What Else Do You Need To Get Customers To Buy?

Sales is a baffling art to most people. And it should be – everyone on the planet is more complex than they get credit for. Getting face-to-face with a qualified prospect is a challenge. Getting a person sufficiently motivated to give you money is incredibly difficult.

Customers need to be given credit – they are continually evolving. What used to work no longer works and needs to be reinvented.

Anyway, before you can even begin sell your wares there are three questions your prospect will ask themselves. Ignore them before you’ll ever be success at selling and by extension marketing. Here are the three questions:

How Well Do I Know You? – Your prospect asks themself this about any seller. It is their way of gauging how trustworthy you are.

If they feel they know you really well they will be easier to sell to them than if they don’t know you from a bar of soap. This is why many guru’s go to great lengths to be in the media – media breeds familiarity. Do you reckon David Koch has too much trouble getting business owners to follow his business advice?

No. Cos they see him on TV all the time – he is well known to his audience.

Do I like You?

At the same time your potential customers wonder about how well they know you. They are also deciding if they like you. This happens really quickly – first impressions matter. (As a few of us no doubt remember from our days doing direct sales.) Even if it was to get a date – you were still being judged based on first impressions.

The same thing happens when you send a direct mail piece – first impression of the piece and what you say, either will help you or hinder you.

Obviously it is much easier to sell to someone who already likes you.

Can I trust you?

These are less than trusting times. The late Stephen Covey (7 Habits Of Highly Effective People) spent a great deal of his later years looking at the effect trust on business relationships. Covey devised his own ways to measure trust.

When he found that trust was high – the speed and ease of doing business was much higher than if trust is low.

Trust is also a barrier to getting the first sale in the door. So be sure to do everything you can to engender trust before you ever ask for the order – and don’t do anything to jeopardise trust because it is hard to get back once it is lost.

I can tell you from experience that when a client knows, likes and trusts you – there is a much better client relationship to be had.

One of the most effective ways to make your marketing sizzle, and to make real connections with your customers and clients, is to add your personality. The fact is, customers prefer to do business with people whom they know and like – not nameless and faceless corporations.

Personality works. It will multiply your sales. What is personality? I think it is best described as humanizing your marketing – taking away the sterile corporate approach. Consider the all-too-common approach to many sales letters:

“It has come to our attention that your account is now blah, blah, blah.” You can imagine how fast that letter will hit the circular file! Now try this next sample on for size, and see if you just might hold the attention of the reader for a little while longer. “I was just sitting at my desk writing my next column and my secretary came running in, waving an invoice. She told me that it is highly unusual for …” Get the idea?!

If you would like to add some personality to your marketing, here are four things that you can do to help make you a better writer.

1. Read as much as you can. You should find time to read every day, even if it is for 10 minutes before turning in!  Read everything from sales letters to e-zines, newsletters, books, ad copy, direct mail, etc. The more you read, the more you’ll learn different ways to express yourself in writing.
2. Write more. There is just no way to get around it – to become a better writer, you have to write – and often! As with most things, the more you do it, the better you’ll get at it. You might want to consider starting a blog, which will force you to write at least two to three times a week in a way that, while important, is not as critical as a sales letter.
3. Read out loud. It’s amazing how different your own writing sounds when you read it aloud instead of reading it silently. This is a great way to find your actual “voice,” which you then can transfer to writing.
4. Mirror your favorite writers. Not only is imitation the sincerest form of flattery, it is a smart way to learn how to become a better writer. In the Glazer-Kennedy world this is known as S&D.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, personality works! I was recently hired to help write a client newsletter in which our strategy was to deliver something very different from the typical corporate brochure. We wrote the copy in the voice of an older woman who was a long-term employee of the company (which in this case was actually true!).

When the first issue was mailed, the reaction was phenomenal. The company received well over 100 e-mails praising the newsletter, saying that it was a breath of fresh air and fun to read, and that they looked forward to the next issue. Being in the newsletter business, I can tell you that that is not a typical reaction – personality sells! Even if you incorporate only a few of these tips, you should start to see a shift in your own writing. Before you know it, your personality will start shining through, and with it, you’ll start to see more clients, more sales, and more profits.

Referrals are an important part of every business. In fact, most small businesses are built on referrals alone. Referred prospects are much more likely to do business with you because you have been recommended, they have a much higher initial trust with you and they have seen that you can deliver what you promise.

Many business owners believe that the only way to get a referral is to WOW the customer with great service and they will tell their friends. While this gets you referrals, it is not the only way to get them. I’ve discovered three main types of referrals. There are a few others, but these are the main three ways that referrals occur.

Customer Tells A Friend or Colleague  – This type of referral usually happens because you WOW a customer and they are happy with your services. These referrals are the most genuine, there is often no reward and they are referring purely because they believe their friend or associate can benefit by contacting you. These people are MUCH more likely to convert into a paying customer than a cold prospect. The downside to these referrals is that you have no direct control over them, if someone tells a friend about your business, you can’t follow up, you can’t market to them or build a relationship etc.

