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Archive for the ‘Direct Mail’ Category

Everyone who offers a product or service to others is in the sales business. No matter how you feel about “sales”, you must be able to present your offer well if you hope to succeed. Most people start by making that offer to one person at a time. When you’re ready for greater success, though, it’s time to make the leap to one-to-many sales.

Why Should I Make the Leap?

What’s the most valuable commodity a small business owner has? A line of credit? A great business plan? Those are both important, but the most valuable asset you own as an entrepreneur is time.

Each of us has a limited amount of time to create products, market them, makes sales and run our businesses. Doesn’t it make sense to maximize every minute? By learning to present your offer to many people at once, your time is preserved for business activities other than sales.

Think of it this way—a great marketing campaign can bring potential clients to your door, but if you don’t have time to answer it, some of them are going to go away disappointed. Meeting with one prospect at a time is like dropping one single penny, rather than a handful of dollars, into your bank account.

Here’s another reason making one-to-many sales is a brilliant business strategy: presenting your offer to more than one person at a time increases your exposure to new markets exponentially. When the barrier to additional markets is removed by presenting your offer to a variety of groups, real success is within your grasp.

What If I’m Not Good with Groups?

If your natural selling style is one-to-one, that’s great! Not everyone can sit across the desk from another person and persuade them to buy a product. By all means, continue to build that strength.

As we mentioned above, however, your time is limited and you can only make so many one-to-one calls each month. You can do yourself a real favor by scheduling in one-to-many sales opportunities, as well. The increase in sales will help overcome your “public speaking anxiety” and persuade you to devote more of your time to reaching groups of people with your offer.

How Do I Jump In?

Many people are nervous at the thought of making a presentation to a room full of people. Try these steps to set up your first presentation:

* Ask existing clients for referrals to small groups they belong to. Anytime someone else is convening a meeting of people who need products like yours, that’s a built-in opportunity.
* Once you’ve booked your first group presentation, deliver information this group will find useful, whether they buy from you or not. The key is great content; once you’ve gained their respect by providing information they can use, they’ll be much more open to your offer.
* As your confidence grows, offer to speak to larger associations, clubs and other groups who regularly need guest speakers. Remember—great content plus your offer will build your reputation and your sales.

Making the leap from one-to-one sales opportunities to the compounding power of group presentations can be exhilarating. Get your toe in the water by presenting yourself to small groups, then dive in head first as you find yourself in demand as a speaker. Once you discover the advantages of one-to-many versus one-to-one, your business will prosper and you’ll actually have time to enjoy the results.

© Bernadette Doyle, 2009
WANT TO SEE MORE ARTICLES LIKE THIS ONE? See more articles at my website

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Are you under the impression that other business owners who offer something similar to what you offer are your competitors? Do you think these people won’t promote you because they see you as a competitor?

This is a common belief among many small business owners – and it’s a big mistake. Don’t view these other business owners as competitors. Consider them as potential joint venture partners.

Joint venture partnerships with businesses that complement yours are a prime source for you to find new traffic and generate quality leads.

It is so beneficial to your company to find other businesses that have lists of prospects similar to those you are targeting, and to approach them about a joint venture.

This is how the people who are in mastermind groups think. This is why they are so successful. They have this abundance mentality – meaning that they believe there is more than enough business for everybody. These mastermind types are always looking for other things to offer to their list.

They know that there is always going to be that group of hyper-responsives – the people whose desire to buy is greater than your ability to keep up with them. If you are not putting offers in front of them, they’ll take that desire to buy somewhere else. You risk losing them as customers if you don’t continue to offer them opportunities to buy from you.

That’s one of the reasons that, in addition to promoting my own offerings, I’ll often do reciprocal joint ventures with people who promote me. When I plan a teleseminar, I create a list of all the people I think could promote my call and invite them via email to participate.

At the end of the call, I always offer something for sale, and the people who helped promote the teleseminar receive a percentage of what I make from those sales. This is a model that works really well.

And the leads you will get from these sources are quality leads. One of the most important things about lead generation isn’t only the quantity, but also the quality. What percentage of those leads turn into actual customers? How much are they going to spend with you over the next 12 months? You stand a better chance of getting quality leads by reaching out to the clients of people who are doing things similar to what you are doing.

An added upside to joint ventures is that you only pay your joint venture partners when you make a sale. You don’t invest any money up front, which is especially helpful if you’re just starting out.

When you develop this mastermind way of thinking, it will give you the opportunity for the exponential growth that you may have been unable to achieve on your own.

As a small businesses owner, you may once have thought that talking to your perceived competitors was the last thing you should do. You need to change your mindset about that. Together, you can accomplish so much more than either one of you could possibly do on your own.

