Archives for February 2012

Having a Financial Plan

February 28, 2012 by Zac Nelles 2

Taking care of your finances does not mean that you have to be well off. It simply means that however much money you earn, you keep a reasonable amount of it in order to achieve your goals. After all, it does not matter if you earn a fortune if you keep on frittering it away. You need to understand your own financial habits and one way of doing this is to create a budget for yourself (and for your family, if applicable) and then make certain that you stick to it. Be sure to have a solid understanding not just of how much you are earning, but also of your other assets – and of course, of your expenses and liabilities as well.

Having a plan is essential to achieving any goals you wish to set yourself and if you are in a position where it feels as though your finances are no longer in your control, then you need to seek professional help as soon as possible.

Filed Under: ezine

Cure the—hic!—hiccups before they drive you—hic!—crazy

February 28, 2012 by Zac Nelles 2

The longest case of hiccups lasted for 68 years, according to the Guinness Book of World Records (and Wiki¬pedia). A teenage girl in Florida was reported to have hiccupped 50 times a minute for over five weeks.
Most attacks of hiccups aren’t nearly as severe, but they can be annoying for the victim as well as those nearby. Drugs, and in some cases surgery, have proved helpful, but no specific treatment has been shown to be completely effective. That hasn’t stopped well-intentioned people from prescribing all sorts of remedies, including these:

Hold your breath. The idea is to force your dia-phragm to relax. Take a deep breath, and hold it for 10 seconds. Let it out partially, then continue to hold your breath for another five seconds. Repeat until you run out of air. You may have to do this two or three times.
Drink water. This popular method calls for you to drink a glass of water while holding your breath and pinching your nostrils shut.
Plug your ears. Stick your fingers in your ears, or on the soft spots behind your ears, for about 30 seconds. This will stimulate your vagus nerve and cause it to stop or at least ease your hiccups.
Stick out your tongue. Extend your tongue from your mouth as far as you can (preferably when no one else is watching!). This opens your throat wide and helps you breathe more smoothly.
Try some sugar. A spoonful of dry sugar can overload the nerve endings in your mouth and throat, some say. One variation: Soak a sugar cube in lemon juice and hold it in your mouth until it dissolves. (Some sources also recommend slowly eating a slice of dry bread.)

Filed Under: ezine

How To Fall Asleep

February 28, 2012 by Zac Nelles 2

Sleep is very important to our health. A lack of sufficient sleep increases the risk of serious health issues such as diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and more. Poor sleep can also cause depression, premature aging of the skin and effects on the memory.

Therefore it is important to know how to get a good night’s sleep, especially if you have been having problems in that area. One piece of advice is to use your bed and your bedroom only for sleeping. Keep the room comfortable, dark and quiet at all times, because your mind associates light with being awake and darkness with sleep.

Regular exercise can also increase your chances of getting a good night’s sleep, as it improves your sleep patterns by regulating hormone levels and your metabolism. You should not try to go to sleep for at least three hours after exercise, however, so your body can cool down.

Filed Under: ezine

The Issue Of Technology

February 28, 2012 by Zac Nelles 2

Technology and easy Internet access can be both a blessing and a curse, giving us remote access to email, smartphones, Skype and other tools. In theory at least, this gives us the ability to be able to work from home and achieve a better work/life balance, and yet in some cases all it has actually done is increase the number of hours that we spend working.
One way to win back some work/life balance is to negotiate the time spent working from home. Not only does working from home save a lot of time you would otherwise spend commuting back and forth to work, it also means you save money on both transportation and food, and it gives you more time to develop an exercise routine. There can be problems with working from home, however, such as lack of discipline and motivation as well as overwork.
The solution is to make certain that your work stays within the time period of a normal working day and does not add further hours to that workload. Some time-management techniques include creating to-do lists, managing your expectations, prioritizing your workload, learning to delegate, and making sure that you have regular meetings and catch-up sessions with colleagues.

