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The Marketing Secret Every Child Knows
Little Kids Ask Until They Get What They Want. Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, can I have an ice cream? Can I, Can I, Can I, Can I? Please, Please, Please, Please. I'll be good for a whole year. I promise. Just give me a dollar. I won't ask again for a long time. Pleaseeeeee! Regular, repeated mailings are the way to create big predictable results. When you mail every 30 days for a year you will cause a dramatic growth in your business. People respond to repetition. If you are a parent you know how hard it is to refuse repeated requests for an ice cream or a desperately wanted toy. If you are not a parent, I'm sure you remember asking, even begging for a toy, a treat or permission to stay up past your bedtime, until your parents finally gave in. Your customers and prospective customers are similar. They need to be asked repeatedly too. Who You Should Ask. You should be asking 3 groups of people to do one of 3 things: 1. The first group is your house customer list (your own list of existing customers). You should be asking your existing customers repeatedly to contact you about some offer you make to them for your products and services. A clear offer with an easy way to contact you should be made, like: "We will give you 5000 full color postcards for $389, simply give us a call at 800-628-1804 to set up getting your postcards." Or some other offer you reasonably believe they will be interested in based on your personal knowledge of them and preferably based on their actual previous buying behavior. 2. The second group is your house prospect list (prospects you have caused to inquire about your products and/or services through your own marketing efforts). This group of people is interested in your service but hasn't made the decision to go for it yet. They will be the most likely to respond to a special when you offer it to them. 3. The third group of people are people who can reasonably be expected to be interested in your products and/or services, but who have never purchased anything from you and have never inquired about your products and/or services either. The likely reason they haven't contacted you is that they don't know that you even exist. You remedy that by contacting them with a series of postcards offering free information about how they can benefit from your products and services. If this list of people is properly selected and if you make an offer that a reasonable person will find very, very difficult to refuse, then your response rate will be high. That is the whole game in a nutshell. Create or get a list of people who have demonstrated they are interested in the type of product or service you offer. AND/OR Get a list of people extremely likely to be interested even if they haven't already proved they are by buying from you or one of your competitors. Once you have these lists of people contact them with postcards which offer them the benefits of your products and services and keep making them offers until they inquire and/or buy from you and then ask them to buy more on a regular basis. If you do what you have just read about you will have more business than you can shake a stick at. You will have a smile on your face just like the little kid with a belly full of ice cream he/she convinced mom to buy. Steve Conn is a Marketing Consultant. He consulted PostcardMania before it could afford its own in-house full-time marketing director. 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 http://www.postcardmania.com
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