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Offline Strategies

How To Use Gift Certificates to Get New Customers

Posted on by in Offline Strategies | Leave a comment

Gift certificates are a great marketing strategy to generate new customers.

You can look at certificates as a client paying referral program. They buy the gift certificates from you and they give them to family, friends, neighbors, work colleagues or employees.

Gift certificates negate customer acquisition cost except for the cost to print the certificates. How To Use Gift Certificates to Get New Customers

Get More Customers
To get more customers all you have to do is create a gift certificate promotion that gets your current customers buying your certificates. To motivate them to buy; all you need to do is discount the certificates or offer a promotion like buy two get the third one for free etc.

Make your gift certificates visible to your prospects and customers; use signage, put display where they pay or wait. Plan promotions around holidays and events like birthdays or anniversaries etc.

High Probability Of Repeat Sales
If you understand life time value or know how many times the average customers buys from you; then you can easily figure out how much to discount the certificates to attract a new customer. Remember the more you discount the more certificates you will sell.

Upsell Gift Certificate
It’s a great strategy to upsell your new customer when they redeem their cerficate. Example 30 min chiropractor – upsell to 45 min for $20 more etc. So, when they call in to make an appointment to redeem their certificate be ready to upsell them at that moment.

Sell Your Gift Certificates To Businesses
A great way to get new customers is sell or give away gift certificates to companies. Certificates can be effective ways to engage employees and improve performance. Contact businesses that have many employees & offer to sell them your gift certificates at a reduced rate.

Here are some examples of how you can use certificates for employees

  • Reward good job
  • Sales motivation tool
  • Offer as business gifts
  • Offer as service rewards
  • Consumer promotions
  • Health & safety awards
  • To introduce or maintain business relationships
  • etc…

Gift Certificate Breakage

Between 15 and 30+ percent of certificates are never redeemed but you should always be prepared to redeem every gift certificate you sell or give away. This percentage varies depending on the quality of the certificate; the better the quality of the gift certificate the more likely it will be redeemed.

Remember track your responses and your redemption rates. You want them redeemed because of lifetime value & you want to track them so you know what type of certificate out-pulls the others.

Clearly gift certificates are a great marketing strategy to get more customers so I encourage you to get together with your staff & brainstorm a gift certificate promotion that suits your business.

Pick my brain: I can give you the marketing strategies & the marketing tactics you need, to grow your bottom line profits without you having to invest any money, time, or effort on your part. Or just shoot me a question & I’ll be happy to help you. What keeps you up at night or what problem are you trying to solve? Click the link to go to Drew’s Contact Page or shoot me an email at drew@ marketingwizards.ca (remove the space after the @ sign)

Barter To Cut Operating Expenses & Trade To Get What You Want & Need

Posted on by in Offline Strategies, Online Reputation Management | Leave a comment

I posted this video to help small & medium sized businesses understand that they should have a basic understanding of barter trade.

All companies should have at least one barter profit center.

Why Barter Mr(s) Business Owner Image

Why?
• To pay off some or most operating expenditures
• To pay off one-of-bills like acquiring:
o new computers
o new carpets
o office paint job
o new fence
o new furniture
o new car for wife
o get advertising for business
o etc… (what do you want or need to acquire?)
• Get rid of excess inventory
• To acquire counter space in another business that has your foot traffic
• To get bonuses for your staff
• etc…

Watch This Short Video To Understand How Barter Works

Remember
Barter or trade is not $ for $ it’s value for value.
It’s value-for-value exchanges to to get those things luxuries or necessitates.
Barter is not a substitute for cash it is an add on.

Below is most of the subtitles from a 3:30 YouTube video that explains “Why Trade and Barter” I omitted some fluff & cleaned it up a little.

“We’re accustomed to making purchases with cash and it’s almost unnatural to get things we want without cash so why trade.

Well trading is a great way to get things we need not by using cash but by using what we already possess; goods and skills. (products & services)

Cash is just a medium of exchange it helps facilitate trading between humans in down economies. People hold onto their cash and don’t
exchange it is freely this restricted

cash usage causes recessions like the one we’re experiencing today if you think about it just because cash isn’t being exchanged
doesn’t mean our skills have no value money doesn’t affect your ability togive Spanish lessons if you know how.

We can still exchange value with out cash
Example
A dentist has an empty chair for an hour
He gets no revenue during that hour but; still incurs the fixed costs at the business.
He could utilize this downtime by trading with say a landscaper who needs to have a cavity filled now.
The dentist get landscaping for that hour instead of nothing.

Another Example
Trading also works for surf shop owner who wants to repaint his store front but is cash-strapped but he has too much inventory; the shop could trade a surfboard and get the new look it wanted without spending cash; problem solved.

