At last month’s Triangle Glazer-Kennedy Inner Circle meeting, IBA Ben Thole talked about how print newsletters can be a highly effective small business marketing strategy.

Print newsletters are actually back in a big way because they allow you to reach people who may be missing your email newsletter or to simply reach them in a different medium. Print newsletters also have a higher perceived value and a longer shelf life.

4 reasons to start a print newsletter:

1. Build relationships. People buy from those they know, like and trust so make sure to include a little personal information and personality along with the business tips.
2. Cross-sell or up-sell your products and services. You’d be surprised how often clients don’t know that you offer anything besides what they offer. This gives you a chance to educate them about that.
   
3. Encourage referrals. It’s easy to include a reminder that you appreciate referrals or run special promotions to encourage more of them.
4. Provide value for your prospects and clients. (Depending on who you’re mailing too.) People love getting helpful information.
   

So now that you’re all revved up and ready to fire up that Publisher program that came with Microsoft Office Small Business (actually MS Word 2007 could do it too), how do you maximize your results?

Here are Ben’s tips for creating newsletters that boost your bottom-line:

1. Tell them what else you do. Like I said, they’re probably clueless that you offer anything other than what they buy.
2. Tell them what’s new. Not just new offerings, but new staff, new happenings. They’ll feel more a part of your business.
3. It’s not about you. Guys, think of it like marriage–other than your personal note or update–what they want is FAR more important than what you want. Keep that in mind as you decide what to include and how you write it.
4. Your back page is prime real estate. Your back page is the page everyone will automatically see (especially if you fold your newsletter) because Mr. Postman is going to deliver it mailing label-side up. So use the other half or two-thirds wisely!
5. Frequency, frequency, frequency. A random when-I-get-my-act-together newsletter just says, “I suck at time management.” On the other hand, if they see that newsletter in their mailbox like clockwork, they’ll assume you’re dependable in everything else you do as well. PLUS, it keeps you on the short list of people they’ll think about when they need your services.

Worried about the time it’ll take? One solution he suggested is to join forces with another business owner. You run an article one month, then the next your friend runs it and you run his. Half the work, double the exposure. There are also services that will create, print and mail it all for you.

Next meeting is January 22, more info at www.trianglebusinessleaders.com.

Clients are a lot like pants.

• Some seem fine in the store but then constantly rub you the wrong way until you can’t wait to rip them off.
• Some require a lot of fussing and tugging—and they never stay comfortable for long.
• Many fit fine, there’s just nothing particularly special about them.
• And then there are your favorites…a few that seem to be tailor-made just for you. You’re always happy to put them on because you know both of you will end up looking good.

Getting dressed would certainly be easier if you had a closet full of the made-for-you pants…And so would your business.

The trick is finding out who those perfect-fit clients are. Here’s one way to do it:

1. Print out your client list—the ones who have actually hired you to work with them. (Skip any who have just bought products from you.) Include past clients too.

2. Rate your clients. Jot down a few positives and negatives that immediately come to mind by the client’s name. Consider things like:

• Were they easy to work with? 
• Did they know what they want from the start, or change their mind a lot?
• Were they knowledgeable or need a lot of educating?
• Did you look forward to doing the actual work? Why or why not?
• Were they enthusiastic about your work?
• Did they follow-through (if relevant)?
• Did they get good results?
• Did you work with one person? A team?
• Did they balk at your estimate? Pay promptly?
• Did they volunteer a testimonial or refer others to you?
• Are there ongoing opportunities to work with them? Or just a one-off project?
• How would you feel if they called today and had more work for you?

3. Pick your ideal client. Maybe none of your clients really get you jazzed. Then who would you LOVE to work with? Pick a specific person you know of and jot down all the reasons why.

4. Now analyze your notes. What consistently came up in the negative or positive columns? Overall, which projects and clients did you like the best? Why?

Which of those traits could be easily found in others? Do people in their industry or profession need (and want) your services? Or people with similar life experiences (e.g. working moms, people nearing retirement or who practice yoga)?

Finally, once you’ve identified some concrete traits to look for then get busy finding more clients just like them…and soon you’ll be looking at a closet full of clients that fit like a glove!

Forget crystal balls. If you want to predict your future income it’s time to start having a weekly meeting with yourself. I learned this invaluable technique from Elizabeth Potts Weinstein and she explains it in more detail in her new book Grow Up! Strategies: The 7 Legal & Financial Strategies You Need to Up-Level Your Small Business.

The premise is simple—spend about 15 minutes each week checking to see how your marketing is working now and you’ll find out what to expect income-wise over the next couple months. And the best part is you can use the insights to immediately adjust your marketing and CHANGE the future…to prevent a cash crunch or make even more money from a blockbuster marketing campaign.

