Why Ben Puts Himself Through EXPRESSive Exhaustion

It was 1:30am on a Thursday morning and my head finally hit the pillow! I’d just finished spending 7 hours hand addressing and packing 65 x 3kg express post envelopes with our guide ‘Getting More Repeat Business & Referrals’. I was completely exhausted.

The following days saw us Express post over 150 guides in less than a week! (This is more than 5 times our previous BEST week). You see, we have recently had some breakthroughs while tweaking our Facebook ads and Fax campaigns which have resulted in some massive successes and a tidal wave of new leads.

You might be thinking… 3kg Express Post? – Isn’t that that’s like $14.95 each!

Or maybe you are like the precious little cashier at the post office who kept trying to sell me 15 instead of 50 because she couldn’t comprehend why anyone would want to spend over $700 on express post bags in a single transaction.

But… Yes, a $14.95 3kg Express Post Envelope is pricey compared to sending a standard regular $1.20 C4 envelope?

So why do we do it?

1.)    Urgency – If we treat our information with urgency, then it is much more likely that the recipient will as well. They will read it quicker and take action on it quicker. Simply by sending it in an express post envelope, we have had a 300% increase in the number of people contacting us within 5 days of receiving the pack. We also find that when we make follow-up calls that a larger portion have read the information (previously the majority procrastinated and hadn’t gotten around to it yet.)

2.)    Importance – People ONLY express post things that are important. So by express posting our guide, the recipients immediately assign importance to it (deservedly so I might add!).

3.)    More Room = More Stuff – By using 3kg bags it allows us the room to include more than just the guide. Lately we have been testing the use of a bag of microwave popcorn, a bottle of Gatorade and a chocolate as some bonus goodies for our recipients to snack on whilst digesting our information. These extra’s cost less than $3 total, yet have a massive WOW factor when received.

4.)    Results – Zac and I are pretty pedantic about measuring results and ultimately we use the express post bags and pay the extra because the numbers say we should… We get more leads converting to consultation and they convert quicker, which means more new clients doing newsletters sooner!

If you want to see what all the fuss is about, and you’re keen to see this urgently, important information on how you can get more repeat business and referrals, feel free to request a copy of our guide by visiting: www.morebusinessandreferrals.com.au or calling 1300 689 449 and leave your details. (Enjoy the snacks!)

Newsletters Don’t Work

Amazing! I run a company called Newsletter Marketing Systems and I am telling you that newsletters don’t work.

Well, it is true there are instances that they don’t work. The first is when there is lack of scope of opportunity within a customer base to mean that retaining those customers is worthwhile.

No point sending a newsletter to someone who has brought once and will never buy again from you – cosmetic dentistry for example – no point trying to sell them another ‘full oral rehabilitation’ package, you need to be out there looking for a new customer.

Many other examples of this are in fact the limitations of the business owner’s beliefs rather than the limitations of the business. It is largely definitional. For example, when I was out selling roof restorations I had the same problem. They didn’t need another roof restoration for 15 years. The average home owner stays in their home for 7 years. So the odds of the repeat sale are slim.

Since I was in the roof restorations business and I sold roof restorations newsletters weren’t going to work for me.

That said, putting on my marketers hat, those same customers could have been induced to buy new guttering, water tanks, water saving devices, candidates for a gardening service, best of all, they could have been induced to refer new roof restorations clients to me.

But because I was stubbornly in the roof restorations business that sort of entrepreneurial/marketing think was beyond what I could do at the time.

newsletters-dont-workThe second reason Newsletters don’t work is because YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG. Newsletters need to be read to have an impact. I’ve seen people with some horrid looking newsletters get some great results because the content was interesting to the market.

