaller subset of your ideal list
Continue to test and refine your direct mail marketing plan in context to highest customer lifetime value...

You can see how direct mail marketing can empower you to find local or even nation wide target market to send letters or postcards…and bring in new leads, clients and customers.

Use direct mail marketing to establish your brand, increase walk-in-traffic and deliver relevant targeted offers promoting products, services, grand openings or special events.

If you own or operate a retail business (brick-and-mortar store) and you’re planning a promotion, you want your offer to be time sensitive (Limited Time ONLY) for 3-7 days.

Tip: Use Limited Time Only Offer to create a need to take action with urgency…

You want to create a sense of urgency with value to a real purpose using reason why marketing bear in mind and consider the time frame to encourage people to buy now.

Buy now is always good for your cash flow and business, right?

Testing, tracking, measuring and fine-tuning your marketing campaign allows you to get savvy with much better sales results and therefore lowering overall cost of each campaign.

Telemarketing is best leveraged for higher priced, high margin products or services…

When you hear the word telemarketing, what four letter word do you think of?

Ok, now you’ve got that off your chest, here’s a clear and powerful way to help customers feel like they are getting personal attention and keep them from blocking your number!

To be successful in telemarketing you want to:

Put together a plan, so you know exactly what you want to accomplish during the call within a specified time frame
Develop a list of topics to discuss and the questions you want to present around these topics
Input verbiage checking to see if you are calling at a good time
Include enough questions to keep the conversation interesting, yet not too many to sound like you are interrogating
Start with broad questions and narrow your focus as the conversation continues
Offer feedback to show you’re paying attention, listening and engaging conversation
Don’t insult their intelligence or manipulate
Remember to listen first, talk second
Stay relaxed and conversational…

Telemarketing doesn’t have to be the trauma it’s typically made out to be.

You can put together an honest, personal and effective telemarketing campaign that is endearing, informative and gets the job done.

Think of how you would want to be treated on a marketing call. Ask your friends and family what they hate most about the telemarketing calls they get and work hard to craft your plan in a better way.

When selling by telephone, you have approximately thirty seconds to convince the customer to listen to you.

You need an opening statement which captures their attention, conveys who you are, what you want and why the prospect should listen.

It’s easy to see how direct mail marketing and telemarketing can positively boost sales and impact your business profits by bringing in new customers.

It’s a constant process of defining and refining, matching offers to the right customer by increasing the level of awareness about your products, services and company branding.

Getting people to respond to direct mail marketing or advertising means using a strategy, so many companies include coupons in their postcard mailers and flyers to encourage prospective customers to come in, book an appointment or schedule a consultation.

Coupons are tried and tested, there are a few ways to make coupons even more effective more attractive and here are a few tips that can help:

Direct mail coupons must be perceived as being valuable, so what if customers don’t feel that your coupons actually serve any real benefit to them?

Firstly, they may not actually respond and as a result, you want to carefully craft your offer.

Remember you want to match your offer to the customer, which represents value, without going broke or putting your company into a serious financial disadvantage.

Direct mail coupons need to attract attention and stand out, as with any other direct mail offer, appearance actually matters here.

This goes back to working with a direct mail designer to get the best possible look for your coupons, and you’re more likely to see far greater results if every detail ties in with offer.

People are drawn into eye-catching offers and the better your direct mail coupons look at conveying your offer in context to matching your customers interest the better your overall response rates.

It’s crucial to always Include a timeline because if you don’t add a deadline to your offer, you may not see a great response.

Tip: Scarcity, timelines or limited offers can actually help your business in the long run

You may not want to offer a 50% discount six months from now, so including a deadline is a good idea in terms of your response rate and financial health of your business, does that make sense?

Direct mail coupons can be a significant way to encourage new customers and reactivate existing customers to return to your business.

Your direct mail marketing campaign makes sure customers get the offer and take action.

