Strategies to easily attract customers to your business [PODCAST]

Episode 056:
Low-Hanging Fruit

Dom Goucher: Hi, everyone. Welcome to this week’s PreneurCast with me, Dom Goucher, and him, Pete Williams.

Pete Williams: Hi, everybody. Welcome to another fantastic show.

Dom: Yeah. I contemplated changing my name to ‘Dommy Twoscreens’ after last week’s show about my new purchase. I’m still just so buzzed about the productivity increase that I’ve had by having two screens. But that’s it, I’m going to stop talking about that now. So, what have you been up to? Quickly changing the subject.

Pete: Oh, look, plenty of good stuff. Working on the addition to 7 Levers, the addition to the course we spoke about and mentioned last week. Doing a lot and playing a lot around with the MagCast platform, with LD Magazine obviously, which is a new little project which is going great. The platform’s just about to be released, which is very, very cool. The service we’ve been beta testing and alpha testing to get our magazine out the door is going to be available to the general public in a manner of days, so that’s super exciting.

Did a webinar this morning with Ed for his mentor students and members of his Immediate Edge program to give them access, early-bird access to the service and the course that goes along with that. That was very, very cool. We did that using Google Hangouts. I think it’s called Google Hangouts On Air, which is a service that allows you to run like a little chat that gets streamed live broadcast via YouTube.

Dom: Yeah, it was very cool. That’s a very cool technology and we’ll maybe be looking at using that for some of our own projects later on.

Pete: Absolutely. Maybe we could work out a way to do like a live version of PreneurCast one day.

Dom: Ooh. Wow. I know, but I’ll have to like, you know, get out of my bathrobe.

Pete: But anyone who’s interested in the platform that we use for LD Magazine, MagCastPlatform.com is where you can find all the information about that. I’m getting tweet and email of where people can sign up and find out more information. So MagCastPlatform.com is where you go.

Dom: Yeah, that’s right. If you want to see LD Magazine, obviously an example of what you can do with the MagCast platform, that’s LDMagazine.com. That’s our magazine about lifestyle design. The MagCast platform itself is going live real soon and you’ll all be able to see if it fits in with your business, and take some of the ideas we’ve put forward in previous shows about how you can use it to reach your audience. So, MagCastPlatform.com, just to sign up and be notified when that goes live for public access. Very cool. Anything else you’ve been up to?

Pete: Oh, with all these crazy shenanigans going on in my world and in my diet. But that’s probably about the crux of it, I think, since last week’s show. I bought a share in Facebook.

Dom: You bought a share in Facebook.

Pete: Yep. I bought a share in Facebook.

Dom: Steady on there. Calm down. Don’t go overboard.

Pete: It was the talk of the week. I just got wrapped up in the whirlwind, so I bought a share. Let me get some of the reasons why for that. I didn’t actually invest properly in Facebook. Luckily, obviously, with what happened over the first few days since the IPO. I think people who got in pre-IPO did exceptionally well, particularly if they were able to cash out early or at least in the first few days of trading or the first day of trading anyway.

But I’m still a little bit sheepish on the valuation. I think Facebook is here to stay. I’m sure I mentioned in a previous episode recently about the book, The Facebook Effect and how that tells a story of how Facebook sees its business and the service they offer. I think Facebook’s well too engrained in the web these days to be going anywhere quickly. My prediction, this is a prediction of mine, is that Facebook Credits revenue will surpass PayPal within two years.

Dom: Ooh.

Pete: I really do think Facebook’s going to become the passport of the web. Facebook Connect is getting out there and it’s starting to apply to a lot more real-world , non-techie-related sites. Spotify launched in Australia here just recently, and you could connect to that using your Facebook Connect account. That’s going to become more and more prevalent across the web in many different places. I think the next extension for that, for Facebook, and will actually give them a lot more growth than necessarily the mobile platform will be the actual Facebook Credits being used across the web.

Obviously, it’s still available right now inside games. You can buy watering cans for Farmville and that sort of crazy shenanigans. But I don’t think it’s going to be far off before Facebook actually become a PayPal, and you can buy something off eBay or you can buy a product online using your Facebook Credits as the payment gateway in the same way that you do PayPal. That’s my prediction.

Dom: That sounds like a huge leap. But, if anybody knows the history of the internet, that’s really where PayPal came from. It came from the fact that eBay needed some way of taking money off people, right?

Pete: I think eBay was already there. They didn’t really have a service to make that easy. PayPal sort of sprouted out, then eBay bought PayPal.

