Here’s one of the simplest ways to come up with a profitable promotion that hardly takes any time at all.
Over the past few posts, we’ve seen how important it is to know our numbers...the number of enquiries from a given advert or flyer...the cost of acquiring a new client... how much it costs to get the job from each advert and so on. It’s important to know what’s really going on in your business.
Whereas tracking numbers is important...it’s equally important to monitor that information regularly. It’s a good idea to have this built into a system too, so that you can repeat successful ways of getting clients. And not waste more money on those that don’t.
I have a spreadsheet which tells me the results of each strategy I have used over the past eight years (and there were over 45 last year alone!). I know the cost of delivering my message to my prospects and I know how much revenue it generated to the penny. I then know the Return on Investment (ROI) for each strategy.
In January I was looking for a promotion that I could use to encourage new clients to try us out while it’s quiet. I didn’t mind if I really didn’t make any money at this time of year as I could always ‘work the back-end’ that is I would show a profit when they used us again, hopefully in 12 months or even when they referred us to a friend.
I realised that I had done what so many businesses do...use a strategy that works really well, get a ton of work off of it...and then never use it again! Which is strange really. After all, if you had a machine that consistently paid you out £5 every time you put a pound coin in...how much would you put in? The answer should be “ALL YOU’VE GOT†After all...why wouldn’t you?
I realised that although I had tracked all my numbers, I hadn’t reviewed some of them for some time. And I came across a strategy I hadn’t used for over five years. Last time I used it (in January 2003), it pulled in 88 enquiries in just 3 days! I remember repeatedly having to take the phone off the hook just to be able to enter customers’ details on the computer before the phone rang again.
And yet I’ve never used it since.
I have a system of reviewing all my numbers on a monthly basis but for some reason I just hadn’t noticed this phenomenal strategy.
The lesson? Look back over all your advertising and marketing strategies and see if any of them did really well. If they did – just do it again or roll it out on a larger scale! It’s that simple yet hardly anyone does it.