The Myth Of The Overnight Turnaround!

September 4, 2013 by

There are a lot people working in the guru space, who are promising miracles for other businesses. “Do what I say and literally overnight your business will be transformed, made over and you’ll be on easy street.”

There is a reason these sales pitches are used – they work. I know how they work, I can even dissect how they work in gory detail for you. If you are gullible enough to believe them, I have the Brooklyn Bridge, The Eiffel Tower and a money-printing machine you might like to buy (The money printing machine isn’t as much of a stretch as the other two…)

And I probably should do a webinar series on biz-op level selling techniques and why they are so damn effective on that crowd.

However, once you get behind the curtain you’ll see the truth. The turnaround promised is often not as effective as you might be led to believe. They can happen but if you could actually get an idea of their track record – their strike rate, you might be disappointed.

After all, nobody offers up testimonials from businesses and business owners that fail. Nobody boasts about the number of pissed off customers. (There is a shadow Facebook group devoted to people ‘scammed’ by a leading Australian Business Guru. Buyer beware.)

Nobody in this guru game is going to do otherwise. Otherwise, everyone might see that the emperor’s clothes are not what he thinks they are. I will say that the emperor has clothes – it’s never a total fabrication. Those people tend to get exposed as charlatans.

The Real Truth.

There is no one magic potion, cure all fix in business. Every business is actually unique and is held back by different things and some business are better at solving certain problems than others. Different gurus have different skills and are better equipped to solve certain problems. Allowing your business to grow.

Through Newsletter Marketing Systems, Ben and I can work with businesses that are operationally sound, want to sell more, have clients that are worth keeping but aren’t being monetised fully. Our skills mean we also create more customers for a business.

Can we make every business owner rich? No. If you add our skills to a transactional business it is less likely we would help. If you have ‘bad math’ in your business we might make things worse for you and if you can’t deliver what you sell (or have a bad product) we would almost certainly send you broke.

Beware of the pitches promising a breakthrough. In our world there are two levels of selling to business – ‘opportunity level’ and ‘business how to’ level. The opportunity level sell is about how to get rich in 30 days guaranteed. The business ‘how to sell’ is about how to take advantage of another opportunity in your business.

The choice is yours.

Filed Under: Blog

The Single Most Powerful Idea In Business

September 4, 2013 by

Dan Kennedy talks about the greatest income explosion comes from when you transition from being a doer of ‘thing’ to a marketer of ‘thing.’

Now, there is a very fine distinction here – income explosion. Income is made and it gets spent. It is transient. And if it is achieved transactionally, high income is not enough to build wealth.

What isn’t transient are the customers that you generate almost as a by-product of creating this income. In your business do you:

Get a customer to make a sale?

Or

Make a sale to get a customer?

If you want repeat business and referrals then you need to be thinking in terms of the latter. Ben and I have laid out the strategies you can use to monetize those customers you have and what you need in place before making a sale to get a customer becomes a source of wealth.

When you shift from income seeker and leveraging the biggest asset you can create in business – your existing customer base, you can move form income producer to wealth creator very easily.

You can create stability in your business.

The worst place you can be in is being desperate for the next sale, the next job. This desperation is obvious – your potential clients can smell it. Many business are stuck in this feast or famine cycle – they almost never take the time to use their existing customers to create stability for themselves.

After stepping up and taking responsibility for the marketing of your business – the next most important idea is going from income earner to wealth creator using the most powerful asset you can in your business – creating wealth through existing customers.

They are a gold mine in so many ways. Don’t let them go to waste. (If this doesn’t make sense go and read our report The Business Owners Guide To Getting More Repeat Business and Referrals.)

 

Filed Under: Blog, Customer Retention

Profitable Gift Card Strategies

August 5, 2013 by

The other week, my Mum told me that one of her work colleagues gave her a $10 Myer Gift Card . Usually Mum doesn’t shop at Myer because they are expensive, but mu accepted the gift and thought to herself that she could use it on a new shirt that she needed.

Mum works in the Perth CBD, and Myer is just a 5 minute walk from her work. Lunch time came around and off she trot to get her shirt… By the time she finished she ended up spending $585!

I thought that this perfectly illustrated just how powerful gift cards can be for the business! In all my years designing and printing for businesses, I have only heard good things from those using gift cards or gift certificates. So if you’re on the fence about them or just haven’t considered them, here’s a few major benefits.

