Marketing Tip #3
Increase your sales with basic mailings to your existing customers
Your own mailing list can be one of your best assets. Growing that list can be fairly simple. The main goal is to get your customers to leave you their names, addresses and e-mail addresses. You can easily achieve this through a number of techniques, by putting out a guest book to capture names and addresses, going through your sales receipts, offering your customers an opportunity to sign up for a newsletter featuring useful tips, special offers and discounts that you can mail to them, or have your customers register for a drawing to win your services or products.
Marketing to your existing customers has some of the best potential for increasing your sales. They already have knowledge about your business and have had some buying experience with you therefore you will find much less sales resistance than with people who don’t know you at all.
Find out your customer’s birthdays and send them a birthday card that has a gift certificate enclosed. Make sure that the gift certificate is for a specific dollar value and that it doesn’t require you to purchase any set amount to use the certificate. Many businesses send out the birthday cards that require you to spend a minimum to get the discount. This is not a gift it is a conditional sales discount, which certainly can work but does not have the same effect, feeling or response rate as a gift certificate with no set purchase requirements.
Send you customers cross marketing postcards with discount offers on products and services they haven’t purchased from you. If you are a hair salon offer your customers that have their hair done a deal on getting their nails done. The idea is to encourage your customers to try new products and services. Your mailing list is also a great way to announce special sales and new products. Today the postcard is one of the best ways to market your business.
Everyone looks at a postcard even on the way to the trash. If you have a good offer many of your postcards will end up on your targets refrigerators, instead of in their wastebaskets, keeping your name & logo in constant view. The latest statistics from the American Marketing Association and the U.S. Post Office indicates that the average rate of return on postcard mailings is presently at 5.3% not bad at all considering that traditional print advertising has only been getting an average return of between 1%- 2% for the last 50 years.
