I was at the farmers market last week at the Liffey Valley shopping centre and as we passed by the fruit and vegetable stall the owner was offering everyone within ear shot free samples of fruit slices. We were lured over and before we know it we had purchased €15 worth of fruit that we had not originally set out to buy!

This reminded me of the power of offering a free sample, which works on an number of different levels. First of all the law of reciprocity where we tend to feel obligated to someone once they have given something to us.

Secondly by allowing your prospects to try your products or services for nothing you are eliminating the uncertainty and risk of them trying you out, which means one less barrier to them becoming your customer.

Finally by offering a free sample this allows you to engage with your customers and determine exactly what they might need so that you can help them.

What free sample can you give your prospective customers?

At the beginning of this year we couldn’t decide whether to move house or simply convert the attic. With two young children we needed more space. In the end we decided to apply for planning permission for the loft conversion (we needed to change the roof line to make it viable so needed permission) so that if we decided to stay then we had it or if we moved then it was something extra of value to offer a prospective purchaser.

In the end we decided to move but something interesting happened when we got our planning permission approved.

I started to receive direct mail in the post from builders and engineering companies offering their services. As a marketing expert I was pleased to see that these companies had taken the initiative to at least send me something, this puts them well ahead of the pack compared with most business owners. However in every single case each of these companies only ever sent one mailing piece. There was no multi step marketing campaign and no follow up by phone or anything.

I thought that this was disappointing, after all they had gone to the trouble of adding me to the list and sending me one piece. Clearly they don’t know that it takes on average 7 contacts between a business and a prospect before they agree to do business. How much more effort would it have taken to send out a sequence of mail pieces and perhaps follow up with a phone call.

Also most of the mailing pieces were weak with no real offer than call us for a free quote, no reason why I should pick them, and no testimonials, guarantee or other reason to compel me to call them.

Most of the companies concerned were offering services that would generate thousands of Euro worth of business but hadn’t bothered to spend anything more than what looked like 30 mins to knock up a basic letter and sometimes a brochure. If you have gone to the trouble of finding a lead then why not go the extra mile and craft a really good sales piece and multi step follow up campaign?

I recently left my car in for a service at Liffey Valley Renault  and thankfully not much needed doing to it.

Two things from the service stood out to me as being good service. First of all as soon as the car was ready for collection I received a text message to let me know. I think this is a good use of technology in keeping customers informed.

The second thing that impressed me was that they washed the car for me for no additional charge and without me requesting it. This is a very good examplae of giving the customer that little bit more. Even though this costs very little I thought it was a nice touch and it made me wonder why no other garage I’ve been to does the same. The little things can make a big difference.

Another thing that impressed me about Liffey Valley Renault was that about a week after the service I received a telephone call asking me if I would mind answering a few questions about my experience with their service department. This only took a couple of minutes of my time and was done very professionally and gave them good feedback to help them improve their service and find out what their customers think about them

If you are running a business then taking the time to look for feedback from your customers is a very useful project. Without asking your customers and clients for feedback how else can you be sure you are doing things the right way?

Most businesses in Ireland these days have a website, but all to often it seems business owners have put up a site based on advice from a web designer rather than from a marketing perspective.

Sure a good web designer will give you a site that looks good but unless you are trying to win a design awared often this isn’t going to be good news for your bottom line.

Instead you need to design your website from a marketing point of view. In order to do this you need to first determine what the primary objective of your website is. Your primary objective could be to capture leads from interested parties so you can follow up with them, or perhaps it might be to sell a product or service directly from the page.

Your website should not simply be a brochure with a contact us page, whilst you need to include this information you should make it more engaging and give people more of a reason to interact with you. For example if your main objective is to build a mailing list of prospects interested in your services then perhaps you might consider creating some kind of report or low value product that you could give away.

For example on our website you will see we give away a free report called “The 17 Golden Rules Of Every Successful Entrepreneur” which contains some tips and tricks for business owners to get them thinking about growing their business. By offering this to our site visitors for free we are giving them something of value and also starting to build a dialogue with them.

So what is the primary objective of your website? If you would like us to critique your website for you for Free then please get in touch or give us a call on 1850 943122.

Last Thursday I put our house in Lucan up for sale as we are hoping to move to Straffan. Today, the following wednesday, I received a postcard from an Irish Transport and removal firm called Libra Trans giving details of their service and encouraging us to call for a free estimate.

First of all congratulations to Libra Trans for taking the initiative and implementing a targetted marketing campaign to a clearly defined target market, people moving and selling a house and therefore soon to be in need of a removal or transport firm. The card is well designed and does its job of catching attention. In the pile of other correspondance a colour postcard stands out.

I think the call to action on the postcard is a bit weak, it simply says visit our website or call for a free estimate. Personally I’m never particularly impressed when I see a company say the offer free estimates, whopee you are going to tell me your prices for no charge how good of you. I don’t think theyd get too far saying call for an estimate, it will cost you €50.