In summary, direct mail marketing and telemarketing, you must get totally clear on your business direction:

How to get business to next level and achieve goals
Clarity and optimism leads to greater wealth faster
Get clarity on ideal clients (age, demographics, etc)
Get clarity on best pricing (higher and multiple price points)
Get clarity on USP, best sales pitch (improve conversions)

Building your marketing machine:

Schedule marketing times (develop marketing calender)
Must test and measure all your marketing (multiple channels)
Must engage, follow-up consistently, re-position and educate

Transform your creativity and productivity:

Focus 25 mins on top priority tasks
Take 5 minute breaks every 25 minutes to refresh
Set a leaving time to knock off work (power of deadlines)
Allocate and block time to plan and grow your business
Market strategically, trial and error vs. system

Direct mail marketing can be expensive, bear in mind you want to be clear and fully understand your customer lifetime value.

Through a successful direct mail marketing campaign you can quickly and easily offset costs and skyrocket business profits (including able to crush and out spend competition by advertising consistently).

That’s why so many companies take advantage of direct mail marketing.

The bottom line is the key to success is in your structure and strategy, if you approach marketing with correct planning, you enjoy much better returns on investment (ROI).

Direct Mail Marketing

Convert Prospects Into Customers

Convert Prospects Into Customers Fast!

14/02/2014 MarketingStrategy Leave a comment

How to convert prospects into customers…

Why Your Prospects Aren’t Converting?

The easiest way to understand why prospects aren’t converting is to ask them. Why ask questions about your unique selling proposition (USP)? You want to make sure USP matches what your present customers think it is.

If USP good or bad, it means it’s poorly communicated. Here a a few ways to identify conversion opportunities…

convert prospects into customers — Ask prospects using a survey to get information you need to turn prospects into customers…

Web surveys keep you in touch with your customers.

You can strategically use a survey to help get the information you need to turn prospects into customers or get information from customers you need to develop a new product.

So you could as questions similar to:

How long had you been a customer of ours?
What made you start using our services in the first place?
Why did stop buying from us?
If you had to sum up what made you shop with us in 1 sentence what would it be?
What did we do well?
What did we do badly?
Imagine we gave you a 10 out of 10 customer experience, what would we have done to provide that?
Does anyone in our team standout as great to deal with?
Terrible to deal with?
Do you still use those services now and if so who provides them to you?
What do they do really well?

Simple to ask questions, right? Again thank prospects for their time and offer something of value for free to get them to try you again to win back their custom.

If you follow this plan you’ll be amazed at what you learn about your business, product, service and team.

Add some of your own questions, essentially you want to find out what makes prospects shop with you, that way once you know you can play to your strengths, alter your USP and modify your business advertising to match your new USP…

Find and target more customers who will buy and become loyal to you and finally better serve your current customers. Makes sense right?

Recommend doing this every year at least with 100 new prospects. OK, that takes care of why prospects buy from you, now let’s work on why prospects don’t buy from you.

The predictable path has been more concentration on the immediate gratification offered by low-hanging fruit, meaning prospects who could be closed quickly get all the attention.

Understanding your target market and prospect is a core step to improve conversions.

Any good business advertising should take advantage of a marketing funnel:

Command Attention
Showcase Benefits of Products and Services
Prove the Benefits
Persuade Prospects to Embrace Benefits
Strong Call to Action

Keep reading and you’ll see how to turn prospects into customers and ensure you retain your customers longer for more profitable marketing opportunities.

Consider how marketing communications match your objectives:

Find prospects
Maintain contact with prospects on a schedule matched to their interest
Move prospect’s interest forward, building story along the way
Accelerate the interest of prospects closest to taking next step toward commitment
Follow-up and nurtured prospects into customers

While, your marketing is doing its job, you want to be working on turning those prospects into customers.

There are a few key ways to draw prospects in and seal the deal, so your business advertisements need to be:

Inviting
Informative
Enjoyable

The biggest fear of most new customers and why they often do not make a buying decision and leave you in limbo is buyer’s remorse.

