Archives for May 2014

Those three little words can be the source of every breakthrough and they can also be the source of damnation. Knowing whether or not a certain tactic works is the first step towards evaluating anything in general, but also in business.

The next three words need to be, “Where’s The Proof?” So that you can make a decision based on the evidence.

We can show you case studies of clients who have successfully grown their businesses with our services. You can also find people who have tried newsletters and have failed with them.

The problem is both sources of advice are biased. One of the strongest needs in human nature is the “need to be right.”

The people whose newsletter didn’t work (or their marketing in general), also need to be right in their forecast that if you do a newsletter it won’t work for you either. They aren’t doing it because they have your best interests at heart, they are doing it to satisfy their own personal needs.

Measure your own results and make your decisions independent of others.

The ability to understand and interpret numbers mean you know if you are on a winner or not, and that is all that counts. The hype of the media, the opinions of your well-meaning friends, family, co-workers, competitors or even marketing gurus don’t matter.

What matters is that you are making money doing it. If you are, keep going. If not, where can you make more money doing something else? Test it, then commit.

By and large I now ignore the opinions of others. Warren Buffett has done it all of his life. He sits in relative isolation in Omaha making decisions based on his own criteria. Dr Michael Bury has been the same, creating 700 million of profit in just 8 years – until he closed his fund in 2008. Dan Kennedy ignored his detractors for decades focusing on what works and has built a massive subscriber following.

Take someone else’s idea and test it. If it works – then cool! If not, then no harm done (risk only an amount you can afford to lose). Once you know it works roll it out.

Then I know and I have something nobody else has: The information about what will happen in my situation. Every business is unique. You know your business more intimately than everyone else so you need to be willing to test the ideas and make decisions based on your data.

Stand tall and proud, make your own decisions – and if you are wrong change. No point going out backwards because you are wrong.

I think the reason business owners emotionally covet referrals is because they feel like they are free. We all like to get something for free – and perhaps a free customer is the best thing we could get for free.

Throughout the history of marketing the power of FREE has never been underestimated. It has launched countless businesses and it has fuelled advertising campaigns. Never forget how powerful it can be.

However Referrals are not really free.

Disappointing isn’t it? There is a massive investment required in order to get referrals. You need to get the customer in the first place, you need to make sure that they go from customer to raving fan, who tells their friends, family co-workers and their peers all about you and how great you are.

Then if all of that happens, we get a referral.

And because we didn’t do anything active it’s ‘free.’

If you believe that makes the referral free you probably believe that traffic that came from the search engines is free even though you are paying for an SEO company to get you up the ranks or you’ve invested hours, days and weeks of your own time doing that SEO. Finally, the time you’ve waited while you get up the ranks was also free.

Either  way an investment is made. Getting back to referrals you’ve put all this work in to get the customer to the point they are ready to refer, then I would be doing everything in my power in order to get as many referrals as possible out of them.

They are and forever will be the source of customers that close the fastest and at a higher close rate, buy more, are less price resistant and I’m sure I have forgotten something, (so THERE’S MORE THAT REFERRALS CAN DO.)

The big problem our clients mention over and over is the idea that they want referrals but don’t have a way to ask for them without being pushy.

Referring should feel like the natural progression for your customer rather than feel like they are being interrogated for a list of the people who should be buying from you.

The hardest element to control is timing – when their friends, family and colleagues are ready for your services. The same as you can’t control when they are ready to buy.

It’s something we have figured out how to make work for you – so referrals become an integral lead source, your customers don’t feel intimidated in to giving those referrals and you don’t feel like a pushy sales person getting them out of your customers.

In some ways it’s amazing that marketing is such a little understood skill. I for one am grateful that it is, but there are drawbacks to it.

Marketing is what makes the world go around. Without it nothing is sold, without an army of face to face sales people or tele-marketers. Endless pounding of pavement, calling on customers, or sitting in bricks and mortar stores hoping the right customers happen to come in.

Without marketing, every business would not be able to employ the number of people they do sd more of their costs would be associated with the cost of selling the goods leaving smaller margins, less production, smaller business and lower profits.

With marketing we gain the power to do more with less.

We don’t need to rely on hand outs.

To me there is almost nothing more irritating than businesses that have sprung up to take advantage of some scheme – like the insulation industry during the last Labour government did. That business wouldn’t have existed without government subsidies – and technically it only has one customer – The Government because nobody else was giving them a substantial amount of money if any at all.

Those are not businesses, they are ‘arbitrage’ opportunities. Arbitrage is a trading term – to take advantage of market inefficiencies while they are there. So yes, taking advantage of them makes sense – but the ‘industry’ crumbles the moment that the incentive is withdrawn or the inefficiency is taken away.

It’s not hard to sell, “do you want free insulation?”

We marketers have a far harder challenge – how do we sell our products and services to the end customer so that we make a decent profit at the end of the day.

To me there is something pure, almost beautiful about it. We are making ourselves and our customers richer in the process. They have had their problem solved, their itch scratched or whatever metaphor you choose to use. They are richer from having brought from us.

This is what the marketer does for a business – they enrich lives, both customers and also the lives of the people in their business.

The world becomes a better place and sadly this selling and marketing thing seems to be a dying art right when we need it the most.

It’s the marketer who can succeed. They can grow businesses and they can make the ordinary seem extraordinary.

I am grateful to be a marketer, I hope you are too.