Bernadette Doyle is a small business marketing expert. Get more tips and advice at http://www.clientmagnets.com

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Do a lot of people express interest in your business? Do you have plenty of leads? A good list of prospects?

If you’ve got all of that and you’re still not getting enough real business, enough paying clients, you need to focus more on your conversion process.

A prospective client is not going to magically convert into a paying client without your doing something to make that happen. There are actually quite a few things you need to be doing to help with that transformation.

Be more upfront about asking people for their business. Ask more people to give you money. Not a loan, not begging. Ask more people to spend money with you, whether directly in a conversation, through an email promotion, or by sending traffic to a page on your website where you’re selling something. If you’re only asking five or ten people a day for money, you can’t be surprised that you’re not getting the paying business that you want.

Maneuver yourself into a position where you’re seen as an expert; where people know about you, and your reputation precedes you. As a result, you will get people automatically seeking you out as an expert.

Have more conversations with more people. The simplest way to move someone from being an interested prospect to a paying playing client is to talk to them, either face-to-face or over the phone. Make time for those one-to-one conversations, especially in the beginning. It is in these one-to-one interactions that you can surface every type of objection, engage with clients and continue working with them.

Be willing to do whatever it takes to get your prospect to see the value. If you truly believe in the value of your service or your product, if you think it’s the best thing ever and that more people should be using it, what are you willing to do to help them use it?

Listen to what your prospect is saying. Before you go into your pitch, determine their current situation, their needs and their desired end result. Only then can you offer a solution that is of value to them. Once they know your value, they’ll be willing to pay for it.

Don’t let obstacles or excuses stand in your way. If the website isn’t ready or something else still needs to be done, you can still focus on talking with prospects and converting them to clients.  Do what you can, with what you’ve got, from where you are.

Have a strong follow-up system in place. Know what your process for following up with prospects is.

Vary the media you use in your follow-up process. Use combinations of email, phone calls, cards and text messaging to keep contact with clients fresh.

Add one more step to your follow-up process. If you’ve tried every medium to follow-up with a prospect, try one more thing, one more time, before you give up. Don’t think you’re being a pest, either. Most qualified, serious prospects won’t feel that way about you if you follow up the right way.

Think of your webpage or print sales material as your personal 24/7 salesperson. Make sure all the information is in place to help prospects make the decision to do business with you.

Bernadette Doyle is a small business marketing expert. Get more tips and advice at http://www.clientmagnets.com

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If you’ve tried direct mail and advertising and it didn’t work for you, fine tune and adjust your advertising and mailings to make them produce results.  One method that I’ve found that makes an ad or mailing successful is to offer specific free items; a report, a tele-seminar or e-books.

I’ve heard from many of you that you’ve tried direct mail or lead generation advertising and didn’t see instant results.  There’s a learning curve with direct response advertising and you’re not always going to get a flood of business from your first ad or mailing.  By fine tuning and testing, you’re going to find the messages that you can rely on to bring in a certain number of inquiries.  Once you have this message, it’s going to produce going forward, it’s not a one time-deal.

Why Free Offers Work

When you’re offering a free report, you’re giving people something tangible to ask for.  You’re giving them a specific task and they’re going to be more responsive than a general ‘call for further information’ request.

I’ve tested this myself.  I ran an advertisement in a trade magazine and offered a phone number to call for further information.  The next time that I ran the ad; I offered a free report for callers.  There was a significant increase in the number of inquiries.

By offering this free report, you’re not only giving a specific ‘call to action’, you’re taking one more step to establishing yourself as an expert in your field.

What NOT to offer….

Well, let’s start with what NOT to offer as a freebie.  Products that take your time and only offer the one-to-one marketing approach are not cost effective and have limited sales potential.  This includes free consultations.

They’re time consuming and they’re taking your time from other projects and prospects.  Change your one-to-one marketing to one-to-many.  For example, that free consultation would reach significantly more people if it’s offered as a tele-seminar.

It’s also known that when you offer anything for free, you’re going to attract a certain number of people who just want the freebie.  They’re never going to buy from you, no matter what.  If you’re offering a consultation, you’ve lost a chunk of your time and it’s not going to pay off for you.  By offering a one-to-many product, you’ve significantly cut your losses with these bargain hunters.

What to offer…

You need to focus on the one-to-many marketing techniques, particularly if you’re going to offer a giveaway.  These giveaways need to be low cost for you, but offer a perceived value to the prospect.  A free report works well in advertisements, as do other techniques of one-to-many marketing such as tele-seminars or an electronic-book via email.

