Marketing Strategies – Building Customer Relationships

I was reading one of my favourite blogs – http://donna-mariecoggins.com/blog/ and her recent post about customer relationships was fantastic at this point in time so I wanted to share it with you. Her full post is at the bottom.

Your customers are your lifeblood. Without them, you don’t make any money. So why don’t people treat them well?? One of the questions I always ask my new clients is “what makes you different from your competitors?” Picture this, say you sell widgets in the local main street. What happens if a new store across the road opens up and sells the same widgets? Do you drop your price and market that? What happens when you start losing your profit margin?  You go broke. Your business is outa there! So what would make people still buy from you, even if your widgets were a little more expensive?

You.

Your customer service. How you treat people will make them stay and pay whatever they need to. Relate this back to some of your own customer service experiences. I know I pay extra for plenty of things, just because of the service I receive. Share some of your experiences here.

Cheers,

Emma
Diva Promotions

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Donna-Maries Post.

When it comes to building strong customer relations it’s often the little things that count.

This week I’ve received two pieces of mail that left me a little disappointed. The first was a magazine I had requested as I was considering advertising in it and I also thought that the members of my local business group might be interested. I sent the magazine publisher an email requesting a copy and stating my interest (this very small, very new publication is available by subscription only but they do offer a free copy to prospective advertisers).

Although I didn’t receive a reply to my email, the magazine arrived about two weeks later… with no cover letter, with compliments slip or anything. Just the lonely magazine.

Now this would have been the perfect opportunity for the publisher to make some effort to build a relationship and encourage my support of their magazine. Firstly, a quick reply to my email along the lines of, “Thanks for requesting a sample copy of xyz magazine. I’ll pop one in the mail for you today.”

This could have been followed up with a brief note or even just a with compliments slip in the envelope.

But… there has been no personal interaction from this publisher at all and I’m not sure if they even want my business. They’re certainly not trying to win my confidence in them.

The second piece of mail was a booking form for a series of workshops. Again, the sender went to the trouble to hand-address an envelope to me and pay for postage, but there was no cover letter – not even a generic letter photocopied for all recipients. And there was nothing to say how they knew me. In fact, how did they even know I might be interested? (Truth be told, I wasn’t. It’s not something even remotely related to my interests).

Apart from the 1,001 Direct Marketing mistakes we can get side-tracked by here, if the sender had spent two minutes introducing themselves it would have made the world of difference. I may have even passed it on to someone who may have been interested… instead of putting it straight into the recycling bin.

So, if you want a successful small business, remember to pay attention to the little things and the personal touches that go a long way in building strong customer relationships.

Small Business Marketing Strategies – Pricing your product

This is a post I have copied from Entrepreneur.com. It’s a fantastic way of describing how to price your product. I can also recommend Dan Kennedy – I have a fair bit of his stuff and have learnt quite a bit from it.

Cheers,

Emma
Diva Promotions

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Price Isn’t Tied to Your Product

When pricing your product, who you’re selling is more crucial than what you’re selling.

This excerpt has been taken from No B.S. Marketing to the Affluent by Dan Kennedy, available from Entrepreneur Press.

There was a time when coffee was coffee. Ice cream was ice cream. A phone was a phone. Even a pair of shoes was, well, just a pair of shoes.

At one level, at the lowest price/profit level, there are still merchants stuck in this time warp, continuing to conduct business as if people still bought products.

Today, that cup of coffee comes with more options than a Lexus. Would you care to add vanilla or caramel syrup? A double shot? Foam? Cinnamon sprinkles? Thus the $5 price for the 50-cent cup of coffee. But even that is only half the story. Ordinary products morphing into complex arrays of choices, options, add-ons, brands and luxury brands is one way prices have been inflated and margins inflated even more. The profit margin of the double-shot of extra something or other far exceeds the profit margin of the cup of coffee itself. The designer name bag selling for $11,000 doesn’t cost 100-times more to make than the similar appearing bag sold at Target for $110. This is a path to profit–and to greater acceptance by affluent consumers. But, as I said, it is only half the story.

Starbucks does not define itself as a coffee shop or even more elegantly as a coffee house. They describe themselves as being in the ‘third place business’–home, office, Starbucks in between. They are not merchants just of jazzed up coffee drinks. They are merchants of place, of feelings, of status, and maybe most of all, of experience. Their inspirations are more Disney than Denny’s. One of the many students of the Starbucks phenomenon, Ken Herbst, assistant professor of marketing at Wake Forest University’s Babcock Graduate School of Management makes the obvious point: “If you walked up to someone about to buy a pound of coffee at the grocery store (at about $4 a pound) and tried selling them just a cup for $5, they would tell you that is too expensive. But if you are at the coffeehouse, you are going to pay for the experience.”