Common Causes Of Doing A Newsletter Wrong:

  1. 1.       Thinking that your customers care as much about your product or service as you do. We have a very specific content formula which we advise our clients to use, to prevent this exact problem. Nobody wants to read a blatant pitch from you every month. Give up doing that. Engage them in other ways – after all, they already know your products are good. They are a customer already.
  2. 2.       Not being willing to send a customer newsletter monthly. Jerry Jones famously says “its monthly or don’t bother.” Our customers that have had the best results with their newsletter send it monthly. No question about it. Quarterly doesn’t work anywhere near as well. You need to earn engagement from your customers, giving you the opportunity to profit from your existing customers. That warrants the investment in a monthly newsletter.

So you want to argue that newsletters don’t work? You may be right. Usually, it is because of circumstances almost always of your choosing that prevent them from working. I tell potential customers that for what we charge to write, design and mail your newsletter for you, the relative investment is minor, compared to the costs of losing that customer. And if you say you “can’t afford it,” then all I can say is I don’t know why you’d want them as a customer in the first place.

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

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.’

What Does Inaction Cost You?

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.

Why Nerds, Newsletters and The Back End Of Your Business Go Together

nerdsSomewhere along the line being a Nerd became cool. Beauty and The Geek and The Big Bang Theory have become staples the country’s nightly television viewing (I challenge you to find a night where Big Bang isn’t on).

I believe most people are pretty nerdy about something. There are people who would self identify as jocks who can easily name the starting 22 of each AFL footy side. I’d say that is pretty nerdy too. There are fashion nerds, art nerds, music nerds (Ever seen Rockwiz?).

Anyway, to me what makes someone appear nerdy, is knowing something at a deeper level than most of the rest of the population. For me, I am a marketing nerd. I know the fundamental difference that made Google the dominant search engine rather than Yahoo. (They used a different metric to set the prices in their Pay Per Click Advertising models – that is the difference between the biggest internet business in the world and lying around waiting to be put out of your misery.)

We all have our own areas of expertise. Customer retention is as much a science as it is a black art. It requires planning, being absolutely meticulous and the ability to follow a very precise program. When doing a customer newsletter, that multiplies out because late and missed issues cost you, repeat business, referrals, cross sells and more.

If you don’t have someone who is a nerd with an attention to detail looking after this part of your business then you are sunk. This is one of the areas of your business where lack of attention to detail is really magnified and overlooked problems add up over time.

Sadly a ‘poor’ newsletter mailed every month like clockwork will outperform a well prepared newsletter done irregularly. The problem for those who are DIYers without the necessary attention to detail is even to get a newsletter in the mail on time every month is a herculean task.

Don’t believe me? Then think about how few newsletters actually stay on a regular production schedule.

There are far more started and abandoned than you will ever count.

Even to produce a single good newsletter is harder than you might imagine. Most of the people who are trying to pull a newsletter together are struggling to get it done in two days. What is your ‘day rate’ if you are charging even a slender $800 per day then that means you newsletter is costing $1600 to produce. An astronomical sum compared to outsourcing it to us who come in at less than half that to produce a newsletter.

We can usually do a higher quality newsletter for our clients can than they can do for themselves and in all of our time doing this we have only had one newsletter go out late, that was when a client called us the night before we were scheduled to post and asked us not to mail because he had a staff member who he featured in that newsletter walked out on him that day.

We got a replacement in the mail for them in under a week.

9 Reasons That A Monthly Newsletter Is A Must For Any Business, Big or Small!

Discover how newsletters can help you transform your business into a super successful entity with hoards of ‘raving fans’?

1 – Newsletters Can Help You Keep Customers

We all know that getting someone to buy a second time costs about 1/6th the effort as getting a new customer. But where do we spend most of our marketing dollars? On getting new customers…

Why is this? Mostly it is habit. We think that we need more business, and therefore we need new customers. But we don’t need as many new customers if your existing customer base is well-nurtured and feels looked after. Existing customers generally need to repeat purchase at some point – there are very few genuine ‘one-and-done’ businesses around, so continuing to stay in touch with them between purchases means they are more likely to buy from you the next time they need your products and services.