  1. People Usually Spend More Than the Gift Card – Like my mother, many people end up spending more than just the gift card amount. $575 more is an extreme example, but often you’ll find on a $20 or $30 gift card, people might spend $50 or so. If people have a $100 gift card and they find $95 of products, it’s very rare that someone will leave $5 on the card, normally they’ll find something extra which might bring the transaction above $100 and they just pay the difference.
  2. Gift Cards are Essentially Pre-Paid Referrals – If someone purchases a gift card and gives it to a friend they are essentially referring that person to you and offering to pay. It’s a referral with a 100% conversion rate and like any referral, if you look after them, give great service and a quality product and start to build a relationship with that customer it can lead to a long-term profitable customer who purchases frequently and refers people.
  3. Money in the Bank NOW – Gift cards are prepaid and you get paid upfront. We all know how important cashflow is and if you can get some easy money in the door and not have to immediately supply the goods or service it assists with cashflow.
  4. Slippage… Huray! – There’s a little thing called “slippage” when talking about gift cards. Slippage is the proportion of people who never redeem their gift voucher or gift card. Various studies come up with different numbers, but on average it’s somewhere between 10 – 15% – Which is great because with those purchases there is no cost of deliverables which means much more money in your pocket!
  5. You Are Kept Top Of Mind. – Most people keep gift cards in a ‘safe place’, somewhere they see regularly to remind them, often in their purse or wallet. By having your logo or brand in front of your customer on a daily basis, you stay top of mind and it can only be good for your business.

I’m sure there are plenty of other benefits too, but that should be enough for you to at least ask the questions  “How can I use this in my business?”

I’m glad you asked… here are a few strategies to help you get started:

  1. Use them as added gifts or bonuses. When someone spends $x they receive a gift card values at $y, this then entices them to repeat purchase or refer a friend.
  2. Put together ‘packages’ – Find ways to bundle products or services to make them attractive as gifts. People may want to buy a gift for someone and prefer to give something ‘thoughtful’ rather than a $$$ amount. Pick a variety of price points to suit multiple budgets and include the gift, the card, the envelope etc, and present it with style.
  3. Outright Promote it. – Put “We Sell Gift Vouchers” in your newsletter, on your website and social media, in your email footer, on posters etc. By simply putting the word out there, a small portion of people will respond.
  4. Team Up With Other Businesses. –  Get another business to provide their clients with your gift cards, this allows new customers to experience your product or service. For example a printer could team up with a website company and offer a $50 print voucher to anyone doing a website, This is a win for everyone, the customer gets the voucher, the website company gets to add value and the printer gets a new customer!

Gift cards are a simple, low-cost, leveraged way to get new business and repeat business in the door each month. Start using them as soon as if you currently use them already, we’d love to hear what your experience has been like!

Filed Under: Blog, Customer Retention, Referrals

Ronan and his Tattoo Shop

July 25, 2013 by

A Shiny New tattooBusiness

I caught up with a friend recently. The first thing out of his mouth after ‘Hi Zac’ was

“Guess What?”

“What.” (At this point I was feeling smug because I had guessed ‘What’ correctly. Good thing I was wrong, otherwise this would have been a really short article).

“I’m going to buy the tattoo shop I am working at and live above it.”

“Cool.” I didn’t know what else to say. And “Why on earth would you want to do that?” didn’t seem the right response.

My mate is a pretty clever guy. He’s self confident and outgoing. But this kind of made me wonder.

“What equity is there in the business I asked?” Thinking “Are you going to be able to build that up and sell it?”

Does it have a marketing system?

What are the advantages of owning the tattoo shop over just working in it?

Normally I don’t do consulting work for free and I generally don’t give advice for free because free advice is pretty worthless, but this was fascinating.

As far as I could tell, owning a tattoo shop means that instead of paying someone for the use of their shop you avoided that. In tattooing, owning a shop means you collect enough fees from others leasing space in your shop to cover costs.

So You End Up Tattooing in order to pay yourself- YOU OWN YOUR OWN JOB.

Considering this business was valued at five figures there is not a whole lot of equity and not much value inherent in any shop. So in the end you have additional pain and suffering of owning a small business and no big pay off in the future. There is no equity to sell; there is no autonomy to be gained – if you aren’t there tattooing you make no payola.

The way these businesses are traditionally structured, at some point you will have to do another tattoo in order to be able to eat.

This defeats the purpose of being in business. This is closer to self-employment. Far too many businesses end up like this. The sad case is when the owner doesn’t want this but ends up with it anyway.