The Bottom Line

Creating advertisements and offers with unlimited potential to produce results over time will trump the hour of cold calling or one-on-one consultation that’s going to yield limited results.  Converting your one-to-one marketing techniques to one-to-many techniques is the key to becoming a Client Magnet.

Using free offers that have the one-to-many benefits is going to help your advertisements become more effective.   Think about where you’re putting your time in marketing.  If you’re using manual lead generators, change your methods to identify the fastest path to generate good leads.  That path is going to be direct response advertising, and the use of free reports is going to make them more effective.

Bernadette Doyle is a small business marketing expert. Get more tips and advice at http://www.clientmagnets.com

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We all have a certain turning point in our lives.  For some of us, that turning point comes when we’ve hit rock bottom and we have nothing more to lose.  My turning point came to me months into striking out on my own.  I had proposals out, making the rounds, I was choosing between putting petrol in the car and buying groceries and I had no money coming in.  My family was starting to question the decision I had made to strike out on my own.  I tried to be Miss Positive and had a few quotes from positive thinking literature waiting in the wings for a response to their questions.

At that point, I had nothing to lose.  It was ‘do or die’ and I planned on doing.  But I had to change my ways, I had to take stock of the situation.  I decided I was just no longer going to tolerate nor suffer the typical things that weren’t working for me.  At that point, I had to give myself permission to dismiss much of the advice that had been given to me to establish my business.  It just wasn’t working for me.

Now you may think your traditional sales experience is just what’s needed for your business, but I’m here to tell you that it’s not.  What’s worked in the past when you had a salary coming in is not what’s going to work for you once you’ve struck out on your own.

Now, I had to hit pretty close to rock bottom to see this.  I had to actually tell myself that it’s okay to throw out what was not working for me.  What I need to stress to you is that you do NOT have to reach rock bottom to get to this point.  Take stock of your situation now and give yourself permission to make the changes that are going to make your business successful.

Some questions that you should ask yourself at this point are:
• What am I doing that’s working to bring money in?
• What am I doing that’s not working to bring money in?
• What can I do to reach more people at once?  Are advertising, direct mail or open events an option?

What I did was I ditched the traditional selling, the one-to-one marketing methods that weren’t working for me and I pieced together a whole new marketing and selling system.  But, it didn’t happen overnight.  There’s no miracle cure being offered.  Things will change quickly, but it won’t be overnight.

So what I’m telling you is to give yourself permission to make the changes that are going to make your business successful.  Be prepared to throw out the old methods and bring in the new.  You don’t have to hit rock bottom to do this.  This isn’t a one-time super-duper effort that offers immediate transformation.  But through a series of steps and maneuvering, you will see results quickly and you will see improvement straightaway.  Just don’t wait until you hit rock bottom to start!

Bernadette Doyle is a small business marketing expert. Get more tips and advice at http://www.clientmagnets.com

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There’s a saying that you have to spend money to make money. I have to say I couldn’t agree more with this. I know many trainers are hesitant to spend money when their cash flow may be low, but spending money to market your services is just one more step to attracting clients. But there is certainly a right answer and wrong answer to the marketing equation.

When you get to the point where you have clients calling you asking for your services, you’ve taken a step in the right direction. I’m certainly not saying to go out and spend money on advertising just for the sake of marketing because it’s necessary. Your goal is to find those marketing techniques that give you the best return on your marketing investment. It’s basic math and it’s as simple as 1+1=2!

For example, say you place an advertisement offering a free report for callers. It’s a worthwhile technique to use. It gives the caller something tangible to ask for and it produces more results than just offering a phone number to call for enquiries. Let’s say you spend £250 for this advertisement in a trade publication. That can be a fairly significant cash outlay if you’re just starting out.

But, if that £250 investment results in picking up £10,000 of business, you’ve created a 40 to 1 return on your investment. You should be asking yourself “where can I spend another pound?”!

Now, how about the investment of your time? That’s also a simple math calculation. If you’re making cold calls how many prospects are you going to get within one hour’s time? One or two perhaps, if you’re able to make it past the gatekeeper. What if you could take that one hour and multiply those results infinitely?

It seems an easy to decision to make, reaching more people in the same amount of time. But it’s a concept that many have yet to grasp. It’s a matter of taking your one-to-one marketing techniques and changing them to one-to-many techniques.

I can’t stress this enough – the one-to-one selling techniques that are used in the larger companies don’t work for those of us flying solo!

The quickest change you can make to take your marketing techniques to the next level is to engage either in direct mailing or advertising. Once you’ve fine tuned your message, this limited investment of your time has the ability to produce infinite results.
So, now that you have some ideas on how your money and time are going to produce the best benefit to your business, you can roll this together to take another step towards becoming a Client Magnet.