A print newsletter is a way to keep marketing to your existing customers without them realizing they are being marketed to. You can show up in their letter box every month. You can deliver great value to them with fun, interesting relevant content making their lives a little better. You aren’t perceived as selling overtly. And you can make them an offer every month too – giving them a chance to repeat. Point-black, there is a simple formula you need to follow if you want to keep your customers. We call it the 12 to 24X formula.

2 – Customer Retention And The 12 To 24X Formula

Let’s you look at your business like a farming operation. Your aim is to work a lot like a rice farmer. You see rice paddies actually get more productive the more fertiliser and hard work you put on them. You know those small family plots in rural Japan and China — the farmers are willing to work them so hard because they know that no matter how much they put in they will be rewarded even more come harvest time.

You can achieve something similar by understanding that your customers are similar to those rice fields. The more you put into them, the more you can get out of them. The way to do it is with the 12-24X formula.

Basically, you will stay in your customers’ minds and they won’t wander off or be swept away with your competitions’ offers if you stay in touch with them 12-24 times a year. This means you need to get in touch with each customer 12-24 times a year outside of sales offers and outright/blatant pitches.

With a monthly newsletter, you get the bare minimum 12 touches and then you can look to add season greetings, such as birthdays, Christmas, Easter, Anniversaries of conducting business, whatever is right for your customers.

But that monthly customer newsletter is the bedrock of the 12-24X formula. Of course you could take it to a whole new level using the internet, by sending out a touch every week or every day. It is entirely up to you. Before we get carried away with ourselves, start with the basics: a monthly print newsletter in their mailbox every month.

3 – Get New Customers

Newsletters have great pass-along value. More so than any other sort of marketing materials. They even seem to do better than education materials, such as case studies and reports or white papers. If an article in a newsletter is relevant, the recipient will pass it along to other people for the sake of keeping them in the loop.

So, say you sell shoes, and your newsletter has an article about how to know which shoes stay comfortable the longest, then one of your customers is probably going to pass it along to other people they know if they mention that their shoes are making their feet hurt… And odds are, they will tell that person:

A) they are a customer of yours, and

B) will point out to the prospect exactly what they should be reading…

Ta-dah. Referral.

How good is that?

How does that compare to other ways to get referrals? Most of them are a little less subtle.

Things like posters on the wall for choice of gifts with referral… Sending out referral solicitations…. Share with friends links in emails… Asking for referrals to the client’s face. None of them are as natural as passing along your newsletter and honestly telling the another person that they should be doing business with you.

Probably the best company in the world at getting referrals is Disney, and they work really hard at it. Their mission is to make your experience at Disney Land so magical that you can’t help but go home and tell seven people about it. That is a lot of work. It is also outside the budget of most of us mere mortals. A customer newsletter is very cheap by comparison, and it can be made to stealthily obligate customers into referring without them evening knowing it.

4 – Make Yourself The Credible Expert

Who publishes newsletters?

That’s right, experts.

So if you want to be seen as the expert in your market, then what should you do?

That’s right, publish a newsletter. Experts know more than other ‘vendors’ and by logical extension, more competent. However, in many cases they know as much as their competition. They just do a better job of explaining their expertise by giving out useful advice in their newsletters.

It is no secret that ‘gurus’ and ‘experts’ get paid more than their competition and that everyone wants to do business with the best in that particular market. So if you want to be been seen as the vendor of choice and be able to charge more for your products and services with less price resistance, then you need to publish a newsletter.

5 – Stand Out From The Crowd For A Few Bucks A Month.

How many of your competitors do a printed customer newsletter? Zero? Did I hear that correctly, none of them?

So you can stand out in a crowded market place by increasing the chances of your customers repeating and referring their friends, family and colleagues to your business just by printing and mailing a monthly customer newsletter.