All you need to do to get started is create a spreadsheet that includes rows for important marketing numbers and columns for each week. While it depends on your business, numbers you may want to look at include:

·         Number of inquiries for your services

·         Number of new clients for your services

·         Number of billable hours worked

·         Number of hours spent on marketing

·         Amount of invoices sent

·         Amount of unpaid invoices

·         Number of ezine subscribers

·         Ezine open rates

·         Click-through rates for links in your ezines

·         Unique visitors to your website

·         Unique pageviews for your ezine sign-up page and any sales pages

·         Number of sales for each key product or service

·         Conversion rates (number of opt-ins or sales divided by number of unique pageviews for that page times 100 to get the percentage)

 It’s also a good idea to take a quick look at all your banking and credit card balances to make sure there are no surprises lurking there.

Overall, keep it simple and focused on the most important numbers for predicting income in your business—after all, this is just supposed to be a 15 minute review. And be flexible, I’ve added and dropped some of the items I look at as I learned what was a  better indicator or added new types of marketing. The point is to just start tracking and reviewing now, so you can start planning better for later!

• Not sure if you’re going to like the changes you’re about to make to a document?
• Do you have someone else reviewing it for edits and other suggestions?

I know it’s much cooler to hate Microsoft, but they actually have some pretty handy features for writing and editing in their software.

Track Changes is one that can make editing a lot easier. Turn it on and edit as you normally would. In the meantime, every word you insert is written in a colored font and underlined. Deletions are marked with the same font color and underlined, plus have strikethrough (or shown in a balloon out to the side). So it’s easy to see what changes have been made (and undo them if need be!).

On top of that, different reviewers are automatically assigned different colors. So if you want to see who messed up the clever phrase you came up with, it’s easy to identify the culprit.

There are several ways to incorporate the changes.

1. If you like or hate it all, look for the Accept All or Reject All icon on the tool bar that appears when Track Changes is on (in 2003 and before) or click on the down-arrow next to Accept or Reject icons on the (2007).
2. You can also highlight sections and hit Accept or Reject to do blocks of changes at one time.
3. Or you can right-click on a single change to accept or reject it separately.

Just make sure you’ve accepted or rejected all changes before you finalize the document or your recipient may see the ones you didn’t!

Here’s how to access Track Changes:

In Word 2003

• Go to Tools menu, click on Track Changes. A tool bar with check (accept) and “x” (delete) icons will appear in your main tool bar or right below it. Turn off Track Changes by going back to Tools menu and unhighlighting it. (Any tracked changes you haven’t either accepted or rejected may still appear to you or other viewers, however.)
• Microsoft has free video training on it.

In Word 2007

• Go to the Review tab on the ribbon and click on the Track Changes icon. To the right are the checkmark and “x” icons, as well as pulldown arrows, for accepting and rejecting changes. Turn off Track Changes by clicking again on the Track Changes icon. (Any tracked changes you haven’t either accepted or rejected may still appear to you or other viewers, however.)
• And here’s the video training for the 2007 version.

I’ve been reading the new book by Robert Cialdini, Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive. It’s actually quite an easy read and has some amazing insights into persuasion–as well as why we’re so often wrong when we try to guess what people will respond to. Here are some of the most relevant highlights:

Show them the proof. When Cialdini’s team added a statement to those “reuse your towels to save the environment” cards saying that most people who stay at the hotel do in fact reuse their towels at least once during their stay, towel reuse increased by 26%. And when they added a third statement saying most people staying in the same room did it, guests were 33% more likely to do so.

This is due to the power of social proof– people who are unsure about an action or decision tend to look to others around them to guide them. And it’s even more successful f the reader has some affinity with the people being cited (even when it’s as tenuous as staying in the same hotel room!).

Takeaway tip: Make sure to use testimonials–highlighting those most similar to your audience instead of the “best” ones. And when possible, include numbers that show how many clients you’ve served or how many of that product you’ve sold.

Stop offering so many choices. It seems counterintuitive, but more choice can actually hurt your sales. In one study, retirement plan participation increased 30% when investment options were cut from 59 to just two. And in a case where people were allowed to sample and buy gourmet jam, only 3% bought jam when they had 24 flavors to choose from–but 30% bought when there were just six flavors!

“It’s often the case that potential customers don’t know precisely what they want until they’ve surveyed what’s available to them,” Cialdini says. So when we offer a lot of choices, customers get overwhelmed trying to differentiate between them and decide which one is the best one and end up choosing none.

Takeaway tip: Always offer just one product or service on a sales page. As for your overall products or services, you may want to test offering fewer–but you should definitely differentiate the ones you offer from one another as possible or somehow indicate which one is the most popular choice.

Mirror your customers. Restaurant servers have found they receive larger tips when they repeat a customer order’s back to them exactly as the customer said it rather than respond with “OK” or “coming up.” In one case, using the customer’s exact words increased tip size nearly 70%!

Studies of negotiation have found similar results when one person mirrors the other’s body language. Why does this work? It’s natural for us to prefer people who are similar to us and “mirroring” customers’ words and behavior helps establish that rapport.

Takeaway tip: Do as the servers do when you’re talking with a client. And when you’re writing something for them, make sure you “speak the client’s language” to help foster that rapport.

“Because” makes you more persuasive. Xerox did a study of people asking to cut in a copier line. Those who added “because” and a reason to their request were allowed to do so 90% of the time–even when the reason was as lame as “because I need to make copies.”