Dom: Yeah. Well, that’s the thing. It grew from that focused need, and now it’s a way of paying for things all over the place. So the Facebook have started their own, it’s not so out there as a prediction, really.

Pete: No. I don’t think so. But the reason I bought a share in Facebook, and I bought it off a service I’ve used quite a bit that allows you to buy one share of stock. And unlike normal trading, if you use E*TRADE or any of those sort of online trading platforms where you can buy and sell shares, you don’t actually get the stock certificate, which is historically the really pre-designed certificate telling you how many shares of that particular company you own. I’ve used this service and bought Disney stock, I’ve bought a share in Trump’s organization before he took it off market, Playboy.

Fleur got a Tiffany one for her birthday last year. So I thought I’d buy another one, just one share in Facebook. It ends up being about $120, or I think it is roughly with the shipping to Australia anyway. It’s just a nice little bit of wall art. I’m not a fan of paintings, I’m a fan of stock certificates. So I’ve got a few of them hanging around my office. I added another one to the collection, being a share in Facebook.

Dom: OK. That is about as business geeky as it gets, really.

Pete: It is. It’s a great gift though. Seriously, for the entrepreneur, wantrepreneur, businessperson, or even someone who really loves a brand, if you have a friend who drinks three cans of Coke a day. Maybe I should buy a one share of Pepsi on behalf of the Market Samurai team, because they’re huge Pepsi Max drinkers and that’s kind of a bit of a running joke around that community. Maybe I should buy them all a share in Pepsi for their office hanging on the wall.

It’s a really cool kind of gift. Fleur’s not businessy, as we’ve spoken about before, but she loves her share in Tiffany’s. It’s one little share. She thought it was the best gift ever for her 30th from her girlfriends. So there you go.

Dom: One way of getting your money back a little bit at a time, I guess.

Pete: Unfortunately, the first question Fleur asked was, “Does Tiffany’s have a shareholder’s discount card?” But unfortunately, it doesn’t.

Dom: Cool. Alright, that is slightly out there and geeky, but I like it. It’s different, it’s definitely different. So this week’s topic, got one for me? Since I really kind of went crazy last week.

Pete: It was your episode. I kind of mentioned at the end of the show last week that I want to talk about low-hanging marketing fruit. It’s a combination of a few questions that came back from the recent community survey we had. A few people asked that question different ways. It’s also something that I think we spoke about maybe three or four episodes back where I kind of made the point, which is going to be ironic in a moment, and my point was that if someone says, “These are things you should be doing in your business,” take that with a very big grain of sea salt.

Because you’ve got to check the context and check the relevance to your business, because not every business needs a website, and for some businesses yellow pages is still the best place to advertise. So, horses for courses, message to market match. I think there are a whole bunch of things that we’ve spoken on the podcast, and on the blog, and in various places that for the majority of businesses, these are going to be the low-hanging fruit for the business or for the entrepreneur to get more leverage in what they’re doing.

So I thought I could just run through these today, touch on them, talk about some of them, dig deep on others, and just give people a mental checklist to go through and think, “OK, yes, I could be doing this for my business,” or, “No, it’s not relevant to me,” or, “I should really re-investigate how I’m doing this in my business or how I can do it better.” There’s no real direct order to the list, it just came about from pinning some ideas down. It’s not really categorized or anything, it’s a little all over the shop. But I think it could be just a mental checklist with people to think, “OK, am I doing all these things that are low-hanging fruit for a lot of business and a lot of entrepreneurs?”

Dom: Cool. So basically it’s an idea show, yeah?

Pete: Pretty much.

Dom: Cool, let’s crack on then.

Pete: Alright. Number 1 on my list was AdWords. This ties back into the Preneur Hierarchy episode, and that whole framework that we talked about a bit. Because with your marketing dollars, the best ROI for attracting new leads to your business is getting in front of people who have their wallets half-open, trying to find a solution for a problem they’ve already identified. That’s what you should be doing with your marketing. As we spoke about, AdWords is predominantly the place people go these days when they’re looking for a solution.

It was the Yellow Pages, five or 10 years ago. Now it’s AdWords. No matter what business you’re in, you should working at and at least testing AdWords to see if it’s a way to generate traffic for your business. There’s a client I’ve been working with recently, and we’ve been doing a whole bunch of stuff with business and things like that. He operates in a very, very small niche, and a very small geographical niche as well. The first response was, “I don’t know if AdWords is really going to be the best ROI for me, or there’s going to be a lot of wastage.”