You want to avoid this at all costs and this should be mitigated if you’ve provided a quality product and service that delivers on the marketing claims you’ve made.

However, this can still occur and there are two ways to deal with this:

Offer to refund money-no questions asked
Offer a bonus they can keep even if they return the product

These offers alone also mitigate buyer’s remorse because the customer trusts you more just for offering these two risk reversals.

There are number of other ways to turn a prospect into a customer:

Offer a special price as an opportunity for you to test the market
Offer a lower price, use a tangible reason for pushing inventory
Customers love story as this makes you feel so much more human
Offer a referral incentive
Offer a smaller, more inexpensive product first to build trust
Offer easy flexible payments, subscription on package deals
Offer to charge less for their first purchase if they become a repeat customer
Offer extra incentives-longer warranties, free bonuses if ordered by a set date
Offer flexible financing options, if applicable
Offer a bonus if paid in full
Offer special packaging or delivery
Offer “name your own price” incentives
Offer comparative data or other comparison tools
Offer a trade-up or upgrade on product or service they already have
Offer additional, educational information to help them make a better decision

The options really are as limitless as you make it.

You can use these or other ideas to find what works the best for your business, products or service and target market to improve conversion rates.

In other words, you’ll be in a stronger position to strategically market or advertise your business and convert prospects into customers fast…

Convert Prospects Into Customers

Sales Follow Up

Sales Follow Up For Effective Marketing ROI

27/01/2014 MarketingStrategy Leave a comment

Lead Generation Success Means Effective Sales Follow-Up To Boost Sales And Leverage Leads!

Regardless of your industry, products or services, the reality is why are so many business owners never doing sales follow-up?

Sales follow up, what if you are among the 94.9%, which have never considered one of the most powerful and crucial processes in your lead generation success?

Well, consider this, many businesses focus solely on attracting new customers, yet you need to spend a good chunk of your time retaining current and former customers.

These are people you already know have purchased, yes…already bought from you!

Take the time to market and sell new products to your customers and less time trying to sell old products to new customers and you see a dramatic transformation in your sales, customer quality and branding position.

You do realise you’re missing out on a ton of sales, right?

Sales follow up is all about relationships and follow up can be done by:

Email (doesn’t have to be opened)
Newsletter
Fax (has to be physically dealt with)
Phone
Mail
Social Media
Face-to-face

9 out of 10 small business owners only follow up once, on average the number of sales follow up messages are more often in the range of 10, 15, 20 times and higher using a variation of messages and channels.

Here’s why?

Because prospects are still asking themselves, “does it make sense to move forward or not?”

Here are a couple of key elements to use to retain your current customers:

Stay in contact means by phone, email, in person or by carrier pigeon if you have too!

Post purchase means sales follow up with customers. Your customers need to feel like they are being supported for their purchase with customer service on purchase products.

How many times have you purchased a product and felt completely abandoned?

Something as simple as a Thank You note with your contact or customer service information can go along way in retaining and adding to customer lifetime value.

Guarantees always offer your current customers a risk reversal. Show them you appreciate their business or extend this further with a club specifically to reward loyal customers.

You can also do this with a preferred pricing option.

Integrity is using good business practices and simply upholding integrity, dignity and honesty go along way with customers.

Let’s face it, there’s a lot of swindling and crap out there. The safer and more confident you make your customers feel…that going to make a supportive and loyal customer.

What if you’re not asking questions…how would you know the best way to keep giving more reasons to buy?

We all know sales follow-up is a crucial component in lead generation and the easiest way to lose sales is to fail to follow up.

After all, leads don’t convert into prospects if they only stay on the line for so long, right?

Sales follow-up is equally key to maintain current customers and repeat business.

Do you follow-up and follow-through on every lead? Here are some techniques to polish up your follow-through:

Maintain all information about the lead or prospect by using sales tracking and customer relationship management tool.

The idea of tracking isn’t new, although anytime you need a name, phone number or other information about a lead, prospect or client it’s easily accessible.