My question out of is that “what do you want from your business”? “or do you want more?” You are at least looking at what is involved in having more if you have read this far. Once you see the underlying form of business you can more easily envisage what next. In my friend’s case what can he sell to the same people after he has finished tattooing them? The real estate on their skin is finite; he needs other ways to further monetise his customers (The shop is pretty busy as it stands).

You’ll be faced with the same challenge: Do you expand the boundaries of what you do in order to make more money or do you stick with tradition in your industry – living and dying by their rules?

Filed Under: Blog

My Own Personal Door Knocking Hell

July 25, 2013 by

door-knockingFresh out of university I started my ‘career’ in direct sales.

There was a degree of irony about the world of an agricultural science graduate. The Ag-Chem companies wanted sales people with degrees in agricultural science and relevant sales experience. Kind of hard to do when you’ve spent the last 4 years studying full time and before that you were too young to hold a full time sales position…

Anyway, I didn’t necessarily want a career as an ag-chem salesman. I wanted to sell. Sound familiar? (Robert Kiyosaki’s advice ‘learn to sell’ had happened to me before I finished high school).

I landed a job door knocking for a roof restorations company. Every day from 4pm until sun down and Saturday mornings I would go to neighbourhoods with houses of a certain age and knock on doors. Trying to worry people into getting me to come back for a quote.

Thankfully, if you knock on enough doors (even when you are really bad) you get enough yeses to get enough appointments to make your sales. I hated it. Two weeks in and I was thinking about what next.

This was hard, soul destroying physical labour – grinding out a living, not a very good one at that I might add. I knew some people who are very successful at it. The one thing they all had in common was their ability to get leads from somewhere – the appointment getting was done for them.

It started me thinking – how do I get leads? If I could crack that the rest of this would be easy.

Weeks turned into months, months turned into seasons. (Winter is a tough time in this business – almost everybody worries about the outside of their house in spring and summer when they are outside – Autumn if something is leaking – so that winter doesn’t ruin their house).

I still had no answer except to pound the pavement. Knock on doors and not stop until I had my quota of leads.

I would do it again today if I had to because I learned so many lessons. I learned to sell belly to belly. The most important skill in sales.

If you can’t do that you will never succeed in business. However, if that is all you can do you end up ‘a long-in-the-tooth, direct-sales-guy who’s burned out.’ There is huge churn in this business and many like them because it is soul destroying work. You could see it in the veterans – often they were stuck. There was nothing else they could do and make the same money. But if something came up they would have jumped in an instant.

I knew that I didn’t want that.

After Two years of pounding the pavement, what I discovered was lead generation marketing. I figured that if I could do direct mail to the houses that needed a roof restoration I might get somewhere.

I cobbled together a pretty primitive flyer, (no sales letter) and put it in an envelope and mailed it to a list of people’s houses that I had door knocked when no one was home. I made a $1,000 commission for the $100 I spent on postage. In my defence I didn’t know what I was doing was called copywriting. But hey, it worked.

I did that until the laws changed and completely crippled the industry for 18 months by which time I had learned a different lesson – about cash flow management and the difference between making a sale and getting a customer for life.

I learned a lot about myself in those two years. About work ethic and the like. I also learned that a business that is a single transaction is not a business – the next time I was to journey into the world of an entrepreneur I was going to be sure I had more than just a single transaction business.

That experience informed the creating of Newsletter Marketing Systems the next time I looked at starting a business. (FYI I understood that writing copy, was not a business, I can’t sell those skills to a buyer one day. I am the one with the gift of the golden brain, or the golden fingers depending on how you argue it.)

Filed Under: Blog, Customer Retention

“I am in Your Base Killing YOUR D00dz (dudes).”

July 25, 2013 by

d00dzWhy every business person should be familiar with “I am in Your Base Killing YOUR D00dz (dudes).”

Along with the AFL football joke “Such-and-Such has brought their own football today.” That line about D00dz never fails to raise a chuckle from me.

There is a story to here it is. Once in the dim dark ages of online video games (the late 90s early 00s), two people were playing one of those real time strategy games head to head. (one of the ones where you have to take over the map to win)

Player 1 asks player 2 where is he?

Player 2 responds with I am in Your Base Killing YOUR D00dz.

If you have no ‘D00dz’ it is hard to defend your base. And when you lose your base you lose the game. Obviously player 1 has not been paying attention.

