Category: Small Business Marketing

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Tweaks That Increase Sales Conversion

The average New York City taxi cab driver makes $90,747 in revenue per year. There are roughly 13,267 cabs in the city. In 2007, NYC forced cab drivers to begin taking credit cards, which involved installing a touch screen system for payment.
NY Cabs Increase SalesDuring payment, the user is presented with three default buttons for tipping: 20%, 25%, and 30%. When cabs were cash only, the average tip was roughly 10%. After the introduction of this system, the tip percentage jumped to 22%.

Those three buttons resulted in $144,146,165 of additional tips per year.

By offering people an incentive or convenience you can change habits.

How can you do something like this in your business?

 

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Marketing that didn’t miss a beat during the super Bowl Blackout

blackout ads
Did you watch the Super Bowl? Since every one out of two Tvs where on the Super Bowl, I bet you did.

Did you see when the lights went out? What did you do during that time?

Some companies didn’t miss a beat and found a out of the box opportunity to promote themselves.

They went to Twitter. Twitter says there were 24.1 million tweets sent about the football game and halftime show on Sunday night. The largest spike was during the power outage, when Twitter saw 3,858 tweets per second. Some perspective: Five years ago, at Super Bowl XLII, the highest spike was 27 tweets per second.

So during those 35 minutes here is what some companies Tweeted:

Oreo: Tweeted 10 minutes into the black out: The ad said: Power out? No problem. You can still dunk in the dark.

That post was re-tweeted 14,600 times as of Monday morning. It received more than 20,000 “likes” on Facebook.

Tide was also fast and released the ad: “We can’t get your blackout. But we can get your stains out,” Tide tweeted, earning about 1,300 retweets.

Walgreens told its followers that “we do carry candles,” a sales pitch retweeted more than 3,300 times.

PBS: This might be a good time think about alternative programming. #SuperBowlBlackOut #WeHaveDowntonPBS This one tweeted more than 3,500 times.

And there were others.

This is brilliant not because these are brilliant ads, but because they realized people were paying attention to the black out and talking about it and these companies managed to join the conversation already going on in the mind of the prospect.

Clever way to get a lot of attention. This is what I call Neuro- Magnetism: You use your brain to join the brain of the consumer in a subtle and effective way.

Every one that you interact with has a conversation already going on and it is up to you to see that and join this conversation instead of trying to divert this attention to something else. A lot less work and much more traction.

When you see an opportunity surface, like these companies did with the black out, run and take action. Speed to market is crucial at these times. Not a lot of thinking, do it.

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Neuro Magnetism Tip

Here is a tip to make you more attractive to your audience and get more attention:

Our brains are wired to respond to motion – in prehistoric times, movement might be a threat, or perhaps food. Whether you are presenting to a group, selling one-on-one, or designing a TV commercial, use motion to grab the attention of your audience and focus it where you want it.

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Case study: Nextpedition- Mystery and ritual in business

travel case studyWe talk a lot of incorporating mystery and rituals in your business. It is one of the ways you become irresistible to a market.

Here is an example of a travel business using mystery and rituals to attract oodles of avid clients.

The name Nextpediton.

American Express has launched a travel service call Nextpedition.  On a Nextpedition vacation, we don’t get an itinerary. We get a succession of surprises.

AmEx doesn’t tell us where we’re going until the last minute. Only when you get there you get to know what you are going to visit. An envelope appears, pushed under the door of our hotel room, or a message issues from our smartphone.

Amex knows that the consumer that wants all the details about his or her trip does not exist anymore.

Why they do it this way?

It creates sense of anticipation. (“What will happen?”) And serendipity. (“What could happen?”) And adventure. (“This should be great!”) Most of all, it delivers a warm current of randomness. Our life is unpredictable. But not “Oh, my God, the sky is falling” unpredictable. No, this is carefully managed chaos. Just enough. Almost like a game.

This customization is important because we want our experience to play out as if directed by a gentle randomness.

The Nextpedition system makes a modest effort to profile us before building our vacations, so our Nextpedition is likely to fall somewhere in the envelope of things we like. But both AmEx and the traveler are taking a risk.

“We created the Travel Signs so that anyone, regardless of if they plan to travel in the near future, can help define what they want out of a travel experience” says Amex. They divide the prospects into groups:

  • Adrenalista – Outdoor adventurers that love to travel
  • Tasteblazer – Foodies always out to explore new places and flavors
  • Technologian – Travelers who explore the world with hi-tech toys
  • Trengineer – Style gurus who seek inspiration from their travels
  • Scenester – Underground influencers on the global music/fashion scene

The company targets people in their 20’s and 30’s.

