There are three ways to increase revenue in your business:
- Get more clients
- Sell more products or services to your existing clients
- Raise your prices
What I’m going to discuss with you now can help you with both the first and second items on this list. (If you want to raise your prices, there’s not a whole lot of discussion needed. Simply show why you’re worth more than you’re charging now, and go for it.)
The marketing method that can help you to acquire new clients AND increase sales with your existing customers is to issue a monthly newsletter.
The first step in acquiring a new client is to establish communication with them. It’s no secret that landing a client the first time you come in contact with them is a very, very rare occurrence indeed. It takes multiple communications, or “touches” before a potential working relationship can develop.
Your newsletter serves as your way to ensure that communication can continue long after your prospect first comes in contact with you.
If you meet your prospect in person or on the phone, through either a referral, cold-call, networking event, etc., requesting this person’s email address so you can add them to your mailing list and send them your monthly newsletter is a very easy way to establish that first level of follow-up communication.
However, your first contact with a prospect won’t necessarily be with you personally. Your prospect might first discover your company when they find your website. If this is the case, hopefully your website has an effective sales message that gives this prospect a very compelling reason to take the next step and contact you.
In most cases, this is a long-shot. Either your sales message must be very compelling, or your prospect must have a very strong need to contact you immediately. Otherwise, they will likely leave your site and statistics prove, they will never return.
However, if your website offers a newsletter promising valuable content, this gives the prospect a harmless, easy way to gain information that might be helpful to them, while providing them with additional information about you.
Once they submit their email address in exchange for your newsletter, you now have an opportunity to communicate with them regularly, both through your scheduled newsletter releases, plus you can send additional email marketing messages if you desire.
As I said a moment ago, very few sales take place on first contact with a prospect. But once these prospects are receiving your newsletters regularly, at that moment when they decide, “I need a new computer consultant NOW!”, you will have the benefit and advantage of being in the forefront of their minds when they reach for the phone to call a prospective new provider.
Of course, the content of your newsletter will play an important part in both retaining your reader’s interest and in generating new sales.
And your newsletter provides you with a fantastic platform to create an attractive sales message that can appeal to both prospective new customers and existing clients alike.
You can create a prominently displayed text box that displays an appealing, attractive (and perhaps limited time) offer, such as a free trial of your maintenance plan, a discounted installation fee on a product you might have highlighted in one of your articles, or a special promotion on a service offered by one of your partners (such as remote backup, cloud services, Hosted Exchange, etc.)
If your sales message is properly written and targeted, it can provide a fantastic opportunity to generate new sales, essentially on automatic.
And if this particular offer doesn’t resonate with your reader, you’ll have continued opportunities for new sales offers, month after month.
