Posted by:
Troy White
October 30, 2007
Issue #268
In this issue:
-
6 time-tested secrets of generating new ideas and marketing breakthroughs in a flash.
-
Your own customized formula for creating new promotions ideas, product or service ideas, and big strategy concepts you can use to build your business faster.
-
12 Steps to a million dollar business enhancer.
- Print-it-and-post-it creativity hot sheet that is guaranteed to give you new ideas that work (complete with 168 quick-scan ideas to get you going).
- And Much More!
Fellow business builder,
It happens to all of us.
Getting “stuck” on a new campaign or marketing idea can be extremely frustrating, but there are simple techniques you can use to get through it.
When I left the corporate world of selling computer systems 6 years ago, I felt uncreative and completely ‘blah’. I knew I needed to rediscover my creativity if I was to survive in the small business world.
Through lots of trial and error, countless books on creativity, and many a night with pen and paper at my side … I found a path to generating better ideas faster.
Through this process of re-discovery, I also found that working on my ability to be more creative helped me:
- Eliminate writer’s block
- Become more productive
- Easily shift from one project to another
- Take my motivation to the next level
- See things I never saw before, in the least likely of places
The first thing I did, which you may have heard before – is to start journaling. Nothing fancy, just a simple notebook that you put your thoughts in, with a daily commitment. The key is to just spit out what’s on your mind on a regular basis. No editing, no critiquing, just get your thoughts down. You can write about anything and everything here. Just spit it out.
Ultimately it gets very easy
to just sit down
and have the words
flow from pen to paper.
Some other things I found that worked really well for those “out-of-the-box” ideas are:
- Listening to the right music. I find some upbeat Jazz or Baroque (Mozart, Beethoven) ideal. I am also trying "The Writer’s Mind" CD, which uses binaural beats to help your right and left brain synchronize themselves.
- Going to the library and immersing yourself in the knowledge of thousands of authors, experts, and historians. When was the last time you visited your local library?
- Visiting your local magazine shop. Pick up a handful of specialty magazines that you would normally never read. Look for niches that you know nothing about – you will be amazed at the new ideas you pick up on.
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Posted by:
John Newtson
October 27, 2007
Issue #266
Dear Business Builder,
No happy, feel good stuff today.
This is about your bottom line.
You do all that work to build your list and convert your prospects into customers. Then your customer stops buying.
You already know the main ways to increase sales …
- Get more customers
- Increase profit per sale
- Increase purchasing frequency
Notice how two out three is about what you do AFTER you get a customer.
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Posted by:
Julie McManus
October 26, 2007
Issue #265
Dear Business Builder,
Happy Friday and welcome back to In the ‘Net Trenches. One of the most mysterious or confusing of the direct response metrics is customer lifetime value (LTV). When you ask many a direct marketer if they know the lifetime value of their customers, their answer usually starts with “Well (insert long pause) … we know they continue to buy, but we just don’t know exactly how much.” And that’s because lifetime value can be difficult and time-consuming to calculate.
In today’s issue, I’m going to try to clear the confusion and give you a good understanding of lifetime value, how you can start to calculate it, and exactly why this key metric is so important to your marketing efforts.
Understanding Customer Lifetime Value
Knowing customer lifetime value is truly where the rubber meets the road for any direct marketing business. Give a lifetime value report to a seasoned direct marketer and watch his eyes light up and get positively giddy with the possibilities. But what exactly is lifetime value?
Lifetime value simply gives each new to file customer in your database an average future value beyond their first order. It is a predictor of future sales and revenue. In active direct marketing businesses, it’s typically calculated in time increments of first 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, 6 months and a year.
At this point, you might be asking yourself (or your computer monitor), “how the heck am I supposed to know what my brand new customer’s next purchase is going to be and when … I’m not a psychic!” And neither am I, but herein lies the great beauty of direct marketing – unlike the current all the rage diet plan — all things considered equal, past results are indicative of future results. And that means we can analyze the transaction history of our current active customers to determine what our new to file customers are likely to spend in the future.
Are you starting feel like I might just be handing you a crystal ball?
Now, you might be thinking to yourself “but I’ve got hundreds (or thousands) of customers, how can I possibly look at every single thing they’ve purchased beyond their first sale?” And the answer is you can’t … and you don’t need to. But what you can do is start by looking at the specific channels you use to acquire new customers (e-mail, pay-per-click, direct mail, etc.) and as long as you’re tracking those individual efforts separately and your customers transactions are grouped under individual customer numbers, you have what you need to start your lifetime value journey.
