You own a small business and you’d like to increase your revenue. But we’re in the middle of a recession… how do you do that?
Everyone spends money, even in a Recession. The difference is that they are more selective about what they spend their money on. And they are also looking for ways to stretch their budgets, so looking for good deals.
One of the basics in marketing is to measure your Return on Investment. The goal of course is to get the maximum return on every marketing dollar you invest. And a known fact that you might not be aware of, is that it’s cheaper to market to your existing customers than it is to acquire new customers.
So now that you’re armed with that fact, how do you use it to your advantage? Develop a marketing campaign to any current customers that haven’t been into your office or received services for awhile.
If you have your customers listed in a spreadsheet, this will be a piece of cake. If not, take the time now and get your customers’ names, snail mail addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses into a spreadsheet. Then you’ll be able to market to them later.
Assuming you have your customer database, review it for any customers that might be deceased, moved out of the area, or those “difficult” ones that you don’t necessarily want to encourage to return. Remove those names or move them into a different spreadsheet.
Then design a simple coupon that offers your past customers a discounted price on a basic service to entice them to call for an appointment. Put a time limit on it to create some urgency. And then mail this coupon to every customer in your database.
If your database is very large (I have a client with 3000 names in her database from 20 years of practice), then spread out your mailing over several months by sending out 250 coupons per month. This will spread your mailing costs out so you don’t have a huge up-front cost before you’ve generated any incremental revenue.
From my experience, you will get a 10-20% response rate on this type of campaign. The reason is because these people have done business with you in the past so they know and trust you… and because you’re offering them a discount! Who doesn’t like a bargain?
So that’s it! An easy marketing campaign to get you started generating more revenue now, even in a recession.
Contact me to get started on your postcard campaign today.
