Rule #6 of No B.S. Marketing: Follow Up!
No B.S. Marketing REQUIRES Follow-Up Systems
Direct response marketing adheres to laws - these laws or rules or commandments are as fixed and unarguable as the Law of Gravity. One of these LAWS is that you MUST follow-up with both prospects and your customers!
Business owners typically concentrate on new customer acquisition. "If only we could ATTRACT more customers." In reality, most businesses are happy if they break even, not losing money while marketing to prospective customers.
WARNING: Do NOT get distracted by new ideas, new media possibilities, and schemes to attract new customers. DON'T miss the MAIN point: first time customers barely cover your marketing expenses.
PROFITS are made - and a business grows in value - through REPEAT customers and maximizing Lifetime Value!
John Wannamaker
50% or 90% wasted advertising? How do you KNOW?
When you invest in advertising and other forms of marketing you are paying for MORE than the customers who make a purchase.
Lazy business people divide the cost of a promotion by the sales generated (assuming there is any attempt to track these sales back to the ad.)
BUT - you are ALSO paying for every phone call, every ad click, website visit, walk-in shopper, email, and every other reaction or response.
The FACT is that less than FIVE percent of your audience is ready and able to buy now.
The other NINETY FIVE percent might buy later.
SEVENTY FIVE percent might buy between 90-days and 9 MONTHS later - but NOT from you if you don't stay in contact. They will buy from whoever contacts them last.
BUT - you can't contact them because no attempt was made to capture the prospects' names, email addresses, phone numbers, or physical addresses.
You PAID for these shoppers to contact you (or simply click an ad), but no attempt was made to offer them a free report, information packet, purchase premium, or other incentive.
When you fail to follow-up, you are simply shrugging your shoulders and accepting this waste (as much as 95% of the results of your advertising!) as an inevitable cost of doing business.
Dan Kennedy says: This is madness! If you spent $1,000 on an ad campaign and generated 100 calls, you paid $10.00 per call. Now you might have made 5 sales - if you "overperform" and achieve a 5% conversion, and assuming that you are tracking your promotions...
IF these sales generated over $1,000 in profit, you pat yourself on the back. You THINK you won...
But you also paid for the other 95 calls at a cost of $950.00. This is like taking 95 crisp $10.00 bills, tearing them into pieces, and flushing them down the toilet. This is criminal waste! I abhor and detest and condemn waste!
An intentional Follow-Up system - as demonstrated graphically above - is the only way to AVOID waste and MAXIMIZE profits from your marketing efforts.
IF you capture the contact information for each prospect, at the very least you can restate, resell and extend the same offer AGAIN!
You can slightly modify the offer by emphasizing scarcity or a pending deadline or including a premium with the purchase.
You can make a "Final Offer" tied to the impending disappearance of the offer - and the COST or PAIN of not taking action, while they still can.
You can change the offer, offering payment terms, or combine new options or accessories.
Follow-Up Systems are not limited to sales prospects.
MORE importantly,
No B.S. Marketing REQUIRES follow-up systems for your customers!
No B.S. Direct Marketing imposes discipline.
Obviously, you are happy to see new customers walk in the door, or hear the phone ringing. But MOST businesses make NO effort to capture the contact information of these BUYERS. The new retail customer made a purchase - but there is no way to contact them, send a Thank You, or inform them of the next special offer.
Even worse, online orders include contact information but the business has no system to thank them later, send notices of new products, or request reviews or referrals. Their ads "worked" and a one-time sale was made. Now you are forced to repeat the process all over again, ENDLESSLY chasing the mythical perfect customer.
For most businesses, advertising expense is a LOSS. Past customers leave faster than new customers are acquired! You are on the advertising expense hamster wheel - which is EXACTLY where the media wants you!!!
You need to be smart! SMART marketers are ruthlessly disciplined. The only way you can GROW a business is to "plug the holes in your bucket" - that is, attract and RETAIN customers.
No B.S. Marketing PLUGS the holes in your bucket!