There was the thought that if he advertises on AdWords, it’s going to have to hit the entire state or the entire country. Whereas, what he can do with AdWords that I don’t think a lot of people are aware of is that you can actually take your postcode or your longitude/latitude area of where your business is located, and say, “I only want my adverts shown to people within a 10-mile radius of this particular point on the map.” So yes, your impressions are going to be very, very low.

But if you maximize your advert by putting in your address details and linking it to your Google Maps account which will automatically give you an additional line of your AdWords listing, and put in local words in the actual ad title or ad copy, it’s going to get very targeted and should be very cost-effective, and thus give you a very good ROI. No matter what you’re doing, I think AdWords can be used very intelligently.

Dom: Let’s just clarify there though. In terms of return on investment, for anybody who’s not used AdWords or hasn’t really thought about it for whatever reason, the most important, the most significant thing about AdWords is you only pay if somebody clicks on your advert.

Pete: Absolutely.

Dom: It’s a model they call cost-per-click. That example you gave where you’re absolutely super mega, mega targeting your advert, and there’s lots of ways of targeting the adverts. But the point is however many times people see it or the number of people that see it, or what they call impressions; as long as the people that actually click the advert are the people you really want to, if you target your AdWords well, that’s a good way of doing it.

Obviously, we’ll talk about split testing. I’m sure is one of your things. But if your advert is well targeted and you only pay if they click it, then that principle in itself is a high return on investment, isn’t it?

Pete: Absolutely, exactly right. Unlike billboard advertising or traditional advertising where you’re paying for eyeballs, you’re paying for conversions. You’re paying for results. You’re paying for a response, which is great.

Dom: Yeah. And that is it. I mean, just flagging back to the Preneur Hierarchy for a second. Some people see all forms of advertising at the top of the pyramid, at that spray-and-pray, just showing everybody. Now, billboards are the epitome of spray-and-pray in a way, because you don’t know who’s seen it, whose reacted to it, what they’re doing, and who’s going to see it.

But advertising on things like AdWords where you can really target is, going back to your example, it is finding the people who have already identified that they’ve got a problem and are actively looking for a solution. They’re typing a search into Google, and your advert comes up as part of the responses to that search. So it’s not spray-and-pray, it is targeted marketing.

Pete: Yeah. Absolutely. An extension to that, which I touched on before, is Google Maps. That’s the next extension of that thing because with mobile devices being so prevalent these days, Google Maps is a big part of the people’s searching for a solution, particularly, if you’re in that space that is instant problem, instant solution-type of marketplace. Maybe you’re a takeaway food shop, you’re a chemist, that kind of thing where someone goes, “Oh, I need this now.”

And it’s not really a long drawn-out thought process. Maybe you’re a massage parlor or something like that, that Google Maps is a very prominent place to be putting your business and making sure you’re maximizing – see, this is something we touched on. I think it was in the episode last week or it might have been a consulting conversation where you really want to make sure you’re maximizing your Google Maps listing.

Just having a Google Maps listing does not mean you’re really picking all the low-hanging fruit. The picking of the entire fruit that’s available to you is when you actually maximize that Google Maps listing by putting videos and images and content and keywords, and really getting everything you can out of that Maps listing.

Dom: Absolutely. I mean, for me, AdWords versus Google Maps, I would say that Google Maps is even lower-hanging fruit because it’s completely and utterly and totally free.

Pete: Yep.

Dom: A Google Maps or Google Places listing is something that really there’s no reason why you shouldn’t do it if you have a physical place of business, which is really the anchor point for a Google Map or Google Places listing. But it’s completely free. And then once you’ve made the listing or once you’ve started your listing, you’re absolutely right; just having one isn’t enough. There’s lots of opportunity to promote your business. We did start talking about it last week.

And talking back to the things we talked about last week on Leakage, there’s so many opportunities to add more information about your business, about your services. You can add opening hours, the kind of payment methods you’ve got. You can add photographs and video. There are so many things you can add. So, go ahead and do it because it’s all free. None of it costs you anything to reach more people and to give a much better presence for your business when people are searching.

Pete: Absolutely, absolutely. That’s the bottom of the Preneur Hierarchy-type of stuff, which is very low-hanging fruit. Something else that I noted down was just your email signature, and it’s very simple. This is, again, not really an out there marketing idea. But from a low-hanging fruit perspective, do you have some sort of call-to-action on some level in your email signature? Maybe, “Have you read my most recent blog post?” or, “Have you checked out this free report?” Or just, have you got a decent signature in there?

