We all can attest to how busy life has become… but how do we make sure that ‘busyness’ is productive to our business? A busy business owner is not necessarily a profitable and productive one.

A fresh perspective
If you start to contemplate a fresh lifestyle change, for example, taking the family around Australia for six months, it will suddenly become clearer which things and activities you (and the family) can live without. It’s easy to think of leisure habits to reduce, since we all watch too much TV/play too many games, but what about business activities?

As a consulting Mum with a gazillion things to do, good systems save me from many hours of work. There are ‘no brainer’ tasks like:

• Letting a good email marketing system process email opt-ins, bounces and unsubscribes; allowing you to set optimum times to send, and sending it to the right list category
• Reminder systems for business appointments, and
• Automated reminders to send account overdue notices to clients (this one is more to backup the ole brain)

Ages ago I realised that I cannot do it all myself, namely: BAS/accounts, sales, backend admin, replying to enquiries, IT issues, writing blogs, PR, branding/design, create marketing campaigns, etc. I’ve seen too many micro businesses suffer under the weight of all those tasks to believe its possible.

Outsourcing to professionals may hurt in the hip pocket, but if we take on too much, life will find a way to penalise us anyhow:

• Late bill payment fees
• Missing out on sales due to slow response
• Spouse mad that you never seem present and not distracted
• A slow decline of movement and muscle tone, leading to aches and pains.

Deliberate or Delegate?
Just recently I had a vital lesson in delegation, when a website coding problem wreaked havoc on a client website. As midnight drew near, I was stressing that the website would never look the same again due to my lack of ‘tech’ knowledge.

My partner had told me about a local WordPress expert who helped him out ‘beyond the call’ earlier that week. Finally I came to my senses the next day and emailed Mr WordPress. He quickly responded, and sent a picture asking, “is this what it should look like”? It was. Did I mind paying for one hour? No I did not.

Just about an hour later it was all fixed, including the footer. And it cost just $44 to solve a problem that I bothered over for three hours.

Henry Ford had a method. He said something like, “Don’t BE the expert, it takes too long. It’s far easier and faster to surround yourself with experts.” Amen to that Henry.

Through InfusionOz I meet many marketing managers or business owners intent on marketing their products with all manner of selling propositions to various markets. This could be called ‘too many targets’ syndrome.

For any given product, there is a primary target market and possibly secondary markets. If you are trying to capture two different markets with the same campaign, you are splitting the focus and this normally doesn’t work too well. It’s exactly the same with selling propositions – hence the name ‘Unique’ Selling Proposition.

The answer is fairly simple: just craft a campaign and choose the media for each audience. This is made easy with the target market segmentation provided inside Infusionsoft.

First, You Must Get to Know Them

Get to know your top 20% of customers intimately:  find out their reading or viewing habits, their shopping habits, and their interests and tastes. Write all this down in a file called “ideal customer profile”.  Then when you have a new campaign to be written, you can send this to your copywriter to craft a message just for them.

Why do I suggest the top 20%? Because that’s who spends the most with you (80%, if the Pareto Principle is correct). They are usually the most loyal, and will often cost you less in administration.

Many companies have an offering for each market segment and this makes a lot of sense. But be careful if you cater to both business and consumer markets, because each needs different styles of marketing. For instance, you cannot get away with a longwinded online sales letter for a B2B software product, because your main buyers will dismiss it as fluff. But offering a free white paper outlining the pros and cons of certain systems would be infinitely better.

Ensure you have a marketing follow up system in place to build on this great first introduction to your product.

Then, You Must Court Them

Marketing is a lot like dating. Just as the beer swiller at the bar with a one liner gets rejected, so does the email marketer with a full-on sales message or over-familiar tone, intent on the sale.

If you’re setting up an email campaign, spend the first email welcoming them and reassuring new patrons that you respect their privacy. The second email should contain some great fresh ideas or knowledge that will help their decision making (business) or overriding problems (consumer). The third email will build on this; perhaps introduce a case study of how your solution helped someone, or keep up the interesting articles… with links to your website if they want to find out more.

In this strategy we’re not selling in the emails because if they’re interested, the linked website pages should be primed for persuading both cold and warm prospects to your solution.

