7 Easy Ways To Get New Customers

By: Natasha Crestani - Inspired Honey

1. Make Them An Offer They Can't Refuse
New customers are not customers at all but suspects. With trust they become prospects. If you're convincing enough, your prospects will believe their life will benefit from dealing with you. Then the transformation into customers is complete. Spellbind them with your exceptional service or product and they stay customers for life.

But what if you're standing back at the drawing board with a blank canvas? How do you even find these 'suspects'?

Consider a free trial, free gift with purchase or substantial discount on one product or service to lower the initial risk for new customers. Use small but frequent ads and direct mail postcards to offer free consultations. This gets your foot in the door so you can demonstrate the quality you provide, winning prospects' trust and future business.

Transform your business card into a sales tool by printing a free trial offer or coupon on the back. Hand out this "gift" to everyone you meet.

2. Communicate Frequently
People are busy. Send just one communication and, if it reaches a prospect when they are not interested in your service, it will probably be quickly forgotten. Studies say it takes as many as eight contacts with prospects to close a sale. A decade ago it was three contacts before action. Our fast-track society with internet, media and product placement means people are bombarded with multiple marketing messages daily. Of course this depends on your industry and product or service, but frequency of marketing communication is crucial for building mindshare. Better to spend your budget on smaller but more frequent ads, rather than huge splashy once-off targets.

Use society's guidelines as opportunities to maintain contact with your database. Mother's Day, Father's Day, Christmas, Easter, summer, spring, national holidays, local shows, and sporting finals are all perfect opportunities to use as themes to market with a different slant. Keep a record of your customer's birthday and offer them something special at the time. It's personal, pleasant and unexpected. Three sentiments you'd like your customers to associate with your business.

3. Use A Variety of Communication Vehicles
Adopt multiple tactics that reach out to cold, warm and hot prospects on a continuing basis and usher them through the sales cycle. Different people react to different forms of communication. It's all about getting people into your "funnel" so you can reach them at a later date when you have a new product, service or event to announce. To find the most effective mix, choose at least one tactic from each of the following groups.
Advertising: print as well as online ads and search engine listings that are linked to your website

Direct mail: postcards, personal letters, brochures, flyers, and e-mail solicitations to rented lists
Public relations: media relations, seminars and workshops, articles for publication, special promotions and events. Public relations may not directly provide you with sales, but they definitely raise your profile, which is the key to ensuring you exist in your customer's minds.

4. Test Everything
Never overlook the value of testing—test designs, opening lines, marketing messages, and mailing lists. The most effective method of getting direct marketing to work for you is to create small tests of several versions, calculate which produces the best return, and then do a larger mailing using those results. Because low-volume tests can be so useful, businesses of any size can benefit from this simple tool. Develop the habit of always asking your customers informally, "how did you hear about us?" Give your customers incentives to provide their details such as age group or postcode. The more information you have about your customers, the more you can notice and compare common threads they may have. Once you recognise who you are targeting, your marketing will become less of a hit and miss trial. Use different specials and bonuses in different marketing materials so you can test the success of leads.
You can test your product without having to undertake extensive research. Edison didn't research the light bulb. He tested his ideas over and over again, and then it worked out. Use Google AdWords as a tester. Google can be your most trusted friend when it comes to testing your headlines and call for action.

5. Create A Referral Program
Referrals from satisfied customers are fuel to your business's engine. Yet statistics show that the average satisfied customer tells only five other people. If customers have a negative experience they will share that experience with up to nine people! I guess they make more exciting tales while gathering with co-workers at the water cooler.

Increase referrals by giving clients an incentive to talk about you. Create a referral program with benefits such as discounts on future purchases or commission fees. After a sale, send each client a letter explaining the program and include some business cards or magnets for them to distribute. In addition, ask your customer for a testimony in writing. It could be just a few lines via email. Ask right at the time your customer is in a state of elation about the quality of service you have just delivered to them.

6. Stand Out From The Crowd
95% of the Yellow Pages Ads Are Duds! Repeat after me: 95% of the Yellow Pages Ads Are Duds! Let's say it together now: 95% OF THE YELLOW PAGES ADS ARE DUDS! All the ads look exactly the same. You can shift the company names between ads and you see that they all do the same thing the same way.
They so desperately try to be different from everyone else that they end up looking and behaving exactly the same way as everyone else.