It’s very small and a lot of people just overlook it because it’s an email signature. But you might pick up a few extra clicks here and there because it’s something that gets forwarded on every day. You do it once and it’s set and forget for the next 6 months or 12 months, and you look at changing it again. So just something small like that is worth considering. What is your email signature doing? Is there a call-to-action for a lesser known product?

Don’t necessarily sell the thing everyone knows about when they consider you and your business, but something that’s lesser-known that you offer. Maybe you’re an accountant that also offers self-managed 401(k) or superfunds. Maybe you’re a web-development company that also offers press release distribution, or that business that by educating the clients about the other lesser-known services that’s extra revenue for you. That’s coming back to that whole 7 Levers thing, that you’re getting more items and more transactions per client per year.

Dom: Absolutely. Again, that was letting your clients know that you can perform a service, letting them know your capabilities, was something that we talked about last week; it’s another form of leakage. If people don’t know you can do something, there’s no way you’re ever going to sell that service or product.

Pete: You are letting this leakage thing out here.

Dom: Dude, honestly, I made an entire show out of it last week and I had stuff left over. But yeah, going back to the 7 Levers. Your emails go out to not only new people but existing people. As you say, repeat business. One of my consulting clients does this brilliantly because all of their staff are communicating with their clients on a regular basis via email and lots of other mediums. But email is a primary part of their business. Just to communicate backwards and forwards, they have standardized — their admin team communicate, but the actual people working in the business do as well.

And their signature is regularly updated with the latest podcast or the latest interview or the latest newsletters out. They announced that they’ve updated their website to a new design. They’re really on top of this, really doing a fantastic job with it, and it’s so effective, and it’s so simple. It’s just a little thing, it sits there and goes with every communication you make. It’s a great way, and again, another low-hanging fruit, easy thing to do.

Pete: Something else that’s very easy to help your productivity when we think about email is using filters, and using automation around your email inbox. So many people get so many emails that you just don’t really need to digest or do anything with, and it just takes up space in your inbox, stress, and a bit of mindshare. So putting filters and automatic tags in your emails is just such a very easy thing to do to just help you manage your inbox a lot better and help you get on top of that.

It’s very much a low-hanging productivity piece of fruit. There’s a blog post that I’ve done recently on PreneurMarketing.com which is talking about how I’ve kind of reached my version of Inbox Zero. It talks about using the filters and how to actually get them set up. If you haven’t got email filters working in your inbox, I highly suggest you check out that post or another post, and just look at how that can actually work for you. Because there is huge benefits of time-saving and headspace-saving you can get by putting filters in place.

Dom: I have two riders to that. One is, my all-time favorite email filter is the unsubscribe link.

Pete: Very true. Very, very true.

Dom: If it’s not coming in, in the first place, you don’t have to worry about filtering it out, do you?

Pete: And you know what the funny thing is, is so many productivity experts don’t mention that because of the fear that their subscribers are going to unsubscribe from their list. Which I find kind of ironic because if you’re really objective-oriented as a teacher, for want of a better term, if they actually unsubscribe from your list and get more productive, hasn’t their time with you been effective?

Realistically, as much as I hate to say it, let’s be completely transparent about this. If people stop spending an hour listening to the podcast every week but actually truly invest that hour properly in their business, working through the 7 Levers because they know enough about it now, our time here is well spent and we wish you the best of luck.

Now obviously, we hope you don’t do that and you unsubscribe from everybody else because they’re wasting your time and not being honest with you. But realistically, what’s the point of this show if you don’t actually implement? And if the only time you can implement is by giving us up to implement, go on, implement. But just don’t give it up to take up another bad habit.

Dom: Wow, that was a bit deep.

Pete: Well, it was; but I’m serious. Isn’t that the whole objective, what learning is, is to implement? So if the way you have to implement is by getting rid of everything, then get rid of everything and work on your business, and then shoot us an email in 12 months’ time when you remember us going, “Hey, that one that you me to leave us and go and do something else and make it happen, and it worked.” Fantastic.

Dom: By the way, I’m not disagreeing with you. I’m 100% with you on that. I would like to think that we add value every week. We bring something to each show, and it adds value, and people feel that they spent the time well.

Pete: Yeah. Are you going to add that little rant?