That is a massive competitive edge and when your competitors figure out what you have done, they will try to copy you, but by then your newsletter will be on autopilot and you will be implementing more cutting-edge marketing strategies to increase the amount of business you are doing. All the while your competition is trying to catch up with their newsletter.

6 – Make You More Than Just Another Vendor

How do most business owners treat their customers? We have already discussed this a bit. They treat them like prey. To be hunted down and a few dollars extracted from their pockets. As you know this is a very short term way of thinking.

You should be in the business to make a sale to get a customer, not get a customer to make a sale. If you want to be getting customers and selling to them over and over again, then you need to build a relationship with them and you need to be more than the competition in the eyes of your customers and market.

The easiest differentiator you can implement is a monthly customer newsletter. It does more to make you appear to be more than another vendor in your market, than any other marketing tactic you can employ.

7 – Newsletters Have A Long ‘Shelf Life.’

In general, people are going to hold on to newsletters the longest out of any form of marketing. People keep newsletters until they have read them and may even save an article they like for later. Most other forms of marketing will be put in the ‘round file’ and promptly forgotten about the moment it is received or immediately after it is read.

Finally because they show up, bring fun, good cheer and useful information, newsletters are often passed along from one person to other people who might be interested in what you have to say. This means you get free marketing.

8 – Shows You Are Willing To Invest In Your Customers

What’s the difference between an eBirthday card and a Birthday card. One shows you care more than the other. The birthday card shows you got dressed and then went to the shops, browsed through the endless isles of cards, found one that was just right for the birthday boy or girl. Then you wrote them a personalised message and put their address and a stamp on the envelope and mailed it to them.

The eBirthday card shows you went to your computer (probably in your pyjamas) Googled ‘electronic birthday card’ and emailed them all without leaving your house and quite possibly your bedroom.

Which one is more highly prized by the birthday boy or girl? The real birthday card? It will sit on display for weeks or possibly months while the eBirthday card will be opened, read and left in the inbox where nobody will ever see it or it is deleted.

Which do you want? A newsletter that is read once and left in the inbox or something that is out on display for days, weeks or months for others to discover, look at and read?

Your newsletter is the same. Sending a ‘real newsletter’ shows that you are willing not only to write and design something to send your customers, you are willing to get it printed, put it in an envelope, write their address on it and mail it to them.

A world of difference in the perceived level of effort. Then your customers get the joy of opening the present in the mail every month. Even though they are expecting it, they still get excited when your newsletter arrives, every month.

Also, because it shows up in the mail every month, you can be sure that it is seen like their subscription to a magazine, a welcome guest that they are looking forward to.

9 – People Are Less Resistant To Reading Newsletters

People will read marketing materials with all their sales defences on. Conversely, your newsletter is seen as information. Not advertising. So they read it with their defences down. So all you have to do is leave your blatant selling out of your newsletter and educate the reader about your area of expertise a little at a time and you will be able to sell to your prospects without selling to them.

It can take a while for this sort of marketing to build up to the point where your customers will actually spend money with you again. Unfortunately you can’t predict when. When they do it is a sum of all the efforts you’ve made to keep in touch that has done it, not just the last newsletter.

To keep them reading your newsletter, it has to bring good cheer, be fun to read and provide them with some useful information, (nobody is as interested in your field as you are). They will keep reading with their sales defences down and they will be subtly brought round to see you as the expert, the ‘go-to-guy’ in your field and they will bring their business to you and refer their friends, family and colleagues to you.

Need More Information About Newsletters?

If you have read the above information and are still unclear if a newsletter would suit your business and would like some advice and guidance, then please request our Newsletter Suitability Assessment by clicking here or calling 1300 120 106.

Selling Your Business For The Best Possible Price

When it comes time to finally sell your business, you’ve worked hard for it, you’ve worked hard in it and you would like to see the best possible price for it.

However, most business owners don’t do the work necessary in order to get the maximum possible sale price for their business.