Customer Tells You About A Prospect – This type of referral is often used by businesses who have a strong sales team. This method generally involves giving your clients an incentive to refer people to you. Usually you’d ask something like “If you know anyone who might be interested, give us their details and we’ll contact them on your behalf and if anyone goes ahead, you’ll be rewarded with x.” – These referred prospects are more likely to convert than cold prospecting because by mentioning their friend, you’re much more welcome when you make the first contact. It is a lot more work than the first referral method because YOU actually need to put in the hard work. The other benefit is that you have their details, you can follow up, market to them and you have control of the referral.

 Customer Tells a Friend AND Tells You – This is the ultimate referral. It combines the above two referral types. They tell their friend all about you and then tell you that they referred them and give you their details to follow up. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard clients say “I referred a few people to you over the last few months, did any of them contact you?” In many instances the answer is ‘no’. If those customers told me immediately when they referred the person and gave me a phone number or email I can quickly flick an email or make a quick phone call to say “so and so mentioned you were looking for x, is there any advice or help I can give you?” – once again I’m in control of the situation and can follow up.

Referrals can be induced, it always pays to WOW your customers in every way you can, but if you want to put referrals on overdrive, build a relationship with them, train them to refer and implement a formalised referral incentive system where your customer AND the referral get rewarded.

A monthly printed customer newsletter is a great way to keep in contact with your customers and build a solid relationship with them. which is the foundation of referrals. If you’re interested in getting a newsletter started in your business, give us a call: 1300 120 106 and we’ll have a chat to see if we can help you.

Why On Earth Would I want to talk to someone about things other than ‘work?’

Ben and I both get asked variants of this question a lot.

Here is the best answer we both give when we don’t want to delve into a big, long speech about it. “Because nobody is as interested in your ‘thing’ as you are.”

It is a true. They aren’t but there is a secret even deeper than that.

ONGOING READERSHIP AND RELATIONSHIP

When someone isn’t in buying mode then it doesn’t matter how hard you sell, they aren’t going to buy. So beating them over the head with how great your product is and why they need what you have, isn’t going to get them to buy. In fact, it is going to reduce their willingness to read/listen/watch what you send them because they don’t want to be beaten over the head with “buy now, buy now, buy now.”

Keep this up long enough and eventually your customers will stop reading, listening and watching what you send them because they are ‘over it.’ “Here comes another pitch from…” Into the big round file with that. (Okay, so some rubbish bins are square but I hope you take my point).

Once they stop reading your newsletter you have no chance to sell to them…

By including information in your newsletters not about work, you can demonstrate that you have interest in them outside of selling to them. They are not cash machines waiting to buy from you. You are in fact a fun and interesting person who can help them outside of work. You are well read, knowledgeable and interested in making their lives better in as many ways as possible. All good reasons to keep reading your newsletter.

Knowing that they will be entertained and find useful information, increases the chances that they will keep reading your newsletter. And therefore buy something when they are ready to buy again.

Think about the repurchase times of some items. Dinner at a restaurant. That might be weekly or maybe up to every 8 weeks or more. Buying a house happens every 5-7 years on average. How much of those times do you think a customer is actually thinking about buying? Dinner at a restaurant may be thought about at most, a week in advance if they plan their meals weekly. Which means they are not really a buyer for the other 7 weeks.

At the other end of the spectrum people don’t actively think about buying a new house most of the time. Something happens to induce them to move at the tail end of that time frame. Do you think it matters what you send them in the mean time?

This is why you need interests outside of work to bond over. It builds ongoing readership and maintains readership when your customers aren’t necessarily in buying mode.

Stay tuned for part 2 next month.

After reading part one of the science of newsletter content, you’ll understand why we have general interest content in newsletters. To build and maintain readership. The next challenge is to covert this readership into more sales.

There are three direct avenues to achieving more sales from our newsletters.

• Ongoing Repeat Purchases
• Cross Selling other products you have
• Referring New Customers to you

All of these can be achieved by seeding sales into your newsletter. What I mean, is patient farming of your clients. Seeding little ideas that germinate, take root and flourish over time. Good relationships take time to build.

There are two really powerful strategies for doing this. First talking about your clients and their success stories. What challenges they were facing and how your products helped them overcome their problem. What results they got.

This gives you third party credibility – far more powerful than you saying it directly. And it clearly demonstrates you are delivering on what you say you are doing.

If you don’t have a client you can do a feature story on, then you can use advertorials to seed sales. In a newsletter you are best to focus on one problem and agitate it, then for the solution – use a call to action. And repeat with new problem or a different slant on the same problem next time.

This gives you plenty of room to create need. And if your clients read multiple advertorials coupled with client success stories then the desire for your products and services will build up over time.

Who is more patient? You or Your Customer?

With newsletters that is the only question. Who has more patience? Eventually your clients desire will build up to the point where they purchase refer or otherwise take action. It is that simple.

In under 12 months of being formally in business and publishing our own newsletter from day one, I can tell you it doesn’t take long.

Simply getting our own newsletter month-in, month-out has converted a couple of fence sitters into clients. The steady drip feeding from the newsletter will work to get your customers in the door and back in the door and it will remind them that you are there and they can refer people to you.

Newsletter Marketing Offers Article Writing for your newsletters, these same articles can be repurposed in multiple ways including onto your blog, into emails To arrange for Newsletter Marketing Systems to create content specifically for your business either call 1300 006 120 or email info@newslettermarketing.com.au for a no cost no obligation discussion about planning your articles content,