Dom: I am not. It’s staying in. No, seriously, because I’m going to say it again. I’m with you 100%. We are about taking action to improve your business. And if you really seriously can use this 45-minute window better; let’s say you actually stop what you’re doing, let’s say you don’t listen to it in the car, you don’t listen to it when you’re walking the dog, you actually sit at the desk or wherever and you listen to this and you don’t do anything else.

So you don’t utilize the time to multitask or whatever, and you think that this hour would be better spent implementing the stuff from the previous 55 shows, or even just the 7 Levers, go ahead. Please, everyone. Go ahead. Because I would be happy to know that we had a sufficient effect, that you got enough from what we do that you can go and implement it. Because it’s about taking action. And yeah, please, if you do that by the way, do come back and let us know. Just drop us a line.

Pete: Mark it in your calendar, one year from now, to send us an email and see how you went.

Dom: Yeah. I’d like to think people will stay with us. Within before your little segue on that one, my personal view is that you should regularly go through the things, the materials that you received, the magazines you subscribe to, or now it’s all email, email newsletters and things. And if what happens is on any given day you’re clicking, in Gmail there’s an archive button for example, or even move to folder or whatever. And if everyday what you’re doing is ticking an email without opening it, 10 or 15 emails, you’re ticking them and clicking ‘move to the folder’ or ‘archive’ or whatever, take time at the end of the week, open those emails.

Open the last few that you got from that person. If they’re really not adding any value to you, it’s not even worth archiving them. Just unsubscribe. Stop them arriving. Because every time you have to do that, it takes some energy away from you. Use the automated filter to filter things of value that you’re going to read later as part of a process. But if you’re generally not getting any value and not going to read them, just get rid of them. Stop it.

Pete: Yes, Dad.

Dom: Sorry.

Pete: “Stop it! Stop it!” So the whole filtering in your emails thing is coming back to learning to use the tools you’ve got. That’s, I guess, low-hanging fruit. If you’re doing something like you’re using OfficeAutoPilot or Infusionsoft, or some sort of software, learn how to maximize that.

By actually maximizing the tools you’re already paying for and already using could be a very low-hanging piece of fruit that you can use to get more results in your business, whether it’s more time, more leads, more opt-ins, better margins. Whatever it might be, just get more efficient with that. That’s the learn to use your tools you’re very focused on, Dom.

Dom: Absolutely. But that’s because that speaks to something that you and I speak about a lot, which is very often people will pick up a new tool because it’s new and shiny, and think that having a new tool is going to solve the problem, when the problem is either knowledge or process-related, it’s not tool-related.

This goes back to the very old days. I was having a conversation with somebody the other day where we were talking about advanced web-design tools and stuff like that. They were completely shocked when I said, “You do know that actually it’s possible, and it’s always been possible, to write the basics of a web page with just a text editor?”

Pete: Yup.

Dom: The tools that we have and have had for years are incredibly powerful, and there’s so many features that we don’t use in them. I mean, Gmail for example. I’m a big Gmail user. Gmail filters, a lot of people just don’t use them. Back to the previous point, they don’t even know they’re there, don’t know what they do, don’t know in that. Another tool that you and I use all day every day between ourselves and between our team that really helps, and I’m going to somewhere do something about this to tell people how we use this, but it’s Dropbox.

Pete: Absolutely.

Dom: Pretty much if you’re in business and have any need to communicate with anybody, and certainly to share any kind of information within a team; if you’re not using Dropbox, you really are doing something the hard way. But, at the same time, I deal with people now to Dropbox every day and they’re unaware of certain things you can do with it.

They take it as it’s advertised, just a way of sharing files. You put it in here, it pops up there. But there’s some fantastic features to Dropbox that really can enhance your use for it, just by learning about it all. So I’m 100%, yes, as you say, it’s one of my favorite topics: learn to use the tools you’ve got before you start looking for a new one. Because there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit there.

Pete: Absolutely. The next one on my list is another Google tool – seems to be kind of a bit of a Google lovefest tonight, but remarketing lists. This is something that probably a lot of people aren’t aware of. A function of Google AdWords allows you to create what they term ‘remarketing lists,’ and the concept is this: that you can put a little bit of code on your web page or on your website. And then, as people come to your website, they get tagged as a visitor. That way, you can build up almost like an invisible list of your web visitors.

You don’t have to get their email address, you don’t get any data about them; all you know is how many people are on this invisible list. And then what you can do with that is you can then run banner advertising across the web directly to the people who have previously visited your website. Let’s say for example you sell something that has a long buy cycle. So maybe you’re in real-estate, maybe you’re in investment, maybe you’re in life insurance or a range of other niches that are relevant where it comes to long buying cycles.

