Adapt Media

How to create dynamic ezines that attract new clients, build customer relationships and increase sales.

When you first go into business you might think that the majority of your time will be spent doing work for clients. However you will quickly realize what you will really spend MOST of your time doing….

That’s right…marketing yourself.

You need to GET new clients!

I doesn’t take long to work out that marketing is more important than mastery.

Spending time at networking events, one-on-one meetings and lunches are all great ways to get the word out about your business. Most of the time people are happy to hear about your services, but may not want you at that time. To have this one-to-one style of marketing is exhausting.

Have you ever experienced that?

It can get very frustrating. Bills need paying – you need clients and you need them fast.

If you’ve not heard it before, one of the rules of marketing is 7-10 rule. This means that a prospect has to see or hear your message 7 to 10 times before they’ll even take action. But too often, people will give up on delivering their message long before then.

So the fortune is in the follow-up!

So what is the best way to follow up that makes great use of your time?

I bet you know that even if you speak to folks in person and get their email addresses, you can’t just sell them on your services every week. They’d soon get ticked off, and you wouldn’t make any new clients that way.

You don’t want to be seen as a pest! You want to be seen as a resource and someone who gives them value.

A regular ezine does just the job! (Call it e-newsletter, etip, email newsletter – they are all the same.)

It contains your message. Sharing your tips with the world. And, then you will see…business starting to come in! Little by little, bit by bit, your word gets spread and people start to contact you for your knowledge and expertise. I know you can see the immense value in that.

Your ezine is often an under rated source of new clients. It MUST form part of your small business marketing plan. Here are some top success tips on how your ezine can boost business:

Use a good email service: many people start out by sending their ezine via their regular email such as Outlook. The problems with this are that you have a high likelihood of being registered as spam. You will get an incredible number of bounce backs which means your message is not getting to your market.

I love using a simple but effective system such as AWeber. It is inexpensive (around $19/month) and you can get a trial period. You can either create your own template using your branding (I got my web designer to do mine) or use one of the one’s already available within Aweber. Once you have uploaded your content, you can select who receives your ezine, and pre-schedule it for a certain day and time. I love it!

I don’t’ use it myself, but hear good things too about Mailchimp. This is a no cost service, with some limitations. I could be an ideal service if you are just starting out.

Track and Measure! It’s important to know what is working and what’s not. By using an email service, you can track all sorts of statistics. Ones that I like to check regularly are: how many people open your email and what your ‘click through’ rate is. Industry standards say that an open rate of 30% or above is good, and a click through rate of 3-5% is average. Can see why when I get an open rate of 100% I’m very happy? When you analyze what people are reading and interested in, this allows you to fine tune your marketing strategies so you can attract more clients.

Be seen as a valuable resource: What I hear people say when I tell them to start their own ezine is “Everybody already gets so many emails; I don’t want to add another one to their inbox.” This is a fair comment. However, it is important to remember that you have your prospects email address in the first place because they have an interest in what you offer. You are right – we don’t want to be seen as a pest. So, you MUST provide valuable information and resources in your ezine in order to keep people on your list.

To effectively do this, hang out where your prospects are. What are they saying is frustrating them? What are their main concerns? What are they currently talking about? It’s easy to get answers to these now that we can connect to Facebook and other social media. Blogs and forums are also a great place to hear what your prospects are saying. Then, all you have to do is write your feature article about these very issues, and hey presto! You are a welcome guest with valuable information on helping your prospect solve their problem.

An effective way to promote your services or products: Instead of simply saying how great you are, an ezine lets you SHOW how great you are by sharing your expertise with your prospects. You’re giving people a TASTE of you, and educating them on why they NEED your product or services.

You can easily share the experiences of other clients that have used your products or services. This provides incredibly powerful social proof to the benefits of working with you. It also allows you to get your message in front of your audience many times in a ‘soft’ way for those that need to see it the 7-10 times before taking action. By showcasing your knowledge and skills, you will attract more clients, as well as media and other opportunities.

Be regular and consistent: Many people ask “What is the best day or time to send out my ezine?”. My answer to them is “When you can guarantee you will be consistent.”