No B.S. Direct Marketing has defined objectives - including customer retention.
Every business acknowledges that the most expensive and least profitable customer is a first-time buyer. You KNOW that it is 10 times harder to make the first sale to a new prospect than to an existing customer.
In contrast, profits are generated by repeat customers. It is these repeat customers and their cumulative sales that makes a business valuable.
I built a multi-million dollar business with over 50,000 repeat customers. When I eventually sold the business, the equipment and inventory was worth less than $100,000. Customer retention creates REAL business value!
You may have heard that, "The money is in the list." But the TRUE value is in the list of BUYERS. This is why direct marketing brands and mail order businesses always pay a premium to rent the lists of another company's BUYERS.
Less than 10% of businesses have an email series to woo prospective customers. Not 1 in 100 businesses have a regular email series devoted to its MOST VALUABLE asset: its BUYER database!
Without Follow-up, Your Customers are Your Competitors' Best Prospects!
Let me spell this out for you: "Satisfied" customers are open to the next better offer. They have NO loyalty to you.
They aren't even looking for better prices. They simply want to know that they are valued, appreciated.
The bar is SO LOW!
ALL that is required is some communication, some acknowledgement of appreciation.
Today, the TINIEST Thank You is unexpected!
The Cardinal SIN of Management is NEGLECTING Your Customers!
Customer retention is a HUGE subject. This topic, including follow-up, has necessitated a new book in the No B.S. Marketing series.
Without a follow-up system, not only do you lose repeat business from your neglected customers, but you also lose the business of the potential referred customers. These referred customers are loyal by default, buy more, and stay longer.
In the No B.S. Guide to Maximum Referrals and Customer Retention: The Ultimate No Holds Barred Plan to Securing New Customers and Maximum Profits, you will confronted with the FACT that NOTHING IS COSTLIER OR MORE DIFFICULT THAN GETTING A NEW CUSTOMER.
Since Dan Kennedy can't grab every business owner by the shoulders and shake them, he joined his coauthor, Shaun Buck (CEO of Newsletter Pro), to dare and coerce you to STOP chasing new customers and BUILD an iron cage around the ones you already have. Click Here to read more about No B.S. Maximum Referrals.
The 10 No B.S. Direct Marketing principles have been developed into powerful, measurable strategies. These principles apply across the entire spectrum of print and broadcast media - including the latest online advertising alternatives. Many of these principles are derived from "old school" mail order or direct response advertising in newspapers and magazines.
You can study ALL of these Laws by claiming your FREE copy of Dan Kennedy's book, "No B.S. Direct Marketing" (for NON-Direct Marketing Businesses) - now in its an updated and expanded edition. This is a $24.99 retail value - but you only pay a small shipping and handling charge to receive the book vis USPS mail. You only need to Click HERE!
The 10 Commandments, from No B.S. Direct Marketing
The Rules of Response Driven Marketing are directly quoted from Dan Kennedy's book, "No B.S. Direct Marketing (for NON-Direct Marketing Businesses). The Rules are timeless and dependable as the LAW of Gravity.
Resolve now that every ad you run, sales letter you mail, webpage you publish, everything and anything you do to MARKET your business MUST adhere to the Rules. These are not suggestions, consider them mandates!
I consider "No B.S. Direct Marketing (for NON-Direct Marketing Businesses) to be REQUIRED reading for my clients, and it is my pleasure to offer you a FREE copy of this book. Fight back! You've been LIED to for too long.
Take ACTION: CLICK Here to receive your FREE book! You will ALSO receive a LONG list of bonuses - and be offered access to even more marketing resources - at your option.
The No B.S. Rules of Response Driven Marketing - or, as Dan prefers to call them, the 10 Commandments of Direct Marketing are universal for product and service businesses.
In the next articles in this series, I will continue to discuss the specific Rules of Response-Driven Marketing. In the mean time, if you would like a PDF copy of these Rules (The 10 Commandments!) to keep on your desktop for reference, Click HERE!
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