It is also important to set boundaries with colleagues to respect your personal time. Switching off your cell phone and not checking emails during non-working hours is a good idea.

Filed Under: ezine

If the Shoe doesn’t fit… Get a new foot.

February 28, 2012 by Zac Nelles 2

A while back, I consulted with a prospective client about implementing a newsletter in their business. They were keen on the idea, they could see the benefit in a newsletter but… the maths didn’t really work.

They were making on average about $80 profit per sale and their products were the sorts of things people may only need once every few years, so there was not a high repeat purchase opportunity. Their referral rates were pretty good though, about 1 in 4 jobs would refer a client to them, which is better than most businesses I talk to.

When it came time to talk pricing and implementation, they were not really in a position to afford it. Knowing the maths in the business, I could see why. I told them that a Newsletter is going to benefit them long them, however I also mentioned that they need to make some adjustments in their business to really accommodate a newsletter and to be able to afford it.

I am a firm believer that if you can’t afford a newsletter, then the structure of your business needs re-thinking. Ideally you want to be able to calculate the lifetime value of your average customer. This involves working out how much your average client spends per transaction and what the gross profit is, how many times they purchase each year. This then allows you to work out what a client is really worth to you each year. I advise that ideally to make a newsletter work, a customer needs to be worth at least $200 per year. A newsletter will on average cost you $30-$60 per year, per customer depending on how many you are mailing. Which is a small price to pay to keep them active and continuing to buy and refer, especially if you are getting back $200+ a year from each and more referrals!

So if your average yearly value is less than $200 and you can’t afford to implement a newsletter. There are a few solutions:

Scrap your business and start over – Sometimes it’s better to admit your baby is ugly… If the maths really don’t work and you can’t find a way to fix it, maybe it’s time to find a new money-creation vehicle.
Increase Transaction Value – You can do this in a number of ways, add additional products (preferably ones that are purchased regularly), find cheaper suppliers which will increase your profit per transaction, increase your prices. Cross sell other products, Partner with affiliated businesses with similar or relevant products and take a cut.
Increase number of transactions per year – Actively follow-up with customers, educate your customers about whay they need it more regularly, get new products or additional services that are needed more frequently.
Change the market you’re targeting. – Sometimes we are fishing in a small, smelly pond… There’s no big fish to be caught in a small pond… Throw your bait into the ocean and you’ll have a better chance, there are a few changes you’ll need to make, but often it’s not a lot more effort to go for a different market. Often to increase repeat purchases if you target re-sellers, contractors etc. someone who is buying regularly vs one-off it can make a massive difference to your bottom line because now you’re talking $1000+ transactions on a more regular basis than $200 transactions.

In a nut shell – if a newsletter doesn’t fit in your business, it’s likely that there is some aspect of your business that needs changing and you’ve got much bigger problems. Try some of the suggestions above and hopefully you can make a significant improvement to your bottom line.

Filed Under: Blog

Effective Customer Relationship Marketing

February 20, 2012 by Zac Nelles 2

Customer Relationship Marketing is all the marketing you do in order to retain a customer. In almost every business there is value in the customer that can be earned over time that far exceeds the value of the initial transaction.

The key to retaining a customer is marketing to them to create a relationship. Even in businesses where you would believe that an ongoing relationship isn’t that profitable such as real estate saes it still makes sense to build up customer relationships.

There are 5 ways that customer relationships marketing can be monetised beyond the first sale. I know that not all of them will obviously apply but if you can use one of them odds are relationship marketing will pay off in spades.

Repeat Purchase of your basic product service
Cross Selling your other products and services
Referrals of new clients to you
Joint Ventures or Other businesses promoting to your customers
Increasing the Sale Price of your Business

Relationship marketing is foundation that leads to all of these opportunities. At its heart relationship marketing is about assembling a database of high value customers (to your business) and building a sustainable long term relationship with them so database continues to grow in size and value to you and your business.