The real value of a business is almost entirely in its list. I mean if you want to sell your business for more than the sum of its parts.

I have a very close friend who built up and sold a business that delivers meals designed to help you lose weight to your door for the week. He sold that up a few years ago and was paid out handsomely. He told me recently that it wasn’t until he delivered his customer data on a USB to the buyer and saw how excited they looked that he realised just how valuable customer data is.

They didn’t care about his ordering software… his high tech delivery routing program… anything to do with his location or how it was fitted out. All they wanted was the customer list.

This isn’t isolated. There was a magazine that was targeted to farmers, but they didn’t allow advertising. It was very popular and a lot of companies wanting to sell to farmers wanted to be advertising in that magazine. The song and dance went on until the one of the companies cracked and bought the magazine out for seven times its earnings.

There is nothing more valuable in your business than your customer database and your relationship with it –  well actually it is the results of that relationship that is so valuable, the customer loyalty and the referrals. To create a relationship with your customers requires investment and a system.

The system is the key part. Systems are what are valuable in business. It means that whoever buys your business will be able to use the same system and get the same results.

“Creativity is over-rated. Most business success comes from doing boring, diligent work. From developing a system that produces consistent results and sticking to it”

Ray Kroc. (The man who built McDonalds into the most successful fast food operation in the world.)

It is this boring work that is the key to business success. Developing and continuing to implement systems to achieve the outcomes you want. In this case building and maintaining a strong relationship with your customer list so that they will continue to buy from you and refer new customers to you.

The systems you create mean that you can sell a future revenue stream. That means you are in effect selling money at a discount. You buy my business for X and you’ll be almost guaranteed to get your money back in 5 years – less if you do the work to grow it… Or something like that.

That is the power of creating systems to maintain and grow the value of your most important asset in  business.

What Are You Thinking? – Questions from Business Owners.

Q: With everyone doing more and more marketing online today, should I move my newsletter online too?

A: Based on nearly a decade of marketing experience working on my own businesses and also helping other business owners growing their businesses, plus seeing the results they get from their online and offline marketing I can say, “You gotta be kidding, right?”

You need to be changing your business so that you can afford to be offline as well as online. Success guru Earl Nightingale said, “If you are ever in doubt about what to do in a situation then look at what everyone else is doing and do the opposite.”

There are three very important reasons as to why you should not follow the herd by moving your newsletter online.

1) 65% of people say they get too many emails in a day to read them all. Epsilon.

2) The open rate on email is 1/6th that of mail. Sending a printed newsletter is SIX times more likely to get read. That gives you a huge advantage in terms of potential response, likelihood of response and also relationship building

3) Because you spent money to get that newsletter to them it is much more respected. By definition – money spent earns respect and shows respect. You value your customers enough to spend real money to print and post them your newsletter. It is more valuable in their eyes than an email newsletter that someone probably slapped together in 20 minutes then hit the send button on.

4) People get ‘more’ from physical things. There was a study by Bangor University and they found a much deeper level of emotional processing and more activity in the area of the brain associated with visual and spatial processing, improving the embedding of images and ideas when they received a direct mail compared with electronic communications.

That is profound – people pay more attention to mailed newsletters than they do to electronic ones and a much more likely to respond when there is a something tangible.

5) In Australia, many people only receive four or so pieces of mail a week including bills. (Most Americans get a piece of personal mail 6 times a year). Some 60% of consumers enjoy checking their mail box and receiving mail. Do you reckon getting a newsletter in the mail addressed to them might be pretty exciting and not competing against too much clutter?

You can use your newsletter to create More Repeat Business and Referrals for your business. Go To www.morebusinessandreferrals.com and download, “The Business Owner’s Guide to Getting More Repeat Business and Referrals” to find out our exact blueprint to grow your business.