They come, they get quotes, they think about it, they come back. What you can do is you can basically tag people when they come to your website for the very first time, and then follow them around the web with banner adverts. No matter what website they’re doing to, if that website has banner ads ran by the Google platform, your ads will appear exclusively to those people. So you’re getting a very targeted list of people to sell to, or remarket to, that are already somewhat put their hand up and made themselves known as a potential prospect.

Now, you can get very clever with this. What you can do is you can make a specific remarketing list for people who went to your ecommerce checkout page but didn’t actually purchase. It’s almost like your list of cart-abandonment people, and then offer them a 5% discount for the next 36 hours. The banner can say, “Hey, you haven’t purchased from us,” or, “You have purchased from us,” or, “We notice you haven’t purchased and we want to give you a 5% discount,” or simply, “Hey, 5% discount off ABC.com for ecommerce purchases in the next 24 hours.”

It’s a very cool way of building up a visible list of just browsers to your website. Because if they come and don’t convert or don’t opt-in, as we talked about in the 7 Levers, what you can do is still get a chance to market back to them in a very cost-effective way. And whether or not you actually do the banners and build that up straightaway, that’s up to you. But I do encourage everyone that has a website to actually spend the one hour learning how to set up a remarketing campaign.

It does take all of that seven minutes. But if you haven’t done it before, it might take an hour of reading and things like that and getting the code organized on your website. You’re building this list up that can build up for six months, and you might get back to it in six months’ time. But at least in six months’ time, you have this little database of 200,000 tagged prospects you can start marketing back to.

Dom: Yeah, that, I have to say, you and I have talked about it a while ago, it wasn’t until after you first talked about it that I started to notice that. It’s a very subliminal thing. You got to a website in response to whatever, and the first time I noticed it was actually in response to an advert that appeared at the top of Gmail. And I went to the website and I looked at it, and I didn’t opt in and I didn’t do anything particular with that company. I was just interested by their advert.

And then all of a sudden, I just started seeing these banners for that company in various other places that I’ve been that did banner advertising. They just kept appearing. In fact, they were appearing quite a lot because it was I think early on in the service and very few people were using it. We were getting a lot of exposure. But it’s great. And your tip is really good, actually. I really like that because to just get the code on your website and start collecting the notifications that these people have been there before, that, is that free?

Pete: It’s absolutely free, doesn’t cost a cent to build a database.

Dom: Right. So you’re building database of people that at some point have visited your website. And then, as you say, later on when you decide to actually do a banner ad campaign, which you will then pay for obviously, you’ve got actually targeted user data. These are people that have shown an interest in your service, no less.

Pete: They’re already aware of your business.

Dom: Yeah. So reminding them, for whatever reason, is great. That’s a great tip, really good.

Pete: I just want to make a request, that can everybody go and visit PreneurMedia.tv in about two days’ time? Because I haven’t put remarketing on that site. So anybody who’s been there previously, can you just come back? You can stay on the site for like two seconds. You don’t have to just play around; just come back and get tagged, that’s all I’m asking.

Dom: Or, folks, you can visit PreneurMedia.tv because that’s where the show notes and transcripts to all the shows are.

Pete: There’s more value than just getting our remarketing list, OK.

Dom: Yeah, yeah. That’s one of those things. We always recommend that you give value to people if you want them to do something for you. So I’m just going to give you some value there, folks.

Pete: Ah, you listen to the show. I love it. Something else that I’ve gotten, moving on, is something that you actually added to this list which we were playing around with recently, loyalty cards. I know you’re a big advocate for these.

Dom: Yeah. It’s, again, one of those really simple little things. We talked about; it’s the 7 Levers principle. Get people to come back to your store and buy from you again. To get a 10% increase in your number of transactions per customer, you need one customer in 10 to come back one more time. And a great way to do that is a loyalty card. You go to the local copy shop, it doesn’t have to be elaborate, there’s loads of different ways to get these done.

You come up with a very simple design. You can use your word processor or whatever it is, it doesn’t have to be elaborate. Go down to the local – well, go somewhere and get yourself a little rubberstamp, or even just be prepared to Biro an initial on them, whatever it might be, something unique. And just get yourself a bunch of loyalty cards, and offer them to the people, customers, stick them in the back when they buy something, whatever.