There was a civility to this. Player 2 was kind enough to let Player 1 know they had messed up big time.

What has this got to do with my business?

Unfortunately the competition to your business will not be so generous. If they find a way to take your existing customers one by one off of you they are not going to tell you.

They will sit and take your customers until there are none left. And YOU ARE BROKE.

This can be stopped – the first step to this is awareness. You need to acknowledge you are losing customers even if the loss is small. Then you have a chance to stop the losses.

Customer satisfaction research conducted by Bain And Company found that 68% of customers left simply because they felt unappreciated. Which means you can cut your defection rate by a third just by making your existing customers feel welcome and appreciated.

I know it isn’t logical. Which makes sense – people aren’t logical, they are emotional. When they feel like a valued member of your community, they will forgive the odd mistake or bad experience in order to remain part of the community.

Creating that community through constant communication is one of the easiest and lowest cost way. Having a sense of community with your past present and future customers means your competition can’t start stealing your ‘D00dz.’

Filed Under: Blog, Customer Loyalty, Newsletter

What Does Inaction Cost You?

July 24, 2013 by

inactionFrom time to time when talking to potential clients about the suitability of them doing a newsletter, Ben and I are often left wondering what the costs of not doing a newsletter are for the client.

The worst case scenario is you do nothing. Nothing changes – if you are looking at doing a newsletter then you are obviously interested in growing your business by one means or another. Nothing changing means your current trajectory continues. Which, as we just discussed, is the worst possible scenario because you are unhappy with the current situation and you’ve changed absolutely nothing.

Now if you want to grow and you are exploring options then all well and good if you can manage to find another way to spend the same amount of money to make a better return. We’ve had a client track a 504% return from doing a newsletter with us. There aren’t too many places where you can get 5 times the return on investment over 12 months in a business or in investing for that matter.

If you do have an alternative avenue to place that investment that outperforms a newsletter – terrific use it. Manage your business by the numbers. We are not going to discourage you from being that ruthless.

The Back End of your Business Is Where the Magic Happens.

Prosperity, Equity and stability in business have less to do with customer acquisition and more to do with customer retention and how you monetise your customers once you have them.

It’s not how many customers you have but how good they are.

Groupon’s Death Spiral

How many of you would like Groupon’s customer list. Personally you’d have to pay me to use it. Groupon’s customer list is the list of all the price shoppers. The idea sounded better in principle than in reality.

The Groupon pitch to business is – ‘put an irresistible offer to our database and you get new customers.’

Good deal?

Not when the customers you get sent are highly unlikely to come back to your business and pay full price. Odds are the only time you’ll see them again is when you run another Groupon special.

The businesses using Groupon have wised up. The offer quality being made to Groupon are going down, the response rates are going down which means the businesses that next use Groupon are going to make a worse offer because they know the response rates are low, further lowering response rate.

Soon Groupon will be dead – punished for being the piece of idiocy that it is.

You challenge is to get good quality customers who keep buying from you again and again and again. There is stability and equity in that. A newsletter does exactly that.

It helps you keep those customers coming again and again and again. It lets you promote your other products and services to them. You can get those good quality customers to refer other customers of similar quality to you. It means that you can promote allied product and service providers to them through your newsletter.

It means that because your customers are spending more with you that you can go out and spend more to get more customers.

Filed Under: Blog, Customer Loyalty, Newsletter

What About The Envelope?

June 5, 2013 by

envelopeThis month we have been blessed to welcome aboard two new clients, one of those is Pieter Berkelaar who runs WA Print Works (a commercial print shop out of Albany in WA). Because Pieter has all the facilities to print and distribute his own newsletter each month, we just assist with the writing, design and strategy.

I received a few questions from Pieter the other day about the envelope and thought that the answers would be relevant to anyone, not just for newsletters, but any form of direct mail. So here are the questions and the answers I gave Pieter.

Do you send out newsletters folded in a DL envelope or flat in a C4 size envelope?

We use DL size envelopes and folded the newsletters down to DL, primarily for the cheaper postage rates more than anything else. C4 is perfectly fine also, but it is double the price in postage. You’ll find that if you do decide to use C4 envelopes that they will stand out more in the mailbox and be more likely to be opened and read.

Do you have logos and advertising printed on envelope?

This is a tricky one, and the answer is “sometimes” – We do for special occasions like valentine’s day or Christmas, but usually we use a hand-written font to give it a more anonymous feel to it. If you can make it appear as though it was sent by a friend or grandma then it will get opened with excitement and anticipation as opposed to an envelope with a logo that looks like it could be a bill or advertising.