 

Print Newsletter Content Mistakes

Creating a newsletter that your customers want to read is very challenging. More than most people can imagine. And I see three very common mistakes repeated over and over again in many of the customer newsletters I see.

Mistake 1: Not taking advantage of the golden rule.

Frequency Trumps Quantity and Quality. Just getting a newsletter in the mail on the same day every month is the best way to ensure newsletter success. It creates readership just by being predictable – like a magazine they subscribe to.

Even if the quality of the content is relatively low, a predictably mailed newsletter will outperform an erratically or less frequently mailed higher quality newsletter. It is sad but true.

Mistake 2: Not making it about the recipient.

Many newsletters are used for self aggrandisement. Which is okay in small doses. But what does seem to happen is that the business doesn’t include any content which the recipient will want to read. Often times newsletter content can be translated into “me, me, me!”

So be sure to make content that is all about your customers and their lives and things they will find interesting rather than about pointless self promotion. It will increase readership when the content is about your customers and making their lives better.

Mistake 3: Making it all about what you do.

The truth is, no matter how much it hurts to hear it but nobody and I mean nobody, is as interested in what you do as you. If they are, you can create a subscription newsletter to go out every month that they will gladly pay for. Meaning that you get paid to send your newsletters – what a great idea.

Think of health and wellness newsletters as well as investment newsletters or business and marketing related newsletters. All are 8-24 pages of content on a specific topic and most of them charge between $39 and $99 a month for a subscription.

Most customer newsletters are not subscription driven so they shouldn’t be just about what you do. They can afford to be a lot more warm and fuzzy. Full of fun, happy, interesting content that will bring a smile to the face of your customer and build good will.

Most of the feedback I get indicated that ‘Reader’s Digest Lite’ content is better to receive than anything about what you do. So check your ego at the door and give ‘em what they want.

To find out how you can get a customer newsletter out the door every month full of fun and interesting content that your customers will love reading and at the same time increase repeat business and referrals, download the Business Owners Guide to Getting more repeat business and Referrals from www.morebusinessandreferals.com

Newsletter Marketing: 3 Simple Strategies to Better Monetise your Print Newsletter (Are you using all 3?)

Everybody is being told to do a newsletter these days. What they don’t often understand is that there are a couple of ad ons that can dramatically increase the profitability of a newsletter in the near, to middle term.

Strategy 1: Seed The Next Sale.

You should be using some (not all) of the space as a way to build the need for the next sale. Doesn’t matter what it is, even if it is complex you should be able to spoon feed the message to your customers over time so that when you run a marketing campaign to make the next sale your customers already know a great deal about why they should buy and are already primed to do so.

Strategy 2: Use a Free Standing Insert

You can always do your selling in a Free Standing Insert (FSI) sent out inside your newsletter. (For those of you who don’t know what I mean think of all the loose advertising that falls out of a newspaper when you open it up)

Most newsletter FSI’s are 1 page, double sided placed between pages two and three of your newsletter. There is plenty of room to there to move people to do all sorts of things. They can request your latest report which is lead generation for a given product. It can promote a referral competition.

It can promote an event that you are putting on.

Or it can simply push prospects towards their regular check up or consultation or some such.

Strategy 3: Ride Along Promotions

You are already paying for the postage and envelope for your newsletter. I bet you can add some weight to it without increasing the postage – which means you can add additional promotions when you need to.

So if you have an upcoming sale, you can give your promotional materials a free ride. You may not want to do this every month but I will assure you that every once in a while it doesn’t hurt. That way your promotional materials will be reviewed when the recipient reads your newsletter.

The added good will of the newsletter is likely to increase response as well.

Now you can get a customer newsletter out the door with far better results than you could ever have imagined. I can automate the whole process for you.

You can take all the stress out of getting your newsletter out the door at the same time every month. Get yourself a free copy of The Business Owner’s Guide to Getting More Repeat Business and Referrals and The Newsletter On Newsletters at www.morebusinessandreferrals.com