They come to your store, and the idea is when they fill out and they come for a number of visits – it doesn’t have to be electronic and clever and difficult. It’s just like you come for a number of visits, and if you spend a certain amount of money in each visit – which is addressing another one of our levers, person spends a certain amount of money, then you tick off the box or sign the box or mark the box with a sticker. When a card’s full, it’s worth something. It’s worth a free something. If you’re service-oriented like a hairdresser or a nail salon, it’s worth a discount.

If you sell goods, it’s worth something. And the other low-hanging fruit, because we talk about communicating with your customers and finding ways of doing that, very few retail stores actually have a way of collecting the names and addresses of the people that visit their store. A lot of people that we talked to in retail stores, when we say, “Oh, the 7 Levers. You need to communicate with your offers to your customers and talk to them so that they come back and let them know what your new offers are.”

And they say, “But we don’t collect names and addresses. It’s really difficult.” We suggest loyalty cards. One of the things you can do is instead of just giving the loyalty cards, you can actually get these people to give you their name and address either when you give them the card or when they give it to you for redemption. You say, “Hey, would you mind filling out your email address or something on the back of the card as a way of showing that it’s completed and it was yours and we got it from you?” You’ve got their email address.

Pete: Absolutely. It’s just weird that this is very prevalent in the coffee space. Subway do it as well. But this is what I think a lot of people need to do when they think about their business. I don’t know how we could do this as a show, but we could try to work out a way to do this, talk about cross-industry marketing. If you’re in the coffee game, it’s kind of just part for the course that you do a loyalty card. It’s just what you do if you’re in the coffee game.

Everyone does that. But if you’re in the hairdressing game, if you’re in the footwear game, if you’re in the indoor spin class bicycle service game, it’s not a common thing. But why not? And this is something; it always intrigues me that there’s so many opportunities for businesses if they just look at what other businesses do as standard and see how they could apply that to their business.

Maybe we could marinate on a show potentially one day, maybe listeners can email in some stuff that they’re doing that’s unique to their industry that they think could be applied to other businesses. We could maybe do an example show with a whole bunch of stuff that’s very prevalent for certain industries that’s not for others.

Dom: That’s a great idea. There are examples of great business practices everywhere and some people don’t notice them because they’re not in their industry. As you say, coffee shops have been doing loyalty cards. Another version of a loyalty card is our local sports center. You can go and you can buy a day ticket for whatever the service is, use the sauna and spa or the pool or whatever.

You can buy a multi-ticket. And if you buy 10 of these entry tickets in one go, you get like a massive discount. It’s like half price. But in order to get the multi-ticket, you have to fill out a form with your contact details and so they’ve got you on a mailing list. Also, you’re basically committing to going back and using the service. You’re committing to going and experiencing whatever else they want you to see while you’re there again.

Pete: Yeah, absolutely.

Dom: And that’s a sports center. Most people going to sports centers aren’t looking for business ideas, they’re looking to, well, I don’t know, depends what you go to sports centers for.

Pete: If you can’t tell, I go there to get fit.

Dom: Of course you do, of course you do. I go there to look at people like you and go “Pff, crikey, he looks enthusiastic, doesn’t he?”

Pete: If you want to see someone fit, check out a new book called Finding Ultra by Rich Roll. Now, this is not going to be a rickroll, I’m not going to rickroll listeners. But if you go and check out Finding Ultra by Rich Roll, which is on Amazon; I think it’s on Audible, so AudibleTrial.com/PreneurCast, and you can get a copy of that. But this guy is one of the 25 fittest people in the world, pure vegan. Very interesting.

Dom: Yeah, do you know what? When are you going to stop talking about that? I watched the promo video for that, and that was enough for me. I was exhausted.

Pete: So let’s give one more, or make it two more examples before we back up. Obviously, we’re getting close to time. Another thing that I talked to a lot of people about is up sell raffles. And this is again fiddling with the 7 Levers to get people to spend more. How do you get to increase the spend-per-client-per-transaction? With a supermarket I was working with a while ago, what we did there is we actually worked out that their average transaction value was, hypothetically, I can’t remember what it was.

But let’s say $67 is the average supermarket shop. We went, “OK, let’s try and get that to 80. Let’s try and increase that by almost 20%.” What we did is we then put a raffle available. At the end of every week, there was a $100 voucher or a $100 parcel of bottle of wine, some really nice chocolates, whatever it might be. Anybody who actually spent more than $80 in the next week got a free entry to the raffle. To qualify for the raffle, they had to actually spend $80.