Sometimes this will not be the way forward because your business has limited time offers (such as a travel agency or accommodation provider). In this case, you can ‘sandwich’ these offers in between some words that ignite the imagination. Even well crafted captions will do the trick; it’s certainly preferable to an image-laden email that does not even get seen by most email viewers.

I hope this article has you brimming with new ideas to implement. If you need any help with copywriting, web design, or email marketing, please send InfusionOz an email and we’ll pass you to a trusted professional that’s right for the job.

Infusionsoft recently had a contest that generated an outpouring of videos, blog posts, and Facebook updates from fans of the program. People who use Infusionsoft love not only the software, but also what it allows them to do – increase their bottom line without adding extra staff.

All around the world, people use this program because it is remarkably powerful. They’re not die-hard techies, just real business people who needed a trackable, all-in-one CRM and marketing program.

Six Features Which Outclass the Rest

If you’re shopping for an online CRM but remain confused which to choose, here are six features that may give you that extra tip towards Infusionsoft:

1. Tags. These became popular with WordPress.  Tag Clouds – a way to classify information so that it can be easily found – are also great for segmenting your list. These tags allow identification of the right message to the right prospect.
2. Action Sequences.  You can easily add or change a record’s status based on certain conditions. For example, a prospect buys “Product X” from you, you can change the record’s status from prospect to client, add a tag indicating that they’ve purchased “Product X”, and initiate the marketing sequence of emails for Product X – marketing your up-sell packages based on what they bought.
3. Trackable Links.  You can send an email with a link that says, “Please have someone call me”, and once someone clicks the link, it starts an action sequence – perhaps it creates a task, assigns it to a salesperson to follow up, and sends off a sequence of emails.
4. Infusionsoft API.  It’s one of the few systems that allows direct access to your database via an API (Application Programming Interface). Basically, this gives it unlimited scope to ‘automate’ business operations. Read 19 More Ways to Use Infusionsoft APIs
5. Subscriptions and Recurring Payments. You can create order forms that accept credit cards and even spread payments out over a period of time.  After you’ve sold something, this allows you to concentrate on delivering the goods.  It takes a lot of worry out of chasing payments, just “set it and forget it.”
6. Custom Reports. If you really like to keep a handle on things, Custom Reporting is for you. The possibilities are: Marketing & Sales Funnels (graphical), Google Analytics through API, Managing Marketing Budget, etc. Infusionsoft users can copy the code from this informative post. You can create custom reports by pulling data from Contact Records, Tags, Order History, Opportunity Records, and many other database tables.

Of course, some people need to see it working to fully understand the functionality. So if you’d like to see it in action, click here to see a demo or have a go at the 15-day FREE trial.

A lot of small business owners have a gut feeling that they should be using social media platforms to create a buzz and attract people, but they aren’t sure if they should expend the time.  First, let’s look at the reasons why businesspeople use Facebook:

• Consumer Brand building
• Personal branding
• Establishing yourself as a thought leader
• Creating a Facebook group as another touchpoint
• Advertising targeted to key demographics (this is not free – it’s pay per click).

Facebook is growing its offsite presence (it seems like an omnipresence) with ‘like’ thumbs-up buttons popping up on every website and blog, allowing users to ‘show interest’ in them and to share their message with Facebook friends at the same time. Within 3 weeks of the launch of this new ‘like’ feature, some brands were seeing traffic from the social site double (example IMDb.com, source ClickZ). So for consumer brands it works.

But for B2B, people who are looking for new opportunities and professional connections, they tend to use LinkedIn. It is easier to see if someone is credible and trustworthy, since most have their resume and recommendations from others.

But Should You Jump on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc?

There are no hard and fast rules to say you must have a presence on social platforms. If you’re flat out just following up the leads you have – why add to your stress with setting up social networking for business?

Don’t just jump in with the lemmings.  First develop a new Marketing Plan for business. See where your customers are coming from, what are they interested in, what is going to attract them?  From this information, your plan takes shape…including how best to attract, persuade and sell to your market.

You are probably going to need a central system to control your marketing communications and growing customer base.   Otherwise, with multiple databases and different lead campaigns, your worklife will become chaotic.  This is what I have found in many micro/small businesses.

So from Facebook or LinkedIn, Email marketing, Website leads, and offline leads, capture all this information together with a tool like Infusionsoft… so a step-by-step sales process can be easily set up, and you can go focus on the important work of building relationships.