Harry S. Dent Forecast in ‘The Great Depression Ahead’ that businesses are being forced to align themselves around the customers they serve rather than the products they sell. So say you are florist, in Dent’s view of the world you will move from being ‘just a florist’ to selling many different things to your customer base around what they need want and desire, not just flowers.

Take the people who buy flowers as part of a romantic evening. They need all sorts of other things – chocolates, Champaign, I bet you could bundle a gift voucher in with the local high end restaurant into a gift pack… And so on. Oh wait I didn’t even come up with the idea check out www.1800flowers.com Flowers by occasion and they have a network of related sites selling other parts of the customers ‘overall need.’

Although I bet it does all 5 things to monetise its customer relaitonships www.1800flowers.com nicely uses it customer relationship marketing to stimulate repeat purchases and cross sells to existing customer list.

Filed Under: Relationship Marketing

Newsletter Marketing Made Simple

February 20, 2012 by Zac Nelles 2

Effective newsletter marketing is really about getting a selling message into your newsletter and getting it read. It can’t read like an ad or a commercial. You need to keep your customer’s perception of your newsletter as news. Not advertising, otherwise most of the upside of doing a newsletter is wasted.

Thankfully, the advertising world has been on to this for years. To this end they have created a format that is used the world over in print and every other media to make a sales message look like editorial. Solving the problem of creating effective newsletter marketing without overtly advertising in your newsletter

(Re)Introducing the Advertorial:

The way to ‘sneak’ marketing into your newsletter

Advertorials is where you provide 90% content and then the final 10% of the piece is a subtle push towards taking action. The content part of an advertorial is about the problems or the benefits desired by your market.

Say you need to write an advertorial about car care. It is as simple as writing an article about how to do a great job cleaning your car. You talk about the common problems they’ll have, what tools they can buy to make the job faster and how good their car will look after it has had its regular cleaning.

Only at the very end do you mention that they can buy the car care products you mentioned in your article at your store and they happen to be on special…

It means you are effectively marketing without overtly marketing. Your customers will love the information.

Admittedly, it takes a little more skill to write an effective advertorial than a straight ‘hard sell’ message but it does keep the customer happy by providing useful information in your newsletter. Effective customer newsletters {link to ‘effective customer newsletters’ to post of same keyword} are about information not advertising. Especially not just a straight sales pitch.

That is the way to make newsletter marketing effective without turning your newsletter into another piece of junk mail.

Filed Under: Newsletter

Customer Newsletter

February 20, 2012 by Zac Nelles 2

Creating an effective customer newsletters can be a real headache. Many times you start out with the best of intentions and all too quickly your customer newsletter falls by the wayside.

After a couple of issues you find yourself pressed for time and tempted to skip an issue and then you are on a slippery slope. The most important to remember about a newsletter is:

Frequency Trumps Everything

In the world of customer newsletters, being on time every time is more important than anything else. The odd typo, a little bit of content that you are unhappy with can be sent. Getting it right isn’t as important as getting out your newsletter on time.

You want your newsletter to be seen as

A regular publication – Magazines don’t skip a month. Neither should you
Information not advertising. Magazines come out every month and contain information. Your newsletter comes out every month with useful information (for the recipient) and isn’t just a shameless sales pitch

Make the Your Customer Newsletter About the reader

When deciding what to write about, you need to make your content relevant to the reader. This does not mean all your newsletter content should be about your company, your products and your services.

I interviewed Michael McLean recently about his Insurance Brokerage’s customer newsletter. He delightfully told me told me he had extended his customer’s loyalty to three times the industry average, and the main reason was his printed monthly customer newsletter and it contained almost nothing about insurance (less than 25% of the content was about insurance). It was all about what his readers might find interesting, relevant and useful.

Keep it short

Everybody is busy these days. Your newsletter should pass the 10 minute rule. If they can’t read it in less than 10 minutes it is too long. Go for either 2 or 4 pages for your customer newsletter and send it monthly rather than 8 or 12 pages quarterly or bimonthly.

Filed Under: Newsletter

Archives for February 2012

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