1) Attract New Clients
Use as many marketing methods as make sense for your industry, your market, and your company. How many marketing methods are there? Literally hundreds.
I've discovered some 397 ways to
• Get More Leads
• Boost Conversion Rates
• Boost The Amount clients spend on each purchase
• Increase The Frequency Of Purchase
• Boost Profit Margins
• Get More Referrals
As proof, I've published a list of 101 of these strategies in my article directory at http://www.andrebell.com/articles/
Despite the many options available, few companies use more than one or two of these marketing methods to grow their company. They are leaving themselves wide open for competitors to dominate the other marketing methods.
Regardless of the economy, a business that refuses to grow stagnates. Nature proves this. Even water that sits still for too long goes bad.
By attracting new clients through using multiple marketing methods simultaneously you avoid this stagnation. Plus you fend off competitors much more easily than relying on just a single sales letter, yellow page ad, or any other single marketing method.
2) Increase The Frequency Of Client Purchases
Apply as many marketing methods as possible and are profitable for increasing the number of times a week, month, quarter, or year your clients buy from you.
The more frequently they buy, the more money your company generates. For ideas on how to increase buying frequency, if you haven’t already done so take a look at my checklist of 101 marketing methods.
Also, if you sell direct by mail or online, think of ways you can implement an autoship or auto-renewal program into your current marketing and sales process.
I was surprised a couple of days ago while waiting for a prescription at my local pharmacy to hear their audio system advertising ‘auto prescription renewals’.
The pharmacy will call you every month to remind you to pick up your prescription, which they kindly auto-filled for you. And the ‘nice’ thing is…you don’t even have to remember to schedule your renewal. The pharmacy handles everything for you.
The reality is, this is a method to stop client attrition and boost prescription renewal frequency. The pharmacy is encouraging customers to avoid letting prescriptions lapse. Why? Because the pharmacy doesn’t earn a penny on prescription refills that go unfilled.
The win to the customer is less hassles with remembering to call in or stand in line to refill prescriptions. The win to the pharmacy is increased renewal frequency from what could be otherwise disloyal or forgetful pharmacy clients.
More ways to increasing frequency than these. Perhaps you can offer or recommend additional products or services throughout the weeks and months. These can be your own products and services.
You can even offer products and services from other companies that sell products that are complementary to what you offer.
For example a pool cleaning service can offer outdoor furniture from a trendy outdoor furnishing company. How? Simply joint venture with another company.
This is a win all the way across the board. The client or customer usually gets a special offer or discount and the two companies split the revenues or profits from the relationship.
Joint ventures are just another way to increase buying frequency. I’ve identified 47 ways to get existing customers to buy more, and more often. Perhaps some of these additional marketing tactics will apply to you. Keep reading to find out how to get a free gift that will help find out how many more ways you can profit from the relationships you’ve already established with your clients.
3) Increase The Volume Of Purchases
Adopt marketing methods that will increase the average dollar amount of each client transaction. Begin using point of purchase incentives. Promote "one time offers" to encourage spontaneous purchases. Also, try imitating Mc Donald’s way of combining multiple items together as a “value” purchase. In other words, encourage clients to “Supersize”.
4) Increase Customer Retention/Reduce Attrition
Clients drift away for a number of reasons. Often complacency of business owners and staff is the cause. And sometimes clients drift away for reasons that have nothing to do with us.
“Salvaging” clients from leaving has the same impact on your bottom line as increasing sales by that same percentage.
For example, if a business normally has an annual 30% loss of clients but works to bring that to zero, this is the same as giving the business a 30% increase in sales. But the best part is, the business grows without taking on a single dollar of additional advertising expense. This is as close to getting free money as a business is likely ever to find.
And it’s easier and cheaper to improve your bottom line by preventing attrition, than prospecting or advertising to generate sales through new clients.
5) Increase Sales Conversions
Increasing inquiry-to-sales conversion will increase a company’s income without increasing costs. This is an instant profit increase without taking on a single penny of expense.
There are several steps a business can take to improve it’s sales conversion rate. Some of these steps are to target and market to only the highest probability prospects.
The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, applies here.
80% of sales staff focus the majority of their time chasing the 80% of prospects who will never buy. That’s dumb and is a huge waste of time. I’ve held sales jobs were employees would get fired if they kicked a person to the curb instead of let the person leave on their own without buying.
The idea was, as long as you were speaking to them, there’s still an opportunity to sell to them. That is so wrong.
Many unqualified ‘buyers’ will waste a salesperson’s time for no reason other than for pride. More than a decade ago I sold cars. We had a nickname for these types of people.
“Lot lizards”.
Every few weeks the Lot Lizards would wander into dealership after dealership and waste the time of a sales person – with absolutely no desire, interest, or ability to buy. This was just time for them to get out of the house and find something to do other than walk around the local mall.
Experienced sales employees would find an excuse not to be available when these time wasters showed up. But the inexperienced employees got stuck with them.
13 years after leaving that industry I still see some of these same Lot Lizards driving those same beat up cars as before. Still claiming to buy ‘someday’.
Here’s the thing. This same situation exists in nearly every industry.
80% of sales reps waste time trying to ‘convert’ non-buyers into buyers...as if persistence alone will work some kind of magic spell. It won’t. Instead, put ‘systems’ in place for quickly sorting, attracting, and weeding out the right types of buyers from time wasters.
This will increase your sales because your time, energy, and efforts are spent selling to high probability clients instead of to time wasters.
There are at least 50 ways to improve sales conversin in print and in direct
selling. Uncover the tactics that will work in your business just as well as
they've worked in others.
These five strategies were extracted from my
Small Business Growth Strategies Plan.
Grab the complete report and audio cds for a full explanation of my 12-Step
Marketing System for overnight business and sales growth.
To your success.ess.
