Direct response marketing

The Success Formula for marketing for businesses that works!

For most business owners, marketing is akin to an annoyance - something they know

they have to do, should be doing, but are ‘too busy’ to pay any real attention to.

They are too busy working ‘in’ the business rather than ‘on’ the business.

“As a Business Owner, You Will Make Far, Far More Money Marketing the Thing Than You Will Ever Make Doing the Thing.”

You’ll have a lot more FUN!

Placing a well-crafted ad in the local paper or the Yellow Pages, or sending out a newsletter to clients and hearing the phone ringing off its cradle!

Direct Response Marketing.

What does direct response mean? Simply, marketing falls into two distinct categories:

Image (sometimes called Brand) Marketing or  Direct Response Marketing

‘Branding’ is something companies do to rapidly lift their ‘recognisability’ in a global or

national market. It is incredibly expensive, but worse than that, its results are difficult, if

not impossible, to measure.

Direct Response, on the other hand, is the only kind of marketing that any small

business should embark on. Why? Because it’s the only kind of marketing that’s measurable and accountable .

As a small business owner, you should be able to measure precisely the cost of a particular

marketing campaign versus the revenue it generates. And you should be able to measure it •

down to the very last dollar.

Now, the name ‘Direct Response’ means exactly as it says; you place an ad, or send out a

sales letter, and you can measure the direct response to that ad or sales letter. And there are very easy ‘tricks and tools’ you can use to make that a straightforward task.

I’ll get onto that shortly, but first, the crucial, ‘must-have’ elements to any successful Direct

Response marketing can be summed up in a simple, proven formula. This is a formula used •

by the best Direct Response copywriters all over the world, and it comes down to the rather

awkward-looking acronym A.I.C.P.B.S.A.W.N

Or

A =            Attention. If you don’t get their attention, you’ve failed before you start.

I =            Interest. If there’s nothing to interest them, they won’t read further.

C =            Credibility. If you’re not credible, why would they buy from you?

P =       Proof. Can you prove that what you say is true?

B =            Benefits. What benefits does your prospective client get?

S =            Scarcity. Unless there’s some form of scarcity, why should they buy NOW?

A =      Action. You have to tell them what to do to get the benefits now.

W =     Warn. And you should warn them what they’ll miss out on if they don’t.

Direct Mail alternatives and initiatives

We provide marketing services to create marketing campaigns for direct mailed letters to your targeted prospects. We can assist you to create a campaign that contains one or more of the following components;

• Prospect direct letters
• Existing client letter
• Database marketing letter
• Newsletters
• Letterbox flyers
• Posters
• Internal business advertising
• Email templates

We can organize to create, print and distribute all of your marketing initiatives using the most successful, modern and cost effective techniques.

Our services are available throughout all states and in most capital cities throughout Australia.

If you have your own design and templates, we can have them created and distributed for you, if not, we can also create them for you!

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SMS Marketing

Why You Should be Using SMS – Before it’s Too Late!

I’m often asked, “What’s one way to get a hundred new customers?” And the answer I

always give is “There is no ONE way to get a hundred new customers. There’s a hundred

ways to get ONE new customer, and you’ve got use as many of them as you can!”

No matter what type of business you’re in, marketing has always been about delivering the

right message, to the right market, and the right time.

The more closely matched your message is to the list you’re marketing to, the better your

response is going to be. And the other huge variable that affects the response you get to

your message (or offer) is timing.

The same principles of compelling direct response marketing apply, no matter which

media you choose to deliver your message. Direct mail, TV, radio, email, a website, the

sandwich board outside your business…or text messaging…it doesn’t matter.

So remember this vital point:

“It doesn’t matter how I’m delivering my message…1 still need to give my clients and/or prospective customers a compelling reason to respond right NOW!”

And that comes down to your offer. Without a compelling offer, you’re wasting your time.

Now, hear this: SMS – jargon for Short Message Service, delivered to an individual’s cell

phone – is just another tool that’s available to you to deliver your message.

Just because it’s easy to use, doesn’t mean it’s the only one you should use . Like anything

else, text messaging should be nothing more than ONE of the many, many methods of

delivering your marketing message that you should be using. And using as much as you

possibly can.