You’ll start by selecting a few campaigns within a specific channel. Then take that sub-group of customers and analyze their individual purchases beyond the first transaction. Break the transactions down into 30, 60, 90 days, 6 months and one year increments (don’t worry if you don’t have a full years worth of data). Some will buy nothing more, some will jump out at you for the sheer volume of additional products they’ve purchased and some will be mediocre. That’s okay; the goal is to come up with an average. Then total the sales for each time increment and divide by the total number of customers in your sub-group to get the average for each specified time frame.
Congratulations you’ve just calculated a very top line customer lifetime value for that specific channel. You now know what a new customer that comes on file under a specific channel after buying a specific product is likely to spend in the future.
With that, I hope you’re starting to see the sheer power of understanding your customer’s lifetime value.
Four ways customer lifetime value
can make a big impact
on your marketing plans
Now that you’ve acquired an actual value per new customer beyond the first sale, you can start to determine how that value affects and shapes your future marketing plans.
Here are 4 big ways this metric can immediately impact your bottom line:
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Posted by:
Carline Anglade-Cole
October 25, 2007
Issue #264
When I told my co-worker Howie I was leaving Phillips (now called Healthy Directions), he asked me what kind of copy I planned to write.
“I dunno” I said, “but I know what I’m NOT going to write: magalogs – they’re just too scary.”
I figured I could make a decent living writing renewal promotions and 2-page sales letters.
Well, guess what? Nine years later – “magalogs” … and their oversized cousins called “tabloids” … not to mention their midget uncles known as “digests” – still scare the beejeezus out of me every time I THINK about writing one!
So how come over 90% of my projects are magalogs, tabloids and digests?
Simple.
I learned a few simple tricks to help me conquer my fear of these Goliaths – and you can too!
In fact, I’m going to show you step-by-step how I tackle these projects – and in no time flat, you’ll be well on your way to writing killer copy for these “Big Dawgs” (hey, I live in Georgia and it’s football season – I had to do it!)
The #1 secret lies in this ancient, Chinese proverb:
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Posted by:
Daniel Levis
October 24, 2007
Issue #263
In this issue:
- How beer companies lie to men and get away with it …
- Basic instinct selling at its worst and best …
- Why admen (and women) get paid to think about sex while they work …
- How to harness the power of fantasy in your promotions to skyrocket your sales …
- And more!
Men listen … despite what the beer commercials imply, beer will NOT get you buxom, bikini-clad babes. It won’t …
Drink enough of the stuff, and they look like babes. Drink still more and you can grow your own breasts. But in truth … a beer-bloated dude is about as welcome in a bevy of bodacious bombshells as a skunk at a lawn party. Isn’t that right girls? So much for truth in advertising …
But it is true: appealing to people’s basic instincts and emotions is a powerful way to get their attention and captivate their imagination. It may in fact be all you need to do if your prime directive is to get them to remember your brand as they’re walking the aisles trying to decide on what kind of beer, toilet paper, or toothpaste they ought to buy. If you want to imprint the name of your product on somebody’s mind, the keys are emotion, a catchy buzz phrase, and plenty of repetition.
The idea is to get people to associate your product with a particular “feeling” they enjoy. In the case of the beer commercials, it’s a party atmosphere, and the promise of sex.
In the case of a sports car, it might be a feeling of virility and success. For fine women’s clothing and jewelery, it might be a feeling of femininity and desirability. Isn’t there something inherently sexual in the experience of these types of goods: The heady mix of smoking tires and half burned hydrocarbons, or the luminescent shimmer of a strand of pearls on a woman’s neckline?
Not only do these objects of desire help us to feel a certain way, even more importantly, they allow us to express our attractiveness to the opposite sex, like a peacock’s extravagant plumage of iridescent tail feathers.
Why admen (and women) get paid
to think about sex while they work …
In fact, almost everything we buy is at some level connected to our innate need for sexual expression. In each case the products themselves are either symbols that allow us to flaunt our suitability as a mate, or a means toward the acquisition of other products that fulfill this primal, unconscious need.
Think about this:
What drives a man to invest in his career, and excel in the business world? He wants to impress some woman, of course!
Since he is instinctually driven to get as many of his genes floating around in the gene pool as possible, he earns money to buy symbols that prove he is good procreation material. It is a man with a plan – not a man with a beer – who gets the chicks.
Mucho moolah allows him to afford more potent symbols than the next guy, evidence of his higher social status. And the higher his social status appears, the greater his access to the opposite sex.
Social status is of course relative. If some challenger on the block upgrades to a new Hummer he needs one too. The poor man has to keep upping himself to keep up with the Joneses – proving he is indeed the one with the authentic plumage – or risk spending his nights alone.
Of course tying your product to the expression of this basic instinct can be very profitable indeed. But it is a tricky business …
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