Consistency is the key to business success and a good marketing plan. If you have a prospect that joins your list and then does not hear anything from you for 6 weeks, then they get 3 emails in that one week. Then nothing again for about 5 weeks. They are not going to be very interested in what you do say by then and will very quickly hit the DELETE button. You want to be sending something to your prospects at least once every week. This habit will keep you ‘top of mind’ for your prospects when they do decide they are ready to work with you. An ezine is an effortless way to build your list and to STAY IN TOUCH with your clients and prospects regularly.

Build your list: If you write a valuable ezine, your readers will pass it on to friends and colleagues all over the world. It becomes an ideal way to capture the email addresses of new visitors to your web that can soon become new clients.

Your Action Plan:

1. Decide which email service you are going to use. Look at all your statistics this week and then track them to help you decide how you need to change your message or focus.
2. Visit blogs, forums, social media, digg.com etc regularly and LISTEN to what your prospects are saying. Use this as the base for your article content.
3. Decide what day of the week and time you send your ezine. Schedule this into your calendar and work every week to meet this commitment.

Most businesses spend 90% of their time trying to get new clients… while virtually ignoring their current and past clients.

For each and every month that goes by in which you fail to stay in touch with your clients, you lose 5% of them. There are two sources of getting new clients. One is from your existing or past clients, the other is attracting brand new clients that have no relationship with you or any of your current or past clients. I want to start by getting new clients with the help of your existing or past clients, because this is much easier to do. You will find out why very shortly.

I like to call this “Low Hanging Fruit.”

In getting results in marketing you always want do what is easier first, this produces the greatest results the fastest. I don’t know about you but I don’t want challenges when it comes to advertising, especially when money is concerned. So as a great marketer I want to:

“Shoot Fish In A Barrel With No Water In It With A 10-Gauge Shotgun”

I want as much of a sure thing as I can get.

Attention – Brand New Small Business Owners: If you are brand new to your business and don’t have any past or current clients don’t skip this. You will want to come back to this article and implement these strategies with the very first new client leads you get.

Referring to the people who do business with you as clients signifies a long term relationship. If you do everything I am telling you here in these articles your “Clients” will soon become your “Friends”

The thing I want you to grasp is to start treating your Clients as if they were your Friends. I will show you how, and then you will understand why later.

Your Best Source Of New Clients Will Come From Your Happy Clients.

Period!

You Are In the Relationship Business!

So how do you establish relationships with your current and past clients so that they are happy to give you lots of referrals and always say good things about you?

You Have To Keep In Touch With Them Often……..And You Have To Give Them Stuff For FREE

What do we mean by often and how do we keep in touch with them?

Often means about 26 times per year you have to “touch your client”. They are hopefully coming into or calling your business 4-12 times already so a lot contact is already being done.

You are probably saying to yourself right now, “ARE YOU NUTS? I don’t have the time or money to do that. Now I think you have really lost your mind.”

HOLD ON! HOLD ON!

First let me tell you what we mean by touching your client. And then prove to you that what I am talking about cost peanuts and are automatic systems, so there is very little manual labor on your part. But before I do this I want to explain to you WHY you must do this and the psychology behind it.

Most small businesses try to get a sale without establishing a relationship first.

Let me ask you a question.

If you are married woman – Did your husband ask you to marry him on the first date you had with him?

If he did, what do you think you would have said?

You would have said, “NO!”

You would have said, “I like you but I need to get to know you better first before I make a commitment that big.”

Selling a person one of your products and/or services is the same thing. It is a BIG commitment of trust and a commitment of money and time, isn’t it?

I like to explain this another way too.

When two boxers get in the ring to fight they are not trying to throw one punch and hope to win the fight; they are trying to throw many punches at each other.

The one who throws the most punches (most client contacts) and the most lethal blows (best marketing message) wins the fight (gets a long term client who stays and pays for a long time).

When your client thinks of the category of business you are in and the products and services you offer, you want them to only think of:

YOU!

You want to dominate that part of his/her brain so whenever anything involved with what your business does and what you offer comes up, you want him/her to think only about YOU and then recommend YOU.

You do this by keeping in contact with your client (touching) in a variety of ways

So what do I mean by “touching” your clients 26 times per year?

Any one of these, or all of these.