So, yes, there were people who were already spending $80 who got free entries not doing anything, not changing their habit, and that’s fine. But for everybody below that, it was a great way to pool the average value up because people were thinking, “Well, it’s an extra $10, yeah. But I might as well buy that extra block of chocolate I was going to get,” or, “I’ll buy the 24-roll of toilet paper as opposed to the six-roll of toilet paper.”

And by forcing them to change their buying habits and their consumption process actually got that result of an increase lever. It’s very easy to do. You’re just working out what the last 100 transactions you had. What is the grand total of that value, divide it by 100, that’s clearly your average transaction value. Jack that up a little bit and give a raffle. It takes all of an hour to set up and you can find a significant increase in your revenue for the next 10, 20, 30 days, however long you want to run that raffle for.

Dom: Yeah. That’s a great example. I mean, just the loyalty cards. As I said, with the loyalty cards someone spends over a certain amount, they get a tick in the box. That’s another way of doing that. Petrol or gas stations, depending on where you come from, do this. I don’t know if they do this where you are, but they do certainly in Europe. They’ll say, “Spend this much, and then you can buy this extra thing at a discount.” It’s quite amazing. You see people looking and go, “Wow, what a great offer! I’ll give you more money, and then I’ll give you some more!”

Pete: Brilliant. Brilliant marketing.

Dom: Yeah, but it’s a very, very, very clever way of doing it. But I love the raffle idea because it’s so simple to do. You’re not committing to give anybody, to give everybody something; you’re actually just giving them entry into a raffle. But yes, it’s a great way to increase revenue.

Pete: And the final way is a bit of a tie-in of all those last couple of things together, and that’s simply having a point-of-sale offer. If you’re a retail store, having something on that transaction platform where you actually do the transaction say, “Hey, buy this. Buy that extra chocolate bar with your purchase of gas. A very, very simple, easy, low-hanging fruit way of increasing the items per sale. That’s another sort of 7 Levers-related, easy, implement-able, low-hanging marketing piece of fruit.

Dom: Indeed. In fact, you probably see examples of quite a lot of those, those things we just talked about. If you were to study another business like Amazon, who is one of my favorite online businesses to study and see how they do things, and then go on copy it because I think they might know what they’re doing with this stuff. They do point-of-sale offer like nobody else.

Pete: Go Daddy?

Dom: Go Daddy, yeah. They’re less subtle about it, but yeah, they’re crazy about that. That’s a great range, as you said. It was not particularly organized into groups, but it’s a great range of things that there’s something there for everybody. Point-of-sale offer applies not just to bricks-and-mortar and retail stores, but online or information product sales or whatever it is. Some form of competition or some form of offer if somebody spends enough is applicable. All the rest of them are all, I think, applicable. There’s something there for everybody, so it’s a great bunch of tips.

Pete: Absolutely. Let’s call this week a show.

Dom: Almost, almost. I just want to talk about something. Every week, we say please give us some feedback, folks, give us some feedback. And we appreciate the feedback. We love the iTunes reviews, we love the comments on the PreneurMedia.tv for each blog post that we put up with the show notes and things. We get direct emails, people use the SpeakPipe voicemail service on PreneurMedia.tv, and we say thank you, and we say that we listen. But I just want to prove that we actually do, because I was just having a look at the iTunes comments, and I spotted this.

This is in the UK Store: “Pete is such a fitness freak that he makes me feel very exhausted just listening to how many light-years he has cycled, run, and moonwalked over the past week. Dom has an engaging voice, but his accent sounds like he started his like in Cornwall, then went to New York, stopped off on Venus for a year or two, lodged with some Klingons for a summer, and then settled in New Castle.

Pete: Love it. Absolutely love it.

Dom: Awesome.

Pete: No mention of business or marketing there, but that’s OK.

Dom: Actually, in the same comment, “Pete Williams and Dom Goucher give practical advice that can be easily applied to most business models,” and he actually goes on to a sort of very thoughtful, very positive review. We really appreciate it. That was like, but it just made me laugh. We have had comments, certainly I’ve had some comments about my diction and vocal tics in the past in the iTunes comments.

But we do love to hear, I’m always entertained by what people write, and we appreciate the positive feedback and we appreciate the constructive criticism and we do take it on board. But I just wanted to make sure people knew that we do actually pay attention and read this stuff. Alright?

Pete: Awesome. Well, with that note, guys, be more comical. Throw some other comical feedback on the iTunes. We’d love to hear it and appreciate everyone’s support.

Dom: See you next week, folks.