Your best customers are the ones you already sold to.

I got some advice from my good friend George Mosher the other day.  It should have been obvious to me but it wasn’t.  He said “Your best customers are the ones you have already sold to.”  You see this a lot in all sorts of businesses.  For example GoDaddy sends me coupons every 3-6 months to buy another domain.

Ikea sends catalogs.  Yahoo sends postcards reminding you to use their advertising program.  All 3 of these companies know that it is easier to convince an existing customer than find and convince a new customer.

Another cool thing that GoDaddy does is they constantly up sell you.  Here are the things they have tried to up sell me:
– 2 years of hosting (instead of month to month), if I say no to 2 years they say “how about 1 year”, if I say no to 1 year they say “how about 6 month”
– Purchase 10 years of domain ownership all at once
– SSL certificates

The lesson I learned from George was this: Don’t ever give up on customers you have already sold to.  Email/Mail/Call them every 3-6 months with some sort of offerring or a friendly hello.

Making Loyalty Gift Cards Even More Loyal

You know those loyalty gift cards you get from coffee or sandwich places? You know… if you drink 10 cups of coffee you get 1 free.  What would be really cool is if after you turn in your loyalty card and get your free drink they hand you another loyalty card.  Except this one is special.  This one is even better.. where you only have to drink 9 cups of coffee to get one free.  Oh yeah and this one looks nicer printed on higher grade stock paper and a cool design.

I can see people bragging about what loyalty card they have.

It would be cool to try this out with my business to improve retention.  For example if a plan costs $29.99.  I would love for it to get cheaper by a dollar every month you stay until it hits $14.99/mo.

Concerts are money making machines

They constantly sell the obvious stuff… you know like t-shirts, food, and beverages.

Then they sell some other kinda obvious stuff… like display advertisements (usually people that want main stream press like Pepsi and Verizon) and booth rentals (people selling cool t-shirts or Best Buy).

The newest thing I saw them selling was movie trailers.  During the intermission they were displaying the “Devil” movie trailer.

Then the smartest thing they do is promote their other concerts.  On the back side of the concert schedule it is filled with their next concert.  On the way out they hand us 3-4 other concerts to look out for.

Concert venues know that the people most likely to go to your next concert are the people that are currently at the concert.

Perry Marshall is an email marketing Genius

I’m on Perry Marshall’s newsletter.  I love the way he markets his ebooks.


First he sends an email (below) in story format about how he facebook is changing the world (helping old people, killing off illiteracy, etc)

Yesterday I heard from a very reliable source that Facebook has triggered a sea change in the nursing home industry. This comes from a client of one of my business mentors. 

The #1 reason people die is their friends have died or been dispersed to the four winds; their family doesn’t visit them anymore, and they have no more reason to get up in the morning. I’m sure all of us have visited long-term care facilities and seen the blank stares and hopelessness of aged people living out their last days.

Facebook has changed that. There are many, many 77 year old folks in nursing homes who now have 60 Facebook friends and interact with them on an hourly basis. This is literally extending life spans – to the point of wreaking havoc in the long-term care industry. 

This is because many of the payment models are based on people living only so long and their communities on Facebook are literally extending their lives.

(It’s also creating some interesting social gaffes. Like after a person dies their friends are still getting reminders: “You haven’t reached out to Ethel for awhile. Send her a note. Click here to POKE Ethel.”)

It’s also obliterating illiteracy. Kids might be able to fake reading books in school, but they can’t fake writing comments on their friends’ pages. I seriously believe that within 5 years, nearly every single kid in the developed world will be able to read, write and type – because of Facebook. 

Within 10 years, the same will be true in developing countries – because of mobile phones. Yesterday I saw a video of men with pickaxes in Rwanda digging 6 foot trenches for fiber optic cable. Rwanda is rapidly becoming the most wired country in Africa.

To hard-core, driven business types, Facebook might seem like a toy. That’s what most people thought about the Internet 10-12 years ago. It turned out to be something much bigger than that, didn’t it?

I don’t know if Facebook is a perfect fit for your business or not, but if you haven’t taken our free self-evaluation you might want to do that right now. It literally takes 60 seconds and you can do it at http://www.IsFacebookForMe.com.


He then concludes his email with a “Is Facebook a good fit for your business or not survery” After completing a list of questions about if Facebook is right from my business it gives me a “Yes!  Facebook is right for your business.” and an action item prompting me to Download the Full Analysis of What Works on Facebook and How It Relates to Your Business.  This is a great way to sell his newest eBook.


Kudos!

 


 

Double Incentive

Threadnow offers a double incentive to get you to suggest your friends to other friends.  They are trying so many things to get you to suggest friends:

1. Using your friends name
2. Using pictures of your friends
3. A chance to win an iPad
Before they were only using #1 and #2.  I wonder if their conversions will increase with the iPad offer.

Make it easy for customers to get your product

Amazon Prime is pretty genius.  You pay $79 and you get free 2-day shipping for a year (you can also share it with 3 people so it could be as cheap as $20/yr).  Why would I shop at buy.com or walmart.com if I have Amazon Prime.
Get Caribou at Work is pretty genius too.  They bring your product to your work place.  No extra work needed.
What can my business (Flying Cart) do to make things easier for the customer?
  • Offer Phone Support
  • Design their store for them
  • Offer in person setup

market, not just create

A lot of people think “I want to start a company.  I need to create something.”  Another way to think about starting a company is “What can I market?”

There a ton of businesses that know how to make things (all manufacturers in China for example) but if you know how to give the product distribution you can add a markup and make good money.

So for your next business idea think about what you are good at marketing.  This could be as simple as who you know (if you know a lot of developers build something you can sell to them), if you are good at SEO sell something you can get #1 on google for, if you know something a bunch of wordpress bloggers need create an add-on.

Thanks to Ziad for inspiring this post.