Let’s look on a deeper level
1 The store paid three hundred dollars wholesale for that bored but got six hundred dollars worth of paint services in exchange.

2 Even better on the other side of the trade the painter may have some down time but; instead of making no money he trades with the surf shop and gets a six hundred dollar surfboard he always wanted.
3 But his wife would never have allowed him to spend that type of money in this economy
4 But not now it’s like the board was free minus thes painting supplies
5 Result: the store front is revitalized, the painter is surfing & the wife is not complaining

Think if trading in your everyday life as it allows you to get more stuff that you can’t always afford.

We can try the traditional route to save up, cutback or work more hours but; let’s face it; most of us will probably have to use that money to pay bills.

Believe it or not we all have skills and talents someone out there wants.

We might even have
1 a bunch of stuff sitting around our house that we don’t use
2 excess goods in our business or in storage that we don’t use.

And that stuff is too nice or valuable to give away so, trading helps us tap into the value that our skills and our goods contain.

One of the coolest things about trading is that we are all different and that we all value things differently.
Example
an electron microscope may be worthless to the average person but may be worth millions but to a Nobel prize-winning scientist who knows how to use it.

And so it is with most things in life, depending on our skills, or the things in our life as we value things differently.

We’ve all heard the saying one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Well trading turns that so-called trash into a treasure for not just one person
but for both people.

Meaning both parties think they’re giving away trash and getting a treasure; pretty cool huh…

Note: For a business we are not trading trash, we are trading valued goods or services for other valued goods & services.

Why not do your first trade with me?
I will build you an online five star reputation

Want A 5 Star Reputation for your business?

Here’s what I have to offer:

$199   video: Online business audit for 3 to 5 keywords
$199   video: Competitive analysis
$149   Find & write professional replies for your bad reviews
$99     Review ignitor cards with QR code & short link
$499   Review website & hosting (FREE for 6 months)
$99     video: PPC analysis for improvement
$99     video: Website Review
$167   5 Star Review video

Total Value: $1,510.00 (descriptions below)

What value do you put on a 5 star reputation for your business?

What do you have to trade?

Pick my brain: Shoot me a question & I’ll be happy to help you. What keeps you up at night or what problem are you trying to solve? Click the link to go to Drew’s Contact Page or shoot me an email at drew@ marketingwizards.ca (remove the space after the @ sign)

Best Method To Get More Customers, Clients or Patients? No Cost; No Risk

Posted on by in Offline Strategies | Leave a comment

Here are two methods to help you get more customers, clients or patients.

Method one costs money & carries risk; while, the other method has no cost or risk attached.

Method 1:

Spend additional funds on marketing & advertising to generate new leads.

Problem:

Costs money & there is no guarantee that you will get a decent ROI so, that means that this method carries unnecessary risk.

Method 2:

Optimize what you are already doing.

  • No extra cost
  • No risk
  • Small amount of time commitment
  • Small amount of effort

The Facts:

– Your already spending money to generate your leads in some capacity.

Example:

Print ads, PPC ads, Yellow Pages, Telemarketing etc.
– &/or maybe you’re getting some of  your leads from word of mouth marketing

It does not matter how you get your leads; paid or free, the fact is whatever you’re process is doing it can be improved.

Example: Improving Print Ads:

Print ads: To generate more leads you could change the headline, the sub head; the offer, the guarantee, you could offer bonuses etc. You could move your ad to a different category in the print media, the right page or left page, top or bottom of the page, your could ask for your ad to be put next to a particular article in the media. You could even change the media you are displaying your ad in. You could even test & change the personalized script that is used when they contact your business.

The $64,000 question is “do you think you could get a 5 to 10 percent increase in the number of prospects the ad generates; if you and your team worked & tested the ad for a whole month?”
If you were getting 100 leads a month from one print ad & you got a 10 percent increase; this would mean you are now getting 110 prospects a month or 120 extra prospects a year.
What would be the result if you were running multiple ads in the same or different media?
How many more prospects would you get monthly if you optimized all your lead generating elements?
Now think about; what would happen if you optimized every sub process in your business?
Example Sub processes you could optimize:

  • Your lead generation
  • Your conversion rate
  • Your upsell/cross-sell
  • Follow up systems
  • Repeat sales
  • Referral programs
  • Lost customer reactivation
  • Profiting from unconverted leads
  • etc.

If you want more customers, clients or patients I recommend method two, optimize what you’re already doing. Then once you have optimized all your processes you can think about investing money in method one. You can use the money generated from method 2 optimization to fund new revenue streams to generate more leads.

Questions?

Shoot me an email for more information at: info@marketingwizards.ca