The essence of marketing is tounderstand your customers’ needs and develop a plan that focuses on thoseneeds. Let’s face it – anyone with a business has a desire to grow it!
You can grow your business in fourdifferent ways. They include:
• acquiring more customers
• persuading customers to buy more products
• persuading customers to buy more expensiveproducts or up selling customers
• persuading customers to buy more profitableproducts
All four of these strategiesincrease your revenue and profit. However, let me encourage you to focus on thefirst, which is to acquire more customers. Why? Because by acquiring morecustomers, you increase your customer base, and your revenues then come from alarger base.
If you are like the majority ofsmall-business owners, your marketing budget is limited. The most effective way to market asmall business is to create a well-rounded program that combines salesactivities with marketing tactics.
Sales activities will not onlydecrease your out-of-pocket marketing expenses, but they will also add thevalue of interacting with your prospective customers and clients. Thisinteraction will provide you with priceless research.
Now, how do you take that limitedmarketing budget and make the best of it? Well, direct mail is entering itssecond golden age!
Why? Let’s look at what’shappening to some of the most common methods of marketing a small business.Two-thirds of the population is on the FTC’s Do Not Call Registry. Thatnegatively affects telemarketing initiatives. And, the cost effectiveness oftelevision and cable advertising is diminishing because of channel surfing andthe exponential growth of TIVO.
The Yellow Pages are morecluttered than ever, while rates continue to spiral upwards. What about e-mailpushes? Well, spam filters are blocking up to 20-35% of legitimate e-mail.Radio? Local radio continues to fragment with the rapid growth of satelliteradio services like Sirius and XM. Ok, how about newspapers? Readership ofnewspapers across America is declining; most of us have no time to read anewspaper, and by the time we do, the information is already outdated.
As you can see, every medium costsmore and is becoming more cluttered in a world where the attention span of thebuying public is shrinking.
That means old-fashioned directmail is still the most powerful one-to-one marketing medium ever created. Infact, statistics prove that 69% of consumers base their buying decisions oncoupons or offers they receive in the mail!
– By Angie Nielsen, CEO, MailAmerica Inc.