This morning I was reading Dan Crick’s Newsletter, “The Marketing Edge.” (Top bloke – I have a lot of time for him.) Dan had come across this research from Forrester. Now Forrester put out a lot of data but only occasionally actually gives you worthwhile information.

Here is the slide that summarizes it best:

If you want to Retain Ups-sell/Cross-sell or get Referrals from your existing customers your customer experience had better be good – top 25% good. For those of you who don’t do math, from being the worst in your industry and best in your industry amounts to between 13% and 16% MORE retention, larger transaction sizes and more frequent purchase and referrals.

According to Jarrad Diamond, “Success is simply avoiding all causes of failure.” Customer experience is a cause of business failure.

Good customer experience will vary, based on what the customer wants and needs from you. Things like having the job done when you say it will be done. Doing it to a high standard may be more important in some cases.

Other times, it may be about having an exceptional atmosphere. Take Starbucks – premium pricing for coffee: largely driven by the environment they sell it in. Fresh coffee smell, nice couches, good music playing in the background and well trained capable staff. Makes a big difference to the price Starbucks commands for coffee.

Take the time to find out what your customers want and deliver it to them. It will make a big difference to your bottom line – far in excess of the initial investment (It’s not a cost if it makes you more money).

Then you need to back those changes up in your marketing to really maximize the return on your investment. The best customer experience should be getting as many customers as possible to it.

This was the reply I got from one of our ‘online only’ subscribers last month when I wrote an email announcing the arrival of my beautiful new daughter Daisy.

It got me asking myself “Does she really not know who I am?” – The reason I found it odd that she didn’t know who I was is because of the sheer amount of automated email contact I have had with her over the past 6 months…

This particular woman willingly entered our database 6 months ago when she requested the online version of our report ‘getting more repeat business and referrals”.

Now for those of you who have requested our report, you’ll know that our email follow-up sequence is quite frequent, there are 24 emails in the first 60 days, plus there are weekly blog/article emails and 2 ezines per month. I checked our systems and over 6 months she was sent 65 emails from us. So I would have thought at the very least she would know me as ‘the guy who sends all the emails’.

At further investigation, she had opened 7 out of those 65 emails, which is a 10.7% open-rate.  Although 10.7% is a low open-rate for us, I’ve heard the number 11% thrown around as an average open rate to commercial email, so I’m assuming this woman is a pretty typical representation of someone receiving email marketing.

This experience just further confirms what Zac and I have been saying all along.

“Email ONLY does NOT build relationships” – In fact in this case it doesn’t even build recognition!

Because we know this, we make a point of getting people onto our hard-copy newsletter database. When people request our free report, they enter their name and email to receive the ‘online version’, we then automatically direct them to another webform to collect their mailing details for their hard-copy too. About 85% of people give us their mailing details, but there is that 15% who are left to be communicated by email only…

If we can’t get recognition with 65 emails over 6 months, what luck does the business sending a monthly ezine only have? Or even worse a business that doesn’t communicate at all?

In order to really succeed we have to communicate with multi-media. We communicate by email, mail and phone to create recognition, familiarity and to build a relationship. I can call virtually anyone who has been receiving our hard-copy newsletter for 6 months and they WILL know who I am because in that 6 months they not only receive the 65 emails, they receive 6 newsletters, 2 post cards, 2 letters and 2 phone calls.

If you would like to discover how to build recognition using print alongside your email, give us a call on 1300 120 106 and lets talk.

We all crave simplicity – I do, you do, it’s universal. If you believe the running man theory of evolution, our endurance made us able to run after gazelles and springboks on the savannah. Our brains made it possible to catch them.

Our brains became hard wired to find the simplest and most efficient way to accomplish any task. It’s why we are human. It’s why we look for the easy way to do stuff. It’s how it is. We also need to know our brain’s limitations.

Why make something twice as hard as we need to? If I can catch a springhare using the half the energy you use we both have a springhare. It’s the earliest form of Dan Kennedys quote, “There is no difficulty bonus when banking your profits.”

The limitations of our efficiency drive are obvious all around us. It’s caused our obesity as a society. If we can eat and sit on our butts all day – then why ever run? There are so many studies pointing out that if we get 30 minutes of cardio exercise a day we would be much happier. But it’s far easier to sit around and eat chips than it is to go run, ride a bike, do Zoomba or anything else you care to mention.

This drive for efficiency has seen mass production, the smart phone, and many other inventions that make our lives ‘easier.’ It is the primal force behind:

“What’s the One Thing I Can Do To Grow My Business?”

So when people start asking about the One Thing they need to do to grow their business, they either don’t like the answer or there is no one thing.

My glib answer to “What is the one thing I need to do to grow my business?” should be “Build a complete marketing system that is able to acquire, retain, grow and monetise customers as well as get the lost ones back. Oh and it should be customised to suit your business.”

If you strip it back maybe it should be “Don’t Be Average.” No average business has all of that. Look at the most successful. Copy what they do and figure out how to add to it.

If it only took one thing to be in the top 1% then we would all be in the top 1%. It’s being able to follow a chain of ‘things’ through to get compound growth getting you far ahead of the masses.

The difference between success and failure is fine. There are only a couple of things we do better than our competitors. They make a massive difference.

Seriously, who sends a gift out with a customer’s first purchase? We do. Who has systems in place to leverage the good will generated from the gift? We do. Not that much of difference in difficulty to implement. Massive difference in results. Don’t look for the one ‘thing.’ Look for 5 small things that will all add up together. That is how you really grow a business.