The website that Libratrans has lets them down - there were errors on the page whaen I viewed it in IE7, and the quotation request form that is pretty crucial to their operation would not load. It is kind of disappointing to think of all the leads that they must so nearly have generated but then lost by having a website that does not do the job for them.

So how else could Libratrans improve this Irish lead generation campaign? I think they could make their offer even stronger by offering something free, for example on their website they have a checklist of things to remember when packing or unpacking. Rather than having this freely displayed on the website they could create a report package and offer it to prospects who fill out a form etc. Perhaps they could make the offer stronger still by offering something of use such as 3 free packing boxes or similar. This would help them qualify the leads from the postcard mailout a bit further and allow them to capture the names of prospects rather than just ‘The Home Owner’. This would help to build a relationship with the prospect, the cost of this would be minimal and I’d be willing to bet it would increase their conversion rate over and above just offering a free quote (yawn…)

So to conclude I think this was a good effort to generate leads in a targetted fashion. I’m not sure how they compile their list, perhaps they monitor the new properties on www.myhome.ie or maybe it is possible to buy lists of all the new properties. Or perhaps they just ask their drivers to note down all of the new for sale properties they pass. Whichever way they do it you can bet it is nicely systemised and produces a good return on the investment. Lets face it the cost of a postcard and postage would probably be less that €1 and the potential business could easily be €1000 per client. It is a shame that the rest of the sales conversion process they are using falls a bit short, however even with what they have I’m sure it puts them well ahead of their competition.

Now I just need to ring them to get my free quote

On Friday I received the following SMS message from Crunch Fitness Gym in Clonsilla, Dublin that I used to be a member of. It said “ST PATRICKS SPECIAL. Rejoin Crunch fitness before 7pm Mon 19th and receive a free Nike Rockstar course and no membership joining fee. Ltd spaces avail. 01 8025906″

This is a good example of using SMS marketing to try and reactivate dormant customers using a direct response mechanism. As we know it is much easier to sell to past and existing customers than it is to sell to new ones. Seeing as the cost to send 1 sms message can be less than 5cent this makes it a much more cost effective and less wasteful medium, than sending a direct mail packages by post.

Also at present response rates for SMS marketing in Ireland can sometimes be as high as 40%, I think people are much more likely to read an sms message than they are to sift through the junk mail at home. Receiving a SMS message is still something that is very hard to ignore as opposed to receiving a ‘junk’ mailing piece.

This SMS message was also good as it made some attempt to give a reason for the promotion. People like to know the reason why you are making them an offer and a St Patrick’s day offer is as good as any.

Another plus point of this message is the use of a free offer and waiving of the joining fee; this helps to strengthen the offer and makes it easier for people to try. An even better approach might have been “no joining fee and first month free - try us out a no cost”

Using a deadline for the offer is another positive thing about this SMS marketing message, by specifically giving a date and time prospects know that they need to at quickly. This is quite a strong call to action. Perhaps it could have been made even stronger by saying call 01 8025906 now avail of this offer.

Can you use sms marketing in your business? It can be very cost effective and relatively straightforward to implement. Don’t think that you can just use it to reactivate old clients; there are a whole host of other possibilities for it. It is particularly suited to time sensitive offers such as notifying customers at a bar that they are running a comedy night or having a special happy hour.

Sometimes the most cost effective way of promoting a business is to piggy back on the back of an existing one. The marketing jargon for this is a joint venture and is where you work with a business that already has a relationship with customers that match the profile of your business.

If done correctly then this can be a winner all round for both of the businesses involved and for the customers. The business that has the customer list (the host business) benefits by being able to offer something of value to their customers, the business making the offer (the beneficiary business) gets exposure to its target market very cost effectively and the customer gets an offer that may be of value to them.

Here are some examples of Joint Ventures that a furniture retailer could use. They revolve around doing JV’s with businesses that have customers that might be in the position to purchase new furniture. For example people that have just moved house. I would recommend that you try and do a JV with estate agents where you could give them a voucher worth say €100 off new furniture. This will benefit the real estate agents by making them look good and it will generate leads for the furniture business.

Another idea might be to approach property developers and offer furniture for free for use in show homes in return for the furniture company to be able to leave promotional materials or discount vouchers for each visitor.

The furniture company also consider approaching small builders and decorators who do renovation and improvement type work for home owners. Most likely once you have had your home redecorated you will then consider getting in new furniture.

Also how about targetting properties that have recently been sold and offering a complete package for furnishing the house.
These are just some simple cost effective ways to grow a furniture business.

Today we are going to look at one way that you can make more money from your business. A lot of the time business owners focus solely on attracting new clients and customers. Also a lot of the time they only offer one service. Whilst this is good intially from the point of being able to clearly explain what you do and to focus, it does limit the amount of money you can earn from each of your clients.