Attracting clients, having them call you is at the heart of this simple equation. Using these advertising methods, along with other steps outlined and detailed in my Attracting Clients system is going to put you in the position of having clients contact you to meet their specific needs and the return on your investment will transform your business.

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If, for one reason or another, you’re out of touch with your past clients, the best thing you can do for your business is to get back in touch with them.

Before you go out seeking new clients, try reconnecting with your old ones. They are far more likely to hire you than someone who has never met you.

There are a couple of easy ways for you to reconnect.

First, if you have a small number of past clients, contact them one-to-one. Pick up the phone and just talk to them. You don’t need to dive right in and start pitching them straight away. Talk to them first about what has been going on in their business or in their life, or how they’re getting on.

I guarantee that the vast majority of the time one of three things will happen:

• You will uncover a new opportunity to work with them again.
• You will discover a new need that they have.
• You may well get a referral out of it.

Now, if you’ve got a lot of past clients, you’re in an even stronger position. For this, I recommend a one-to-many approach. There are a few different ways that you can do this.

• Put together a simple, direct mailing. It could be a special offer for past clients. A “we missed you and we want you back” offer. Be creative and have some fun doing an offer like this.

• Send a postcard directing people to a webpage.

• Mail a full physical offer where you’re describing something new that you’re offering and asking them to take action.

It’s important that you really make your mailing stand out. A great way to do this is to use something called lumpy mail.

Lumpy mail is when you include some type of “grabber” in the envelope to make the package bulky and make it stand out from the other mail in the post.

Typically, lumpy mail gets opened before ordinary envelopes. It’s a great way to grab someone’s attention.

Again, have some fun with this. I’ve seen people send things like a,little watch attached to their mailing, and the message is about time. You can add chocolates, or little magnets and make them significant to the message you’re sending. Lumpy mail is fun to do, and fun to receive.

There are other things you can do as well. Have a special event that is for your past clients only. If you work in a local area and most of your clients are local, do a customer appreciation day. This might be a day that you offer for free, where you get your past clients back and you offer a networking opportunity. Perhaps you share some new information or new insights with them. Use that day as a platform for being face to face with your past clients and reactivating their business. That’s a strategy that works well.

If your clients are all over the world, try a variation on the same theme, such as a customer appreciation teleseminar.

Getting in touch with past clients may be a little time-consuming, but it is a good return on the investment of your time. It is simply the best way to remind clients of the value of your services and introduce them to something new that you may be offering.

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When writing any form of copy, your objective is to evoke a response. An important step in getting people to take action is to understand what motivates them. Ask yourself, ‘What does this person need to believe, know or understand in order to take the action I want by the end of this communication.’

Depending on what you are asking your reader to do, that may be a short answer or a very long answer. For example, let’s suppose you are asking a prospect visiting your website to complete their email details to claim your free report. What do they need to believe, know or understand?

At the very least, they would probably need to believe that you are not going to spam them. They might want to be reassured that you are not going to share their information with other people. They will also want to be convinced that there are going to get some real benefits by downloading this free report. The advantages of doing so have to outweigh the ‘cost’ of handing over their email addresses to you.

In this case, it is not going to be a lengthy sell. You could probably do all of that in a single paragraph. However, if you are asking people to sign up for an eight-week teleseminar program, it’s a very different story.

When Long Copy Is Necessary

From the a reader’s point of view, you may be requiring them to reorganize their lives, arrange for a babysitter every Wednesday night for the next eight weeks and take money out of the account that their partner was hoping would be spent on a new set of furniture; now they are going to invest it in your program instead. You are going to need to work a lot harder to overcome their objections.

Your task, then, is to convince them that this particular course of action is going to make a big difference for them and pay off in so many areas of their lives. That is going to take a lot more copy to accomplish than a simple paragraph.

As you write your initial draft, be sure to include all of the information that supports your end goal; leave out anything that doesn’t. It is always better to write too much and edit it later than to write too little and risk missing important decision-making information. Include whatever you believe is needed to get a response.

Every Single Word Is For Their Benefit

Then, as you go over what you have written, ask yourself once again, “Who am I writing this for?” Sometimes you may notice you have added information that sounds like you were speaking aloud. Are you writing it to convince yourself or to talk aloud to yourself about what you’re doing? You need to be writing it for the prospect.

As you go over your draft copy, edit ruthlessly, eliminating anything that might distract the prospect from taking the action you want. Reinforce what is necessary to overcome objections, and strike out whatever is not.

Each redraft should come closer and closer to providing your readers with exactly what they need to need to believe, know or understand to take action. Anything less than that risks the copywriter’s kiss of death: No response.

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