What's the problem? The problem here is good old Failure To Plan.
Don't blindly trust the Yellow Pages' ad specialists to create the ad. They are employed as salespeople, NOT advertising gurus. No one knows your business better than you. Plan your ad carefully before you even approach them. The Yellow Pages doesn't care whether or not you make any business from your ad. With this in mind, what is the logic for Yellow Pages to hire expensive ad specialists? Would they be keen about increasing overhead costs? I doubt it.

They will create an ad that looks exactly the same as all your competitors', the same ‘me too' type of ads. Your chance of being selected when potential buyers peruse your category is not much.

Typical ways businesses imitate each other:

• The headline is replaced with the company name or logo. Unless you are a celebrity or your company is McDonalds – who cares?
• Benefits are replaced with product description. Hint: If you sell drills, advertise amazing holes, not drills. If you're a real estate agent, advertise quality of life not houses. Sell the sizzle. Not the sausage.
• Hours of business and location
• Company's slogan or mission
• "We take all credit cards"
• "We've been in business for 10 years."

And the normal reaction to all this gibberish is: "So what!?"

Don't follow the crowd who make the mistake of writing an ad that pleases their business, while ignoring the buyer's self-interest.
Most ads are "me" based: "Look what I want to sell you". They don't care about what buyers want to buy. Which only proves that so many companies totally don't understand their target markets and what they want.

The other strategy to keep at the forefront of your mind when planning your marketing schedule is whether your ad belongs in the Yellow Pages at all. (or any other type of media for that matter). Ask yourself the question: would your target audience EXPECT to find you in the Yellow Pages? Would they LOOK for you or your competitors in the Yellow Pages? Important questions to ask yourself and those you trust. The Yellow Pages and other business directories don't have the same ‘accidental, unexpected' factor that an ad has in a newspaper or on radio.

7. Include the 6 Essentials Of Any Ad
1) A Lara Croft kick-butt persuasive headline: The headline is the ad for the ad. The headline alone can increase or reduce response rate by as much as 85%. When you write your ad, you have to spend at least 85% of your time on the headline. Unless you're a celebrity, your name is not an attractive hook for an ad. To catch the fish, you need bait that appears alluring.

2) Attractive benefits: No one cares what kind of special chemicals you use in your pest control business. To succeed, you must promote effectiveness and security. Without this, even if your headline catches their attention, the ad itself fails to keep their interest.
3) A sexy offer: After the benefits, you must offer a very specific offer. Direct them to the website where a free Special Report, Consumer's Guide or some other free offer waits for them. Or offer an appealing gift or some other incentive. This approach has never failed.

4) Call for action now: Most ads are lame and don't ask readers to take any kind of action. Make sure you ask for a very specific action. Remember, your ad's job is to generate sales leads and sales. If your ad doesn't generate new business, it is dead, and you have just lost your money.

5) Appropriate contact information: Put in all the appropriate contact points where you can be reached. Ensure your website and telephone numbers are clear and big enough to find easily.

6) Position your company as a trusted resource by offering relevant information to aid your buyer's decision. You will always stand out as memorable and unique if you provide information your customer perceives as valuable. You'll appeal more than other companies who see customers as numbers and only focus on closing sales.

Imagine. Every ad in your section of the media is screaming, "Give me your money". But you say, "We have valuable information for you that can save you time or money. For a free report, "5 Deadly Mistakes Mechanics Make When Fixing Their Own Cars" call us at xxx-xxx-xxxx or visit our website at www.xxxx.com." Now this is an appealing proposition.

With this approach your ad stands out like a hacksaw buried in a cheesecake. You make your ad different. You create a predisposition towards your company. You give people value with information and other offers. You position yourself as the expert of the category. It makes you unique for you alone are doing it. So get out there and do it!!!

Now it's up to you!
I hope you've learned something from this special report. But more importantly, I'd like it to spur you into action – because, of course, what matters is not knowledge itself, but applied knowledge.

Distribute this freely to anybody you like, as long as you distribute it in its entirety, don't change it in any way, and don't charge money for it. The more people who know about this, the better!

It's likely I've convinced you of some new ideas and strategies you haven't thought of before. It's also likely you may have already heard of some of the ideas here. But the real challenge is in separating yourself from the crowd who moans, "I already know it." Or "yes, I've heard that before." You should always add to yourself, "I may know it, but am I really doing it?"

If you read this and do nothing, that's just as bad as not reading it at all. In fact, it's worse, because you've wasted your time! So please take action, and start now.