If you run into a customer on the street and you’ve only got your mobile phone handy, you’ll be glad this information is right at your fingertips!

Document all follow-up, sounds like common sense, right? Make sure to track every item and complete each action accurately and within the agreed time frame.

Look, a customer feels more secure in making a purchase if you’re well organised…

Providing information which is inaccurate, incomplete or untimely won’t help your current or prospective customers, and definitely won’t help you.

Make sure you understand how the information requested is used. Do customers want to better understand the benefits of your product or service?

Do they need a quote which must be below a certain figure? Don’t make assumptions or guesses, just talk to the customer! Make sure you’re providing exactly what they need.

Customer service means contacting leads or customers within a reasonably short time period, so ask if they have any questions regarding the information provided.

Tip: Cover your bases and ask if they‘d like any additional information…

This helps to clear up any misunderstandings or misconceptions they have. It’s also a key opportunity to find out if you’re still in the running.

Perhaps your client is stuck on a comparable benefit on another product. Maybe they got a lower price quote from a competitor and would welcome a second quote.

You can’t always predict which way they’re leaning, so don’t be afraid to let them take the lead once.

4. Don’t let the lead get away because if ‘no’ is the answer to the questions above, you understand why the information was requested and how it will be used, right?

So offer to provide additional information or services the lead finds valuable. Does your lead need a flexible payment plan or approval from others?

It might be beneficial to schedule an in-person meeting with technical representatives or a phone meeting. Do whatever you can to make it easy for your lead to buy your product.

5. Ask for the sale, this is obvious, yet once you’ve come this far, don’t skip the most important step. If you’re able to solidify your relationship with a lead, remember to say ‘thank you’.

It’s common to fire off another e-mail for this, yet a card or personal note makes you more memorable every time. And if your lead does say ‘no’, take the time to find out why.

Did you provide the information too late? Was the quoted price too high? Find out who is the competition and what are they doing for the prospect?

Don’t let one lost sale discourage you because this is a great opportunity to find out how to improve your sales follow-up techniques and your marketing strategy.

Importantly, at each of the above mentioned, always track sales follow-up as required, record the lead’s response in your database.

This information is crucial in managing your relationship with all leads, prospects and customers for analysing and evaluating strategies, business systems and marketing ROI.

Even if you don’t make the sale, this information is valuable and provides a guide next time the prospect knocks on your door.

There are three cornerstone ideas to a successful business:

Quality product/service
Offering useful products/services that solve a problem
Or Enhance the life of a customer
Offer subjects your customers find interesting

Use this approach of educating your customers and offering real information and insight and see how this is returned in the form of trust with loyalty and greater sales success.

Stop wasting all your time on new prospects while your current customers fall by the wayside. Your best leads are your existing customers.

If you’ve been putting all your marketing efforts into acquiring new leads, stop and divert some of your resources into reselling, up-selling, cross-selling to those same customers.

In every way possible, through package inserts, regular mailings, special offers, just stay in touch with those customers and get them used to buying from you.

Sales follow up is a totally effective process and business tool if you use it within a pattern of influence.

Imagine you focused on your customer, not the sale by tapping into their emotional needs, wants and desires…

You use reason why marketing, your sales follow up sequence delivers so much value you’re able to shift the market’s buying criteria in your favour.

In the book from Robert Cialdini, he shares this amazing process which is called triggers of influence:

Scarcity
Authority
Social proof
Likeability
Reciprocity
Commitment
Consistency

Really in a nutshell, sales follow up basically all comes back to relationship marketing.

We have put together the sales follow up resources and savvy tools to do exactly that. We can help you educate your customers and you can watch the benefits pay off many-fold…

Sales Follow Up

Customer Experience Strategy

14/01/2014 MarketingStrategy Leave a comment

“Watch Sales Soar With Your New Customer Experience Strategy”

The peak performance stimulus offer every business should use now…ever lost customers to a competitor and didn’t really understand or know why it happens?