To explore taking a NEXTPEDITION trip, the consumer must consult with a specially trained American Express NEXTPEDITION Specialist who will create a mystery itinerary based on the Travel Sign. NEXTPEDITION Specialists are experienced American Express Travel Counselors selected and trained to take information generated from the Travel Profiler and blend it with budget preferences, personal interests and past travel history to develop and customize an itinerary.

A specially programmed, on loan Smartphone called a Travel Console will arrive at the consumer’s home a few days before departure. The device communicates the traveler’s itinerary, Lonely Planet guidebook content, restaurant recommendations, and other helpful travel tools. The Travel Console also allows travelers to share the details of their experience on Facebook through a personalized travel log.

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How Irresistible are you?

Discover the real secret to achieve long lasting prosperity and to become irresistible to your market. http://www.bestbuzzgift.com

There are 2 things you need to have on your mind and three things you need to act upon.

When you are thinking on how to promote your business, three things need to be on your mind:

  • How do you get attention from your market- very different than visibility
  • How you increase the appeal for your brand
  • How to you generate abundance coming from the results of the two above.

There are 3 things that you need to work every day in order to create long lasting prosperity in your business:

  • Your mindset. This is probably a lot more important than you think
  • Your message. The message needs to be irresistible to the market. Always refine your positioning.
  • Your marketing. Your actions in marketing should lead to conversion of lead or sale and to support all of the above.
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Tip on goal setting

It is the beginning of the year and most people are busy goal setting. This is not what you should be doing. Setting goals is giving you permission to miss them. Watch this video to know what to do.

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What are your Sales Channels?

salesIt is common to be talking to people about business and hear them say they are not selling enough even though they are marketing all the time.

It inspired me to write this post because I see simple mistakes that entrepreneurs make when selling that impacts a lot how much money they could be bringing in.

 

  • 1. Marketing and selling are not the same thing. When you are posting on social media sites like Facebook and Linkedin several times a day you are marketing not selling. You need specific sales actions- actions that make people purchase something.

If you post something with link offering some value that would lead to a sale, then it is another story.

 

  • For example: You create a report on one topic where you have a specific call to action for them to acquire a service and you offer this free report to your list – will generate sales.

When you have some specific sales actions, they need to be reliable, you need to be sure they can generate sales. Branding yourself in social media sites is good for, well, branding, but it is not a reliable way to make sales.

So the key point here is to ask yourself every time if it is a reliable sales method, if it is something you can track conversion.

Maybe you are like me, I’m not into numbers. I’m a creator. Checking numbers and tracking how my sales efforts are converting is not something I used to enjoy. But it is crucial if I want to succeed.

 

  • Tradtional media is easier to track but it does not mean you cannot track sales efforts online. Even on webinars today you can do AB split testing sending participants to different sales letters. It may be a bit more work but it will open your eyes on what is working and what is not.

 

  • You need to know what your sales channels are. I see a lot of people that have no idea and again they think everything they do in marketing leads to sales.

 

  • Follow up, follow up, follow up. I talk to online and offline businesses everyday and am really impressed at the percentage that does not have a proper follow up strategy. Around 90% my friend. Some have some auto-responder messages in place which is good. The bad part is that they think this is all they should be doing when it comes to follow up.  You can increase your conversion by 50% just by doing proper follow-up.

 

  • People that bought from you before are the ones that are more likely to purchase again from you. They already know you and trust you. Stop the madness of always going after new leads and create a process to generate specific offers to those that haven’t purchased anything from you in the last 6 months. Here we call the Wake the Zombies campaign.

 

  • Make a goal to sell something everyday. It doesn’t matter the price point. What matters is the habit. It is very easy to get lost in marketing, because it can be fun and gives you the sense of being busy than to make specific efforts on selling.

 

  • Make a goal to send some ships every day. At the end of the day here at BuzzBooster we ask each other: How many ships have you sent? This means, what have you done to generate sales today or tomorrow. The idea behind this is that in order to have fish on their tables, fishermen have to send the ships out to sea. No ships, no fish. Got it?

Here you find a chart of what I take as sales channels and that we use to get ideas on the ships we send.

Online sales  Offiline sales
optiin- report-sales direct mail
opt-in video sale eddm
ppc networking
facebook ads speaking gigs
FB promoted posts workshops and presentations
banner to sales cold call
webinars- teleseminars cold calls
e-mail marketing referral program with existing clents
Private hangouts campaign for inactive customers
affiliates postcards to neighborhood
jvs Newspaper ads
clickbank magazine ads
launches radio ads
Amazon- kindle, products and audio live events
telesumits
PPC on specific sites like Plenty of fish
newsletter ads
Blog

Do you have any others?