How to Plan Your SMS Marketing

Like any other form of marketing, SMS marketing needs planning. Here’s an outline of the

process you need to go through. It’s not complicated – in fact it’s very, very simple – but

without it, you’ll be flying blind.

Remember how I said that marketing is about the right message to the right

market?

Well, that’s your list. In this case, not a mailing list, but an SMS list. It’s the names

of the clients you want to market to, with their cell phone numbers in the adjoining

column. That’s the easy bit.

The clever bit is this:

The better matched your market is to the message you’re sending to their cell phones, the

better is going to be your response. So, when you craft your offer, part of the sales thinking process is ‘who among my list of clients is the group that’s most likely to respond to this offer?’ You see, even the most clumsily-written sales message (offer) will get a better

response if it’s sent to a well-targeted list than a great message sent to a lousy,

inappropriate list.

The quality of your list matters. Much more than the number of people on the list.

Sales Thinking. Do this before you do anything.

First, you’ve got to think… “What am I going to say to these people to get them to

pick up the phone right NOW?”

You need to do some sales thinking – the kind of thinking you should always be

doing before you so much as book an ad space, plan a direct mail campaign,

or…send an SMS!

The key to the sales thinking process is your OFFER. In other words, what’s going

to get them phoning in right now.

And we will take care of this for you !

a) Give your client massive perceived value

b) Limit the offer in some way…either by time, or numbers

c) Call to Action… “Call NOW” works better than just including your phone number and hoping they’ll understand what you want them to do!

2) Timing. There’s good timing, and there’s bad timing.

The message is clear; the more instant the technology, the more attention you have

to pay to timing.

And there is simply no media more instant than SMS. Not email. Not direct mail.

Not press advertising. Only SMS can deliver a razor-sharp, targetted message right

now to your specified audience. To one prospect, or a thousand.

Now, a couple of things about timing. First, things to avoid…

Similarly, sending a text that arrives at dinner timeis almost certainly a recipe for being ignored or forgotten. People are busy, tired, grumpy or all three at that time of the day. Give them, and yourself, a break.

a)      Sending a text message that arrives in the wee small hours of the morning and wakes the entire household is not cool. True, people should turn their phones off when they go to bed…but they don’t. Assumption is the mother of a foul-up.

b)      Depending on your specific target market, a certain time of the day may be more appropriate than another time. E.g., if you’re texting all the mothers of school-age children on your list, timing a message to arrive on their cell phones as school finishes probably isn’t very clever.

Sending a text message at an inappropriate time is a sure way to annoy your clients…not get them to buy from you!

Then there’s the kind of timing you should be taking advantage of. Decades ago,

famous advertising man Robert Collier talked about ‘entering the conversation

that’s already going on in their heads.’

That’s a concept perfectly-tuned to marketing using text messages. Because with

text messaging, you can time your message to co-incide with, and take advantage

of, events that are happening that your target market is interested in.

Something’s happened that gives you a ‘hook’ to market a particular product your service . It’s everywhere in the news; it’s a subject on everybody’s lips  hard enough

Client Management System

All businesses should have a computer CSM program:

• A list of clients and their cell phone numbers on an Excel spreadsheet…and import the names and numbers into our web-based SMS service.

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Web based email marketing is a great cost effective way to develop a database and to get your existing prospects and clients to spend more, more often.

Email marketing to your database can complement your various marketing activities and can generate you thousands of additional sales and profits, costing you next to nothing to do!

Email marketing can be done as often as your client base wants it, weekly, fortnightly, monthly – it is all very flexible and fluid.

We use email marketing techniques that have generated 10’s of Thousands of Dollars in business Sales…

Strongly Suggested Resources for Email Marketing;

· Data base marketing
· Auto responders
· HTML Email
· Tracking
· Mailing Lists
· Newsletters

We can coordinate the templates, the use of the database and the implementation of your email marketing campaign.
PS- please ensure your database have requested and approved receiving your messages

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Your Marketing Calendar

Marketing isn’t an EVENT – it’s a PROCESS

Many business owners consider marketing one of those annoying tasks that’s left until the last minute, executed badly, and completed begrudgingly. Worse, it’s done haphazardly, ad hoc, with little or no forward planning.

