The team here at Tailored have a drink after work on Friday afternoons. We finish up about 4 p.m, open up the fridge and have a drink and a bite to eat in the boardroom.
During this time we shoot the breeze on anything from weekend plans to work issues.
We often have some terrific ideas during these relaxed chats and last week…..
We had a magnificent idea!!
Now, I know we are a marketing business and we deal with marketing issues every hour of every day. And I’ve done this for years and years. But this next idea has never entered my head. Until last week. And what an idea it is!
A simple twist has made a huge difference!
As you probably gather from this site, we use a variety of marketing strategies to generate leads and clients. And I’m more than happy to share these things with you, for a couple of reasons.
1. I’m sure you are smart enough to realise that we are giving away the tricks of our trade. This stuff is valuable intellectual property and can be incredibly valuable if used the right way.
2. I have every confidence that you don’t read and think “Oh the sneaky little person!” I’ve even had a person email me and tell me that I would never get a client from this site because I show too much – wrong! This site simply demonstrates our expertise.
If you are a potential client you might recognise some strategies we use, but I believe most people see the strategies for what that are – good and decent ways to get new clients (I’d love you to use us of course, but I’d equally love you to follow the examples and do it yourself and make your business a great success).
Get on with it Brendon!
Okay, okay! Here it is.
We were discussing the results of the latest postcard mail out (we did 3 last week). One of the mail outs generated us 4 leads from 90 cards.
Bianka mentioned how funny it was that all of the people who responded have their businesses located very close to and knew personally one- (1) of the two- (2) people who we quoted in the testimonials.
My reply was pretty simple
“The biggest barrier to buying is the perception of risk. Every purchase is a risk. If you can remove the risk of doing business with you – maybe offer a 100% guarantee – then you will get more sales,” I said.
“Because these new clients know the people we quoted on the cards, they can very easily check up on us and be reassured about the perceived level of risk. Thus, people who know other people we deal with are far more likely to contact us.
It’s the very same reason that the vast majority of our business is provided by word-of-mouth referrals,” I said.
Stick with me here……it’s gold!
The response rate of that 90 card mail out was 4.4%. Not bad for a mail out.
We talked about that and a few other things.
Then it hit me like an arrow between the eyes!
We would, just like we did last week, generate a much better response to our mailings if we quoted testimonials from people that the person reading the card knew!
We would greatly increase our success rate by sending cards quoting businesspeople around the place of the person providing the quote.
So that’s what we did!
The results?
Spectacular!
We’ve only sent our forty- (40) cards so far, but we’ve already had four- (4) responses. That’s more than double the previous response. And a quick assessment of those four- (4) clients tells me that it could be worth $10,000.
All because of an easy chat over a wine and following a natural progression of thought. It seems so obvious now!
Regards
Brendon
(taken for a www.tailored.com.au article – article has since been removed)