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Article:
Raise Your Income! by: Joy Gendusa How often do you sit around and wonder how to make more money and get more people to buy more from your company? It's one of the most basic problems every company faces. The answer is astonishingly simple. Too simple maybe. But I've seen it work over and over again with our customers in every line of business you can imagine. You have to promote. Your income is governed by the size of your customer base and how often and effectively you communicate with those customers. So raising your income is simply a matter of keeping in touch with your existing customer base, reminding them you are there, offering them goods or services they might be interested in, in such a way that they want to buy more and more often from you. And increasing the size of your customer base by finding and contacting potential customers and persuading them to buy your products or services and then adding them to your customer base and keeping in touch with them in the same way. If you have a good service or product and you make sure you service your customers well, you cannot fail to raise your income. How rapidly you raise your income depends on how rapidly you do these actions, how much you promote. Handling the quantity or volume of promotion is definitely the most obvious thing you can do on an immediate basis. Believe it or not, if you send out crappy, crappy promotion, your income will go up. You may not be happy with the Return on your Investment (ROI) for that marketing effort, but definitely it will raise your income. Once quantity is handled and you are sending out loads of promotion, you want to tweak it and raise the quality of your promotion. And here are some things you can do. Use Offers to Improve Your Response. One of the barriers to buying which you work hard to overcome is 'no hurry.' Why buy it now when I can think about it for a few weeks, shop around a little and get back to you, maybe? Familiar with that 'I'm interested. I'll get back to you.' Or the card you have designed and mailed out gets put in a drawer somewhere for possible follow up, maybe next year some time. One way to deal with this is to reward those who buy now and penalize those who don't. How? With some special offer and one that is attractive and one which has a time element attached to it. 'Order your new lawnmower now and we'll give you a free edger. Offer good until the end of May.' (Or whatever, you get the idea). Obviously the offer must be financially feasible for you so you'll have to do some number crunching before you make the offer. You can tie these special offers in to some particular event or season (like jewelry for Valentine's Day or flowers or chocolates or just about anything for Christmas) but you don't have to. Special Offers help you maximize on your direct mail marketing and keep your customers ordering from you when you want them to. It's just one more way to be in control of your promotion. You can control how much and how fast your company grows. About The Author Joy Gendusa founded PostcardMania in 1998; her only assets a computer and a phone. In 2004 the company did close to $9 million in sales and employs over 60 persons. She attributes her explosive growth to her ability to choose incredible staff and her innate marketing savvy. Now she's sharing her marketing secrets with others. For more free marketing advice, visit her website at www.postcardmania.com. This article was posted on March '03
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