Would you use barcoding for cheaper postage rates?

We don’t, only because once again it loses the ‘could be from grandma’ effect of the newsletter. – Barcoded newsletters basically scream – “We bulk mail this and you are on a database” where the handwritten with the live stamp is more of “we hand-selected you and here’s a special gift we sent you”.

In all honesty, as absurd as it sounds, we find that these small things actually make a noticeable difference to the readership and responses we get from the readers. Hopefully these few tips shed some light on the best way to use envelopes in your marketing.

Filed Under: Blog

Why I Love Dreamteam And Supercoach and Why it will grow your business

June 5, 2013 by

dreamteamFor those of you not in the know about Dreamteam and Supercoach AFL/NRL players score points based on their match stats each week. You have a salary cap and trades and the idea is to pick a side to score the highest combined points.

I didn’t get off to the best of starts this year in either AFL competition because the first round fell during the Easter weekend (so while I was away at Bluesfest), it is hard to pick players, go to the beach, sleep in and then go to a music festival all at once. Placeholder players earned a spot in my starting side.

Despite this I am well poised to repeat my achievements from last year – a premiership in both leagues and finish close to the top 10%. It’s looking scratchy at the moment but the pieces will be in place in the next 3 weeks.

This year I sit around the top 2000 in NRL Dreamteam despite not being able to pick half of my players in a police line up. Last year I finished in the top 10% and made a prelim final in NRL Supercoach with the same handicap. (That year I could name 7 NRL players, two were on AFL lists that year).

What I do know is that many ‘coaches’ spend hours poring over data doing calculations and generally letting this hobby ruin the rest of their lives. I am managing my teams with 30 minutes for each of the 4 teams on Friday night and checking the how the team went Monday night.

So How Can I play this game so well, despite the relative lack of time invested?

I have often joked that AFL and NRL Supercoach and Dreamteam have more to do with share trading than the actual sports.

The real answer is simple really: One of the easiest ways to get an edge in your business: Knowing your numbers. Not the simple easy ones that your accountant can tell you in business (or that the Supercoach Dreamteam people give you).

I follow the numbers that really matter. A friend from uni who did some advanced stats courses and I sat down and talked through everything that we ‘really’ needed to know in order to succeed at dreamteam and Supercoach – the list is 4 stats for the year. We need a couple of lists at the start of the year with two pieces of data for each player.

Ben and I figured out the key numbers we needed to know in Newsletter Marketing Systems and we track them relentlessly.

We also help our clients to figure out the handful of key numbers they need to know in their own business before we go and help them. Knowing your numbers makes managing your business much easier and much safer.

If you know what you can realistically afford to spend to acquire a lead or a customer, you have a big edge over your competition that have absolutely no clue whatsoever about these critical numbers.

Filed Under: Blog

How Do They Do It? The Publishing Industry’s Secret To Coming up with content:

June 5, 2013 by

How you can plan a years worth of newsletter content in just 27 minutes!

One of the most common questions we get asked by our clients is:content

“How do we plan our content for the year?”

Answer: There is no magic formula to coming up with content. Sad but true. There are some time test principles to it though.

The best idea is to borrow from Magazine publishers, month in month out they fill magazines with plenty of content. Ever since The Gentlemen’s Magazine started being published in 1731, magazine publishers have been very diligent about coming up with a content plan.

For a newsletter we just need to take their content plan and adapt it slightly, after all, when you are doing a newsletter with us you just need to supply an article not fill a whole magazine.

What we do for our clients is come up with a short list of their products and services and then the associated benefits of those products and services.

That will often give them more than their 12 article topics for the year. Then all that needs to be done is sit down and write them. We also can provide the seed ideas. We have more than 121 different types of article  seed ideas. Which means you can repurpose your content in multiple ways so that your audience reads it over and over – until they get it.

Coming up with content is more to do with planning and then being diligent enough to execute in advance in order to meet deadlines.

As many writers often joke, writing isn’t that hard. You sit down at your computer, open the words processor, slice open your wrist and bleed.

Not really it isn’t that bad.

But if you don’t like writing, you really need a routine and a set time to do it otherwise it never gets done.

Sad that creativity is so mechanical, but it is. That is how we plan our newsletter content and how we recommend our clients plan their newsletter content.

 

Filed Under: Blog
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