When we think of automation, many different things come to mind.  Some people imagine computers, whilst others picture factory lines and robotic machinery.  Automation occurs everywhere. It’s in our alarm clocks, our ovens… our computer calendar reminders and even our wristwatches.  Automation is a part of modern life, working away without our noticing.

What about in business – do micro and small business owners need automation?

In any business, automation can easily be set up in a number of ways:

• Scheduling daily tasks in the computer calendar, with timers to remind you when a task is due.
• Using software programs that automatically run a program every month.
• Operating system is set to check for updates on a regular basis.

These are all examples of automation.

So how does a Small Business Owner utilise automation more to save time and make life easy?

Firstly, look at the tools you have available.  A calendar is a great way to set things up so that you’re keeping on track.  If you’ve created a schedule of your day and allocated time to do certain things, then set it up in Calendar (inside Outlook or Entourage), with alerts to remind you when to finish and start the next one.

Let’s face it – emails often distract us from our task at hand. If you don’t want to be distracted by emails, turn off the automatic downloading of emails or set it to download only twice a day.

You can also create different views or types of calendars for the different activities you have – very handy for those of us leading double lives!  Some calendars – such as Google Calendar – allow you to colour code your different calendars and activities, so that you have a visual representation of the different activities you’re doing.

Taking It One Step Further – Complete Business Automation

You can take things to another level in your business by actually automating processes, so that tasks normally done manually are done using technology.  This is where a system like Infusionsoft can put your business on Steroids (good ones) with marketing, sales, and billing automation – to name a few.

The best part about automation is that you control the set up – so it can be customised to your business and personal needs. Before setting it up, my advice is to find some smart tools and ensure you’ve identified all the processes that can be automated.  The benefits are well worth it.  And if you’d like some help with this, just give me a call.

Email Marketing Tricks of the Trade

While social media is the belle of the ball, Email marketing still arguably provides one of the most cost effective returns on investment… if you have a well-managed database.  So how do you spin those database names into pure gold?

Give it a Branded Look

Effective email marketing systems let you use easy templates, which you can have customised with your branding. Use them time and time again. This gives a consistent look to your prospects when delivered over time.

Send Laser-Targeted Campaigns

You can improve your campaign performance by segmenting your audience based on information collected with web forms, emails they’ve opened and clicked, their location, and previously purchased products.  This is the ‘gold’ in email marketing!

Track All Email Activities

If you want to know how successful your emails are, you need to track your email campaigns to see how well your campaigns engage (and convert) those that respond.

When you can easily view open rates, click rates, opt-out rates, and bounce rates for each campaign, you will know how to tailor future emails.

If you have a large database you should also test new emails on smaller sample groups (i.e. A/B split testing). You can test things like subject lines and pricing offers.

Automated Marketing

Most email marketing tools can send autoresponders (a series of pre-set emails sent by the system).  These are often lists of email addresses, rather than a database for your prospects and customers – which can prove quite limiting if you want to store and manage information about your prospects.  As well as the ability to have unlimited autoresponders, Infusionsoft can automatically start or stop any autoresponder when a person fills out a form, opens an email, or clicks a link.  And the database will tell you exactly who has done it, and who hasn’t.  Hence – you are using a far more sophisticated tool to manage campaigns that make the data crunching and analysis a whole lot easier.

Deliverability

While the average legitimate email delivery rate is around 56% (Return Path, 2008), a good commercial delivery rate is over 90%. Infusionsoft has a 97% delivery rate. A careful watch on wording will also see it get past the individual’s junk mail filters.

Delivering more emails makes the most of your marketing efforts, so it’s important to use your time and choose your system wisely.

Follow-up of Interested Prospects

I’d also recommend you employ a follow up system for all email and web form enquiries; people will have questions about your products, service, or costings. After all, this is how you bring people into your sales funnel and learn more about them!  Customer-focussed businesses need to watch they don’t ‘forget’ to respond. Australian businesses have a dismal rate of follow-up: 59% of businesses do not respond to email or web form enquiries within seven days (Strike Force Sales survey, 2008, NETT).