An example of this would be the company that does the bookkeeping for my Irish business they have been doing my books month in, month out for over two years now. They charge €50 per month which is very cost effective and saves me a lot of hassle. But I think they are missing out. You see I am pleased with the service they provide, and we have built up a good working realtionship. Yet they have never once offered me any additional services and I’m willing to bet that it is the same for each of their other clients too.

What they need to do is to identify a back end product that they can provide and offer to their existing customers. To do this they could put together a questionnaire and ask me what other similar services I might be looking for that they could then provide. For example I might be interested in payroll services or more in depth financial forecasting assistance. If they didn’t feel comfortable providing any additional services themselves then they could approach a 3rd party company and offer to pass on new customers to them for a % of the ongoing residual business.

So in this example say that my bookkeeper has 100 clients and she is currently getting €50 per month from each one. This means her turnover is €5000 per month. What if she was to offer all of her customers a more detailed financial forcasting service which she charged say an additional €50 per month?

Say only 20% of her clients decided to take her up on her offer, that would represent €1000 per month additional turnover, or a 20% growth in her business. All without finding any new customers but by finding out the needs of her existing customers and meeting them.

Based on this example what other products or services could you offer your customers?

If they have purchased from you before then they already know you and must have liked or trusted you enough to do business in the past. Don’t make the mistake of not going back to them and finding out if there is anything else that you might be able to do for them.

Flick through any Irish local newspaper or perhaps the Independent directory and you will see the same basic error time and time again. Business owners who have created there own advertisments and who think it is a good idea to use the name of their company as the headline for their advertisements. So you see adverts which proclaim in large letters ABC Carpentry services. This is a most unsatisfactory waste of space and effort and shows a huge misunderstanding in the way that people react to advertisements.

Lets take a step back. If you are in the newsagents and are browsing the papers and magazines what is it that makes you read a particular article or pick up a certain magazine? It is the headlines for the article either on the front cover or throughout the paper. The reason for this is that when we are reading we subconsciously scan the headlines to decide what to read next and tend to read the articles that interest us.

It is the same when looking at advertisements. A headline like ABC Carpentry services is not going to really attract us to read the advertisement. On the other hand something like ‘Homeowners: How to Get a Solid Wood Floor Laid in One Day For Less Than The Cost Of A Laminate’ is going to raise curiousity and attract all those people looking for wood flooring.

Headlines act as a filter for your advert, they should work like magnets to attract those looking for your products and services and filter out those that are not. Remember not everyone is going to be looking for your particular product or service. The idea of a headline is to appeal and attract those that are.

Having a good headline is the first step in making the advertising for your Irish small business more effective. Future issues of the Better Business Results Blog will look at other ways you can improve your response rates and get the most from your marketing budget.

Like many people with the advent of a new year my thoughts turn to what goals can I set to improve for this year. Top of my list was to start to take regular exercise, with two young children and busy business commitments one thing I have let slip over the last two years is my fitness. So this year like many others I vowed to get myself fit.

I did consider joining a gym, but initially I felt that I’d start with something that I could do from home without having to get in the car for. I decided to start with running, we live near the Griffeen Valley Park and there is plenty of space for running so I thought I’d give that a shot.

The next thing to sort out then was a decent pair of trainers (or runners as they call them here in Ireland) like most people I had experienced pretty poor service when it came to dealing with sports shop in the past. So I turned to google for advice (as I find I seem to do for most things these days). I searched for running shoes in Ireland and straight away at the top of the search results in the paid google adwords spot, I saw an advertisement for a running shoe specialist company called Amphibian King. They offer the specialised free fitting service where they film you running on a small track and then analyse the way your foot hits the ground. Based on this information they then recommend exactly the right running shoes for you.

Being a bit of a gadget fiend I liked the idea of someone filming and analysing the way I run so I hopped in the car and drove over to Bray in Co Wicklow where Amphibian King are based.

To cut a long story short Amphibian King and Darren Kelly who served me impressed me with good service and savvy marketing in the following ways:

1) They were using google adwords to attract targetted prospects to their business

2) They use a website to provide further information

3) They give you one on one dedicated service - Darren spent over 45 minutes with me measuring my shoes and trying on and testing at least 3 pairs of potential matches - all based on the requirements of my feet not on how much they could sell me.

4) Darren was able to add value by giving me additional advice on how to start a running program, he even showed me his website with free exercises for warming up and strenghtening my legs

5) When I decided on a pair of shoes and was purchasing I was asked to complete a customer details sheet which captured my contact details (very important for following up with clients) and also where they record details of my feet so they can serve me better next time

6) They gave me a €10 discount voucher to give to a friend - a great example of a referral program getting your exisitng customers to talk about you to their friends and then have a reason to visit you is a great marketing tool.

7) They also gave me a €10 discount voucher to use for myself for when I need a new pair of runners. In about 500 miles time as Darren suggested - so in my case in about 5 years time

As you can see none of this is rocket science, but how many businesses in Ireland do this - not many that I come accross.

Good on you Amphibian King and Darren Kelly.

Now I just have to get out there and use them!