1. Sending them a postcard

2. Sending them a holiday card

3. Sending then a birthday card

4. Sending them a text email

5. Sending or emailing them a newsletter

6. Emailing them one of your consumer awareness guides

7. Emailing them a video link you think they may be interested in

8. Sending them a voice broadcast

9. Sending them an audio postcard

10. Sending them a thank you card

11. Sending or giving them an inexpensive gift

12. Sending or giving them a DVD of a new product or service

13. Sending them a text message

14. Mailing them a “lumpy” letter.

Ideally what you want to do is set up a 12-month schedule so that you are keeping in contact with your clients and your potential clients. Once you get this set up there will be very little manual labor on your part. And it will be very inexpensive to do, but will give you the biggest bang for your buck.

Warning! I realize that some of you may not have a computer, email, web sites, etc., or don’t know how to do some of the stuff like streaming video or audio postcards.

Let me address this in this way.

This is one of the things YOU need to hear and there is no way to sugar coat it.

You had better learn how to use a computer (or have someone do your computer work for you) and you had better get a website because your future clients have been brought up using computers and web sites, and that is how they WANT to find information out and that is the way they WANT to communicate with you.

Period!

You have to give people what they want.

Good News! Learning how to use a computer these days is rather simple. If you can use a cell phone, you can use a computer, send emails etc. You just need to “bite the bullet” on this one and learn it. If you refuse to learn these skills, your must have someone do your computer stuff for you. If you don’t it, will end up costing you lost sales and BIG money out of YOUR pocket.

I personally have stopped doing business with certain small businesses because they have no website or email or fax machine because they are too hard to get a hold of. It was more of a pain than it was worth.

In today’s automated world people want everything done fast and they want it to be easy.

I am often asked, “Is it possible to do all the stuff you talk about without a computer?”

And the answer is, “YES!”

It is just harder, much harder. The more clients you have, the more difficult and time consuming it becomes. So if you want to make your life easier. Get a computer.

Technology Is Your Friend!

Technology will allow you to get most of your marketing done automatically, which will free up your time so you can spend it the way you want. This gives you tremendous leverage.

All kinds of businesses are now looking for the latest solutions in voice recognition and voice biometric authentification to ensure their security checks on the identity of their clients is 100% safe. Leading banks, multinational reservation companies and booking organisations are keen to invest in highly sophisticated technology that can guarantee the ultimate security in online banking transaction validation.

Facilitating voice verification within an organization gives an easy to use, safe method of confirming the client is who they claim to be, and financial companies prefer it to other methods as it’s simple to use, is user-friendly and reliable across several channels, and offers a particularly strong verification to portable appliances. Millions is being spent on improving current systems and reducing fraud which costs companies all over the world billions each year.

Any organization interested in employing voice authentication should consider solutions that are straight-forward to use and compatible for online banking and call center’s. Biometric systems are reliable and can be set up to take over a large part of the daily calls that generally take up so much valuable agent time.

Call centre operations offer a real challenge for businesses as they need to ensure they give a quality customer service along with limited call waiting times, and still have the opportunity to undertake some active selling. Accessibility to new technologies and improved working practices means that these goals are more achievable than ever before.

Voice biometric software will make your company stand out from the crowd and give clients a truly positive customer experience by ensuring there are no more mistakes made, callers get directed to the accurate agent or to the next self-service level much more quickly and so they are happy. Call centre costs are reduced as time is saved and the automatic system means you can reduce staff levels or put agents to better use in other departments where they can spend time more effectively by chasing sales and increasing profits. Agents are also happier as they don’t have to deal with repetitive, tedious calls daily and their job gets more interesting.

Integrating voice biometrics into the business means you can offer your customers the most efficient and safest tool available in keeping personal details safe and private. Callers simply speak in their normal fashion and the sophisticated software verifies the voice by comparing it with the pattern they have stored on file for that customer, as no two voice patterns are the same it is 100% foolproof. Once the callers identity has been confirmed then the call is put through to a customer service agent, this also enables the agent to greet the caller by name, putting the service on a much more personable level.

The rise in competition has meant that consumers have a lot more options when it comes to finding a financial establishment suited to their needs, banks, credit unions, building societies and any other organisation where money is involved have to offer a quality experience as otherwise customers will simply take their custom elsewhere.

Speech solutions can give an institution the sophistication it needs to be able to differentiate itself from its competitors, the latest technology offers a safer interaction for clients via voice biometrics and natural language speech recognition applications and can give you this upper hand. Every business want to achieve the objective of less fraud as it ultimately leads to happy customers which increases brand loyalty, pushes up profits and enhances reputation.

Learn more about how automatic speech recognition can assist your organization and give a far superior customer interaction than any of your competitors.