This means that price is not tied to product. As soon as you disconnect those two things in your own mind about your own products and services, you are liberated to make a great deal more money and to have much greater success appealing to affluent customers or clients. To be redundant, for emphasis, most business owners are severely handicapped by keeping price and product linked in their own minds. What I call “The Price-Product Link” is as restrictive and antiquated as “The Work-Money Link” that I take apart in my book, No B.S. Wealth Attraction For Entrepreneurs. These links are imaginary. They exist only in your mind, not in the marketplace, yet they are ties that bind as if real, physical, 1,000-pound chains.

The Price-Product Link becomes ingrained religious belief in most business owners beginning with textbook formulas for setting price. Retailers are taught the doctrine of “keystone” pricing, meaning double their own cost. If you buy it for $1, it should be priced at $2, then, at times, discounted from there. In my line of work, direct marketing–what was once called mail-order–we’re also taught formulaic mark-up as doctrine, although ours is 8 times rather than 2 times. In businesses where raw materials are converted to finished products, like printing, there is a plethora of price calculating software to do the thinking for you, using standardized mark-up formulas. In every case, the price is chained to the product. There is the fundament that a particular product is worth only a certain multiple of its cost and not a penny more, period, end of story. Unfortunately, this widely and deeply held belief is completely and utterly stupid.

The two biggest “chain cutters” that de-link price from product are who is buying the product and the context in which the product is presented, priced and delivered.

Who you sell to you what matters. The simple act of selling whatever you sell to more affluent consumers may allow its price to rise, with no other modifications.

Price for the same product also varies by context. This is easy to see with commodity items like food, even though many restaurant owners still never grasp it. When is one-third pound of peanuts not one-third pound of peanuts? In a jar, on the shelf, that’s all they are, unless dusted with Starbucks mocha latte powder and packaged in a fancy tin. But when served hot, from a vendor’s cart in the park, scooped into the bag and sprinkled with cinnamon by a handlebar mustached man in red-white striped jacket and straw hat, with calliope music playing from the CD player in the cart–then they are not peanuts at all. They are an experience that evokes emotional feelings. Even as you read my words, your mind may have flashed to Mary Poppins in the park or a trip to the circus as a child. While it is not so easy for most to transfer this idea to other businesses, it does, in fact, transfer to any business. Context alters or liberates price. Move the exact same product from one context to another and its price can easily be altered.

Dan Kennedy has earned him the moniker “Millionaire Maker” through  his network of consultants, which help more than a million business owners succeed every year. He is the author of the bestselling No B.S. Series and co-author of Uncensored Sales Strategies, available from Entrepreneur Press.

Small Business Marketing – does procrastination get to you?

Here’s a great article from the flying solo crew all about procrastination. I’ve copied it here, but you can view heaps of other great articles at http://www.flyingsolo.com.au

Seven steps to overcoming procrastination

Procrastination isn’t a long term strategy, but sometimes us soloists treat it as though it is! If you’re constantly putting things off that need to be done, then read on for ways to overcome procrastination and get you off the avoidance treadmill.

Procrastination happens to the best of us. And we rationalise our action, or lack of action in this case, in so many ways.

The harsh reality is that procrastination is just a nice way of saying avoidance. Why do we avoid things? Simple – because we don’t enjoy them, or because they take us out of our comfort zone.

So instead of succumbing to the dreaded beast – try these tips for overcoming procrastination:

1. Be honest about why you are avoiding the activity. Is it fear, is it that you don’t get on with someone, is it because you have to deliver bad news and you’re not sure how to go about it?

2. Commit to doing it at a certain time. I usually do the things I’d prefer to avoid in the morning, so they are out of the way.

3. Prepare! If you need to write yourself a script, do it. If you need to have absolute quiet, switch off the phones for a couple of hours. Whatever it takes – set yourself up for success.

4. Just do it!

5. Reward yourself when you are finished – but only when you are finished. I reward myself by going out for coffee afterwards, or taking a break.

6. Appreciate the feeling of getting something done that would normally sit in your in-tray for ages.

7. Consider whether you should actually be doing this job. There are some things that we just aren’t suited to, or that we don’t have the expertise for. If the things you avoid fall into this category, consider outsourcing them to an expert.

What tasks do you tend to put off? Which of the above strategies for overcoming procrastination might work for you?

Enjoy! Emma -

Diva Promotions