When the request was more significant, adding “because” doubled the yeses received. One caveat–the bigger the request, the more people will evaluate the worthiness of your reason.

Takeaway tip: Ask your clients what they like about working with you to find out some of the reasons you can give so you can say, “You need to buy this product because…” or “You should trust me because….” You won’t always use the exact word “because,” but it is more powerful when you do.

Finally, here’s a tidbit to keep in mind when you’re going to multi-day seminars and conferences (or to use to your advantage if you’re giving one!)–sleep deprivation and fatigue make you more susceptible to persuasion. So leave your wallet in your room on the latter days since you probably haven’t been sleeping and eating as well as normal!

This is just too funny–a great year-end look at the year in business and marketing from curmudgeonly Herschell Gordon Lewis…

Twas the night before Christmas, a time for no joys
Because Santa could not afford presents and toys.
Why not? Well, like most of us, it’s a tough time,
And his North Polar mortgage was really sub-prime.
Worse, his deadly stockholding, like so many others,
Was a lousy investment in sad Lehman Brothers.
And he’d wanted some bright wooden trim for his sleigh,
But the idea went down with the fall of Bombay.
He hoped both sleigh and reindeer would not lose endurance,
Because AIG had covered all their insurance.
Ah, he thought, I’ll at least get a quality yield
From gift packages from that great store, Marshall Field.
Nope, another great notion that’s now pushing daisies
Because Marshall Field now is a blue-collar Macy’s.
Hmm, some books would be nice for my favorite elf.
Too bad: Borders is selling not books but itself.
Why not go for top fashions, a perfect gift turn-on?
Uhhh, who’s today’s owner of Lillian Vernon?
Maybe sharp electronics, a wonderful notion.
Not from The Sharper Image, stopped dead in mid-motion.
From these oh-so-bleak bits you’d be bound to detect
That we marketers suffer from sub-prime effect.
Yeah, if negative numbers are any true sign,
The days of wild growth are in savage decline.
But even in these days, the toughest of times,
Some smarties reap in lots of nickels and dimes….

Read all of it over at Direct magazine’s website.

Yes, it’s a famously effective headline from years ago, but one reason it still works is we can’t help looking to see if we ARE making those mistakes!

Speaking of mistakes, here are the top errors I see when editing.

1. Loose and lose

Loose is to make something less tight. Lose is when you can’t find something.

No: I always loose the product key.
Yes: I always lose the product key.
Yes: The dog is loose again.

No: The affect of the marketing campaign was amazing.
Yes: The effect of the marketing campaign was amazing.
Yes: The marketing campaign affected their sales in a big way.

No: The techs had to check there cell phones over their, and their not happy about it.
Yes: The techs have to check their cell phones over there, and they’re not happy about it.

 No: Bring me the CD, along with it’s case because its going with us.
Yes: Bring me the CD, along with its case because it’s going with us.

No: I remember the day which we met.
Yes: I remember the day that we met.
Yes: The team, which won the Superbowl last year, now has the worst record in the NFL.

Even better, “that” is often unnecessary! See if you can delete it and still make sense. (I remember the day we met.)

No: I’m going to lay on the sofa, so please lie those books on the table.
Yes: I’m going to lie on the sofa, so please just lay those books on the table.

No:  Let’s bring a bottle of wine to the party.
Yes: Let’s take a bottle of wine to the party.

No: I could go to a show with my two siblings. (e.g. Kim and Chris)
Yes: I could go to a show with my two siblings. (i.e. Kim and Chris)

Note: Grammar guides conflict on whether to use a comma after the abbreviations. The generally accepted usage though is without.

No: The word he used was “bloviate”, and she said, “I don’t know what that means”.
Yes: The word he used was “bloviate,” and she said, “I don’t know what that means.”

For question marks and exclamation marks, it depends. They go inside if it’s part of the quote, outside if it doesn’t.

No: She asked, “Can you explain what that means”? And I can’t believe he said “no!”
Yes: She asked, “Can you explain what that means?” And I can’t believe he said “no”!

Happy writing!

Given the state of the economy these days, it’s easy to get wrapped up in chasing down new business. But showing your appreciation for those who contributed to your current success is JUST as important–if not more so. After all, happy customers are your best prospects and your best potential sources of referrals. 

You should definitely be showing your appreciation to:

Customers. Nearly 70% of the time customers leave a business it’s because they don’t feel appreciated or valued, according to a study by the Technical Assistance Research Project. Obviously, you should send a thank you right after a client comes on board (which is also a good way to stave off buyer’s remorse), but also keep thanking them–at least once a year.

Referrers.  If you don’t thank people who send you qualified prospects–whether or not they end up becoming your client–they’re not going to keep doing it very long.  Consider a special thank you for top affiliates and joint venture partners as well. 

Your Team–Real or Virtual. It’s simple–anyone who makes your business life easier is worthy of a thank you. This goes for social media friends and others who go out of their way to help you as well.

Prospects. Thank those who have shown serious interest in working with you.  Even if they choose to go a different route at the moment, they’ll remember your gesture. A