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Practice Effective Marketing

Written by: Brian James

Article Overview: Achieve a virtuous circle for your business of healthy profits, greater customer value and better meeting customer needs. Find out how...

Practice Effective Marketing

Know your target market. Match closely the demographics of your prospect to those on your contact list. Consider psychographics as well as demographics (i.e. the personality, style and character of your prospective customers). Identify who you like to do business with. Find your kind of people.

Build your database with intelligent information about customers and prospects. In addition to contact details you want to know the source of the contact, details of communications and responses to offers. Track their buying history and provide regular appropriate and relevant information and offers. Continue to give greater value.

Many business owners ask me what is the right price for their product or service. I say the right price is the highest price that the market will accept. You want to continue to push prices up. It’s important that you maximise your profitability. This enables you to be generous with your customers, offer greater value and be able to spend more time with the customers of choice.

This becomes a virtuous circle of you making healthy profits, offering greater value and in turn better meeting customers needs. You want to avoid being purely purchased on price. Your proposition becomes a commodity, your margins are squeezed and you are neither able to give value nor choose the best customers to deal with. This becomes a vicious circle and difficult to break out of.

You want to be able to engender loyalty from your best customers so that they come back to buy again and again and recommend their friends and associates. The best referrals come from the best customers. Don’t waste time with poor customers or badly targeted prospects (who are actually suspects not prospects).

For example, one business I work with sent out a loyalty programme to existing customers and other inquirers. This was a personalised direct mail letter with a faxed back response. 700 went out on the Friday and by Monday evening we had a 19% response.

The key success factors are sending the right messages to the appropriately targeted people at the right time using their preferred medium and offering them the most convenient way to respond.

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Article Tags: business owners, contact list, demographics, direct mail, existing customers, inquirers, intelligent information, key success factors, loyalty programme, mail letter, margins, personality style, poor customers, profitability, prospective customers, rig, target market, vicious circle, virtuous circle, waste time



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Re: My 3 best business books - 1. Think and Grow Rich - Napoleon Hill 2. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen R. Covey 3. Permission Marketing - Seth Godin Think and Grow Rich seems more powerful each time I read it or dip into it. The 7 Habits not only offers some very effective ways to organize your life (which I have yet to master!), but also some great quotations and thought provoking statements including this by Nazi concentration camp survivor, Viktor Frankl: [i:2naxzsom]Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose.[/i:2naxzsom] Seth Godin's Permission Marketing is a good read for anybody seeking to understand how to approach doing business on the Internet in the right way with regard to winning people's trust.
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