I think author Dan Millman says it the best:

“I learned that we can do anything, but we can’t do everything… at least not at the same time. So think of your priorities not in terms of what activities you do, but when you do them. Timing Is Everything.”

I thought you all might be able to use a few tips to make this holiday season more joyous with good, profitable database marketing.

Here’s something to trigger some ideas for you to help give your client base “a REASON to spend with you”:

Our 5-Step ‘Holiday’ Sales System:

  1. Segment Your List
  2. Craft a Message with a Reason
  3. Make a Compelling Offer
  4. Have a Deadline
  5. Create an Up-sell, Bundle, or ways to expand the sale

 

Let’s break this down a bit and really give you marketing muscles a workout shall we.

Segment your list – Now don’t get me wrong, we love ALL of our paying customers and clients – it’s just that we love some more than others. The fact is some of your clients are many times more valuable than others.  Some use more of your services, refer you more, are more loyal or are just plain easier and more profitable to do work for.

Also, if you want to do a promotion for a particular product or service that is only relevant to clients who own pets for example, or live in a certain neighborhood – you would certainly increase your ROI if you only targeted that portion of your list who are known to meet that criteria already.

There are lots of reasons and ways to segment you list, that’s the beauty of databases.  The important point here is to always consider who it is you want to aim at with your promotion and then segment your list as best you can so your message is much more targeted.

Craft a Message with a Reason – When you present an offer to clients, you must have a logical reason for the offer.  Notice I didn’t say a great reason, or even a good reason, certainly nothing earth shattering, but a reason nonetheless.  Here’s why:  People are naturally skeptical and suspicious.  They’ve been told their entire life that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.  I think we’ll all agree that there is some truth to that.

You can have an ‘Anniversary Offer’ –  ‘New to the Neighborhood Discount’ – ‘Scratch and Dent Sale’ for example.  If a supplier extends special pricing to us we’ll have a limited time promotion and say our vendors are helping us make this happen.  Remember, good is certainly good enough!  Truly, any logical reason will give you a bump in response.

Make a Compelling Offer – The ultimate reaction you want from your clients or prospects is, “I’d be a fool if I said No to this!”  Every piece of marketing you do must have an offer, and it can’t be a ho-hum, run-of-the-mill offer.  It must be something so great, so ideally matched to your target audience that there is no way someone could possibly justify ignoring it.

Have you ever watched those infomercials on weekends or late at night? (If you haven’t, you should!)  With the enormous costs of national TV advertising you can bet that any marketer who’s ad runs for a good long while is making money even if the product is being sold for only $19.95 (on the front end – but we’ll get to that in a minute). There is lots to be learned on how to craft a truly compelling offer form watching infomercials and taking notes.

But the question I’m often asked is, “John, should I use a discount or a premium”  A premium is something you give your client as a free gift for taking the action you want.  It can include placing an order, accepting an up-sell or even just opting into your marketing funnel by providing their contact information.

I say the only real way to know for sure is to split test your offers and see which one wins.  However, if time is of the essence, I can make a pretty good argument for premiums over discounts.  My mentor and marketing legend Dan Kennedy, has said many times that,

“Premiums can and do drive sales, and that a change of premium, with no other changes, can dramatically alter the results of a promotion.”

The primary reason of offering a premium is to give ’fence-sitters’ a push over into immediately buying action.

A few other rules to remember when crafting your compelling offer are;

i) get in the habit of offering only one thing with each piece of marketing, confused and overwhelmed people do nothing, and nothing is the last thing you want from prospect or client.

ii) Be wary of using percentage off for your offers.  As a society, we’ve become increasing skeptical of these offers.  We have ingrained in our minds that they’ve simply over-inflated the original value of the product or service.

Have a Deadline – For an offer to really be irresistible, you MUST have a reason for immediate action.  In direct response marketing, we call them deadlines.

If you don’t have a deadline, you don’t really have an offer!

Most importantly, you don’t want to hide it in your offer so make it big and clear.  A headline is not something to hide from the client, hoping they don’t see it.  Your deadline is the same thing.  You want them to know the deadline, make it big and clear to create urgency and an immediately response, NOW, not later.

Here’s an insider’s tip most don’t know. Multiple deadlines, especially if you’re deadline is not for a few weeks, can work very well with an additional bonus for a fast response.

Here’s an example:

This offer expires on December 24, 2011.  But if you respond by December 10th, you’ll get ______________. (Then fill in the blank with your incredible bonus gift, Free report, additional savings etc.)

Here are a few more ways to create deadlines in your marketing:

  • Within “X” Number of Days
  • By “X”-Date
  • By Date stamped in RED in the letter.
  • Limited to the first “X” number who respond
  • There’s a Waiting List!  You can’t even get it right now! Register Here…

Create an Up-sell - This might just be the single biggest missed opportunity I see most small businesses make with their marketing and sales processes bar none.  It can actually have you leaving as much as 2X to 3X of your profit behind! And when we’re talking about promotional campaigns, this one concept can often make the difference between your offer delivering a negative ROI or a huge windfall.

Quite often you’ll find package selling to be one of the easiest ways to bundle up your services, add a premium value and then offer the upgrade to all of your transactions when closing the sale.  Other options are to offer add on products or services at a discounted rate exclusively for those who take advantage of your original offer.

This process is the staple of the infomercial business.  In fact, most marketers are quite willing and happy to loose money on the offer they promote in the infomercial because they know that X percent of respondents will opt for one or more of their one-time-only up-sells – and it’s the up-sell offerings that contain all of the profitability in their campaign.  Now I’m not suggesting you go out and run all your promotions at a loss or you might just loose your shirt (NOTE: if you had a solid, well tested and high converting backend sales system you certainly could) but by creating up-sell offerings to be presented to the buyer at time sale is a great way to maximize your profitability while providing additional value to your clientele.
So there you have it, our 5 Step Sales System that will certainly bring more cheer and goodwill to your bank account this holiday season.

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