How to destroy your business - 1

[peterjhale]

How to destroy your business in five easy steps


The reason for marketing is simple: to attract more people to your business. However, it can be expensive, and if not done properly, ineffective. This has made it a tricky issue for startup businesses with small budgets. To work, marketing campaigns must be carefully targeted at the desired audiance meaning there are few generic 'must do's'. However, there are some marketing disasters that all businesses should definitely avoid.

Chris Cardell is one of the UK’s leading experts on small business marketing. He has been featured extensively on national media including BBC, ITV and the national press. After a decade of working with and interviewing hundreds of UK businesses, Chris has outlined five of the fatal mistakes that business owners and managers make, which at best cost them a fortune in lost profits – and at worst can lead to business failure.

1 - Not communicating effectively with your existing customers

Your best immediate sources of additional profits and increased business are your existing customers. These are the people who you’ve already invested time, energy and money with to create a relationship. They know you, they trust you, hopefully they’ve enjoyed doing business with you. Because of this it is normally five to ten times easier to get an existing customer to buy from you again, than it is to get someone to buy from you for the first time.

If this is the case, why are so many businesses so ineffective at communicating with existing customers? Here is an example that we can all relate to. Think of all the ads in your local newspaper for restaurants. Imagine all the money the restaurant owners are spending on these ads. Now ask yourself this question: When did you last receive a letter or an email from a restaurant you’ve visited, asking you to come back, or offering you a free bottle of wine if you bring your family? What would happen if your local restaurant asked for your email or your address at the end of your meal so that they could keep you informed on special offers, incentives, or perhaps to enter you into a prize draw for a free meal. What would happen to the first restaurant in your area to apply this systematically for the months and years ahead?

Now apply this principle to your business. Here are some useful questions to ask yourself. How often do you communicate with your existing customers? What do you have to offer your existing customers? What are you not offering existing customers that you could be offering them? When did you last send a letter to your customers? When did you last email them? Did you measure the response? When did you last call them? What would happen if you doubled your contact with them this year? When you do communicate with them, what more could your be doing to clearly explain the specific benefits that they will experience?

I once had a client who generated £300,000 by sending a brochure to their clients once a year. I asked what would happen if they sent the brochure twice a year. The thought had never even crossed their mind. We did it (and a lot more) and it generated a fortune for my client.

This may sound ridiculously simple but it is not an unusual story. We are all so close to our businesses that it is often a challenge to step back and look at the obvious – the elusive obvious.

When I start working with a new client, I know without a doubt that they are sitting on a goldmine. This goldmine consists of the wealth that is hidden in their relationships with their current customers.

Here are some more useful questions to maximize your relationship with existing customers: How often do you communicate with your customers by direct mail? Do you test and measure the response? Do you spend at least 15 minutes each month thinking of an exclusive offer you can make to your existing customers? Do you say ‘thank you’ to your customers either by letter, email or telephone? Do you ask your customers for referrals? Did you know that there are at least 90 ways of getting referrals? If you have a limited service or product line – do you know of additional companies, products or services that your customers could benefit from?


There are hundreds of great marketing strategies for getting new customers (we’ll deal with some of them in the rest of the article) But before that, you need to nurture your relationships with your existing customers. It is the first key to the goldmine.

[theplanner]

Good tips I think.

As marketing is idetifying and satisfying customer needs I suppose customer research is key - as needs change then products should change !

[carolb]

Too true - you need to keep on top of what customers are demanding.
As you say, these change over time

[mbailey]

A regular newsletter, even by email is extremely cost-effective. Designing it does not have to take long either. If it's in printed for it could even be done in Word, although using a proper DTP product is best. And with the cost of colour laser printers these days (that can also handle double-sided printing) it's easy enough to do it in-house. If you're doing 500+ you should get them printed externally, as toner costs soon mount up.

Email is even easier, although this should not be abused you you will find your email is simply passed to the Junk folder, or worse still your customers may complain to your service providers - this could result in your account being suspended or you being blacklisted by one of the spam organisations. If this happens then anyone who uses email software that subscribes to their anti-spam databases will never see your emails again, legitimate or otherwise!

Golden rule: Before you send anything else get someone to proof read it. It is almost IMPOSSIBLE to proof read your own work successfully. I've made some howlers in my time that I simply could not spot. Luckily I always get others to check my work before I send it out.

You can read an excerpt from my book, Marketing your Business at http://www.marketingyour.biz/fact_sh...newsletter.htm

Hope this help!

Martin Bailey
Author: Marketing your Business
www.marketingyour.biz

[theplanner]

Email marketing had helped me.

The best way to start an online business is to find someone with a large opt in list that is relevant to your industry and take out an add or add in an affiliate link.

[JennyFine]

I have read an interesting article about news letters recently. it discribed a new approach to writing them, based on one businessman's experience (don't remember his name).
The things that I found useful:

1. He positioned himself as the publisher of a high-quality magazine not the director of his company and started every issue with a passionate intro to make the letter personal

2.He talked more about the industry rather than his own company

3. found some regularly updated industry data and created a chart from it to send to readers. he built his publishing schedule around the chart date. fresh data is always more exiting to read

[peterjhale]

That's really good advice - positioning is always important