Here’s something you should repeat over and over again, until your staff beg you to stop:
“Marketing is not something we do as a side-issue, it IS WHATWE DO all the time! The treatments and products are just the stuff we feed down the marketing pipeline.”

All businesses are marketing and sales organizations - only the ‘product’ (or service) changes.”

If you have a computerized database, it will be easy to organisations… set up a series of marketing direct mail pieces that only the ‘product’ correspond with certain events. (or service) changes.”

For example, you can set up your database so that a birthday offer is sent out each week to those clients on your database whose birthdays occur in the following two weeks.

Here’s a list of ’special events’ that could be set up to trigger a letter containing a special offer:

• ‘Missing in Action’ -let’s say you haven’t seen a client in three months. You can set up your database so it automatically each week gives you a list of such clients and you can post them the appropriate letter in the sales letters section of this manual.
• Client birthday – each week, you can send those with upcoming birthdays the
  appropriate letter from the sales letter section.
• ‘Top Client’ Letter – in most businesses, 80% of the income comes from the top
  20% of clients. You could set up your database to alert you when these clients have
  spent a certain amount in a set period, say three months, and send them a special
  ‘thank you’ letter accompanied by a gift voucher.

Then there are the ‘Calendar Events’ that should trigger a standard series of letters to clients. So, there are two classifications of regular mailings you can set up;

1. Letters to clients that are triggered by client-specific events, such as birthdays
2. Letters to clients that are triggered by calendar-specific events, such as Christmas, Mother’s Day, School Holidays and so on.

Get yourself a Yearly Planner. They are readily available from office supply retailers. Make a list of marketable ‘events’ on the planner. Then backtrack one month. That’s when you need to start taking action to market for the event. Not two days out.

Secrets of Sales Letters – (It’s Salesmanship in Print or email electronic format )

Most businesses fret about getting ‘new’ customers in the door, constantly worrying about where the next customer is going to come from. But amazingly, many businesses hardly bother to market to their existing client base at all. I suppose they figure ‘well, we’ve got them as a client now, we don’t need to bother with them anymore’.

Yes, it IS important to keep feeding a business with ‘fresh’ clients, for all sorts of reasons. Old clients move away from the area, inevitably you will lose a client here and there because of dissatisfaction.

Newsletters

4 Great Reasons to Send Newsletters to Your Clients

Statistics say that if you send out a newsletter monthly for 24 months, 65 % of the nominated members on your database will purchase from you!

“…they always bring in more money that it costs to have them printed and mailed out…”

1. A regular newsletter sends a message to your clients that you care about them.
   Especially if it contains a note saying ‘as one of our most valuable clients, you are
   receiving this newsletter to inform you of developments in the service and goods we provide. People want to feel special, cared for. They don’t want to have stuff ‘pitched’ to
   them all the time. There is no better way of keeping in touch with your clients with
   information that is useful to them than a regular newsletter.
2. Having said that, once you have set up a regular newsletter ‘pattern’, it becomes
   simply the best way to communicate special offers to your clients. When your
   newsletter arrives in the mail every couple of months, they are expecting it, they
   open it, and they read it.
3. You become the expert. There is a term in marketing called ‘positioning’. As the
   author of a newsletter on beauty and skin treatments, you set yourself up as the
   ‘guru’ in the business. You become the one to turn to. And when a client you haven’t
   seen for some time suddenly decides it’s time for some treatment, who is she going
   to call? You, of course.
4. A newsletter can also be a great way to involve your clients in your own special
   ‘community’ surrounding your business. You can promote competitions, include
   news of clients’ activities. A newsletter is the perfect vehicle to promote a special
   ‘club ‘ in which there are members at various levels. People like to see their name in print. And if, in your newsletter, you talk about ‘Platinum Member Joyce Smithers’ or ‘Silver Member Alice Jones’, you will find that other clients will want to know how they can achieve a higher level of membership, Especially when you talk about the extra benefits of being a Platinum member.

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