Your customer experience strategy can focus resources and empower your business with more customers and keep them coming back, (repeat buyers) buying over and over again.

More importantly from defecting to your competitors…

The single most important focus is on superior customer experience supported by a crystal clear strategy and transparent performance accountability at every level.

How do you get there?

It starts with a customer experience strategy which drives and defines KPIs (future targets required) to be successful, followed by execution.

What are the key elements of successful customer experience strategy?

Customers have two feelings when buying or considering buying from a particular business. The first is they are the most important one in the relationship.

Tip: Customers purchase if they decide it’s in their interests to buy and only then.

So customers are right to see themselves as important and the way in which they’re handled in context of courtesy, efficiency and appropriateness must reflect this.

Customer experience strategy enables your business to live up to your brand, maximise revenues and reduce costs:

Customer’s today are dealing with more choices and a complex selection of digital
channels and overwhelming daily messages:

Online
Offline
Direct mail
Television
Radio
Social media
WordPress websites
Mobile apps
Email
In-store digital displays

The customer experience strategy can utilise all these media channels which are playing a vital role in the total brand experience.

Your customers have access to all these types of interactivity and content combined with each of these multi-channels, which distribute messages via text, audio and video.

From a brand’s perspective the communication space has become so fragmented and is
evolving so fast that most digital strategies are out of date before they are signed off.

Many businesses trying to deal with this complexity have started to move beyond channel based strategies and towards more multi-channel customer experience strategies.

Customer experience strategy is all about your competitive advantages…

What if you didn’t have any competitors?

Well, there wouldn’t be a need for customer experience strategy.

Even if it’s for the sole purpose of strategic planning which empowers your business to get as effectively as possible a sustainable advantage over your competitors.

Another factor influencing the need for businesses to focus on the entirety of customer experience, from end to end, is it’s reached a point in their development where customer acquisition is not the core measure of success.

Detailed maps of the customers’ end-to-end service experience and analysing cross functionally to understand customer frustration and service complexity allows for customer service transformations.

Outside-in maps track your customer experience lifecycle within every service channel:

Phone
Self-service
Online
Social media

The map provides a comprehensive picture, as a business scales up acquiring new customers which is key to success, particularly for consumer-facing brands.

As a company matures, and the market they play in becomes more competitive, retention becomes as important – if not more so.

Retaining and understanding current customers is the key to discovering new revenue opportunities and increasing the overall lifetime value of each customer.

This is where customer experience strategy and design becomes vital for the businesses continued growth and success.

While a marketing focused digital strategy is mostly on awareness raising of the customer journey, a customer experience strategy looks at the whole process.

Tip: Customer experience strategy is designed around long term relationships…

As a business leader there are essentially two ideas to get your head around if you are about to start down the path of a customer experience, or customer-centric, strategy.

The first is learning to think like a customer. This is not as easy as it sounds.

For example, your marketing and branding will have set expectations about how they will be treated and what the customer will receive.

From there the customer interacts with your brand in some way.

The result of this interaction is the experience customer. This activity is all about engaging and connecting on an emotion level…

The emotions can range from delighted to angry, which determines how the relationship they have with your brand evolves.

The more you understand your customer journey and reasons why they buy from you, the better you can manage the resulting relationship.

This brings us to the second step that customer experience design needs a process.

The customer experience discussed above is the first step of the strategy.

You want to do deeper discovery, build, test, validate and finally implement.

This is not something you design and push out to market as a finished product. Why? Because you need to be agile.

The end result is all about your customers so they need to be part of the whole process.

Digital technologies and changes in the way we communicate and interact are disrupting many industries, still for each there are also new revenue opportunities.

Your customer experience strategy is a fast way of uncovering untapped revenues, grow revenues and increase loyalty by implementing a customer experience strategy today…

Customer Experience Strategy

Picture your business booming, being the trusted, most powerful fastest growing brand, what you always wanted to happen with a smarter marketing strategy right?