Copywriting of Emails

Use the right writer! While it calls for a journalistic style for newsletters, it takes stronger persuasive writing for effective lead generation emails.  Don’t think because you wrote a good essay back in 9th grade that you automatically know how to write to capture leads!  So seek out assistance of those who can do it better, quicker and more effective than you can.

Here are some guidelines:

1. The messages will need a consistent style and tone (especially if you’re marketing as if it were coming direct from you).
2. The copy must be not too wordy, and it should draw attention right from the subject line.
3. Of course, it must deliver on your campaign goals. Calls to action must be there!
4. Good writing needs time. Planning your campaigns well in advance with a copywriter will ensure that your emails are written in both good time and good style.  Let them know all the research on your customers that you have gathered, because then they will be better able to connect with your prospects.

If you hire a copywriter, expect to pay around $70 to $140 per hour. You can negotiate a good rate for multiple email projects.

Remember: email marketing when done properly with the right tools and resources will make a huge difference to your business.

Sometimes we are lured by funky new software, devices with apps, and online tools that sing to us with their promises of status, flexibility, connectedness, and new toys to play with.  Rather than make us more efficient, these devices can actually cause us to lose productivity if we don’t first examine what our business needs are, with an eye on desired results.

Many business owners believe that getting the latest gadgets and programs will help their business… but the reality is far from it!  You can spend thousands of dollars on the latest laptop, related software, and then some specific programs for your business needs.  The costs can mount up.  But do you really need this major upgrade?  Will you use all the functions?

Every day there are new applications created for the iPhone and iPad, but most of these are more time wasters than time savers…  Then there are the programs that profess to take your hassles away, manage your marketing or your data, or print labels seamlessly, or even manage your tasks better in a timely fashion.

Here’s a tip:  technology is a lot like the big sales at Myer and David Jones… it’s only a bargain or of value if YOU NEED IT!

Determine Your Real Needs First
In my line of work I am constantly seeing new applications and systems designed to do multiple things. The marketing campaigns for these are brilliant because they make the busy business owner think that they NEED it to make more money!  Occasionally that might actually be the case.

Yet without having identified the business needs first – you aren’t going to make many wise purchase decisions.

When I worked for large corporations like NAB and Australia Post, we spent a LOT of time in the initial stages of our projects to determine our needs.  This shouldn’t be any different in the small or medium business.

If you don’t do this initial analysis, you will end up being MORE frustrated with a new tool that doesn’t meet your needs.  Plus you may find that they bog you down with complexity rather than make you more efficient. Seems pointless if you’re aiming to create an efficient and leveraged business!

So my advice to you is… if you are considering a new app, tool, system or gadget – ensure you know exactly how it’s going to benefit your business.  Otherwise you could get the exact opposite of what you set out to achieve.

Remember: in business purchasing make wise, informed decisions, and if you don’t have the expertise or knowledge about something – ask someone who does.

When it comes to talking to your prospects or customers online, do you come across as yourself or as an automated purchase taker? Do you make it personal or keep it all business? Do you find a new prospect and try to sell them your big ticket item on the spot?

The best piece of advice a mentor gave me on this topic is this: See your prospects as though you’re dating them for marriage… you don’t go to fourth base on the first date – you’ve got to go on quite a few dates before you take it to the next level!

I often see business owners try really hard to make a sale by blasting out an offer on the spur of the moment, then sit by the phone and wonder why it’s not ringing.  Have you ever been sold to by someone you haven’t heard from in a while but ignored the offer?

Statistics from recent research tell us that it takes on average 7-9 touches to make a sale.  I have prospects who have taken longer than that, and who have required MORE than just an email every week.  My prospects like to communicate with me personally and get a sense that I understand them and that I’m adding value to them and their business.

How are you ‘courting’ your prospects?  Asking for fourth base on the first date?  Or are you taking your time to get to know them?  The truth is in the sales results.

As our web-based communication age continues, we are being challenged more and more to find new ways to promote and sell our products and services.  Remember that it’s not all about the latest design and pretty pictures.  It’s more than a great offer.  And it’s more than power words repeated ad infinitum.

It’s a mixture of ALL of these things, and the magic ingredient of the human touch.  People want to buy from people – and that’s who you are after all.

The Ladder of Loyalty

The Direct marketing system is built around a five step ladder of customer commitment, dating back to the 1930s.

On the bottom we have Suspects – people we think should have an interest in doing business.

Once they show interest in our business they become Prospects – we communicate to them to encourage a sale. Once they buy something they become Customers. But this is not where it ends.

If you continue the communication, giving Customers added value and real  information, they move up to the Clients level. So they are happy to buy only/mostly from you when they need those products or services.

By asking these Clients to refer friends who need your services, they then become Advocates. Advocates willingly encourage their acquaintances to try your products/services.

All businesses should nurture the customer through to the Clients and Advocates level – where most leverage happens. After all, look at your business you will likely find the Pareto Principle at work – 80% of the business comes from the top 20% of all people you trade with. These are your clients and advocates.

“Simplify, streamline, automate”.

They’re words you’ve heard before and might attribute to large corporate exercises to cut costs, save money and downsize.  True in some cases, but streamlining is not just reserved for the corporate world.

Where small business owners suffer is in the constant grind of daily tasks, never-ending work, and responding in a reactionary way to requests and problems. This leads to ending each workday feeling drained and uncertain about what progress, if any, has been made.

As the 4-Hour-Workweek describes, it’s not only a possibility to leverage yourself out of your business, it’s a creative choice.  Moreover, to get there takes some work – it doesn’t happen in an instant.

Keeping life simple is a golden ideal most of us have. But in our business, how can we possibly keep it simple?  To truly be ready for leverage and automation in your business, you must first go through certain steps to simplify things.

Simplify = understanding who you are, your business drivers, goals and strategic vision is a good start.  Know what excites you and what drains your energy.  Create a schedule to keep you on track, and employ methods that support your daily work.

Streamline = outsource the things that you don’t do best but that take up much of your time.  Consider your common tasks and activities and see where you can consolidate them.  Look at your marketing and sales processes, ask pertinent questions of your best customers, and then create better ways for your customers and prospects to experience your business.

Automate = use technology and systems to make life easier for you and take the guesswork away.  This will enable you to outsource more functions to others, because the processes are already set up.

Unless you’re an expert organiser (the top 2%) this can all be a headache to learn, and because of unfamiliarity it can be very slow.  Why not outsource it to those who are experts… enabling you to get on with making money in your business.

You can do 50 different things to bring people to your website. But what about actually MARKETING to those prospects so that they eventually buy from you? 

One business owner I know had a website in a very crowded marketplace – gift baskets. Her site was nice enough but her conversion was very poor. If you’re in the gift basket industry in Sydney, you’d better be ahead of the game. If studies show that it takes an average of seven contacts from a business to convert a sale from a qualified lead, why do website owners often expect the people just browsing their site to instantly buy? Capturing people’s emails (with a tantalising offer just for subscribers) was my first piece of advice to her.

Where is Helpful Advice on Email Marketing?
Although there is a plethora of info on attracting people to your website, actually marketing to them and getting action (sales/calls/bookings) is often left to chance. 

Email marketing has been around for awhile now, but it is rare to get advice on what to send, how often, how to segment your list, and how to get a great response. So most business owners just send untargeted offers, which seriously under-utilises this low cost avenue for customer acquisition. (Of course I work with Infusionsoft, the tool to use to get those high performing results you want).

In addition, pay-per-click advertising to attract customers can get quite expensive if 95% of the prospects sail away before any contact. Email marketing works brilliantly with PPC advertising because it allows businesses:

• to tell them more details about the services/products
• to learn more about their visitors’ real interests
• to offer value through information prior to purchase (i.e. handy tips, news, events)
• to keep the relationship between business and prospect alive, right after they showed interest

Fortunately, I am working on a solution to help end the marketing confusion generally circulating in the small business world. It will be an exclusive Business Builder’s membership program. Stay tuned for some interesting, results-focussed advice.

Some E-marketing Tips

You need to encourage people to give you their email address, so what do you give them in return? While it is the most popular, you don’t necessarily have to offer a newsletter. Other options are: a free white paper with some facts about your industry, a free consultation or evaluation, or a free webinar or teleseminar.

Thank them for signing up to your list (automatically of course), personalising this message based on their encounter with your website. Once they read your newsletter/email, track which links they clicked on, and then target mailings to their interests and habits. You can even segment people who found you through search engine marketing in a separate mailing list from your general list.