Increase Customer Frequency

Repeat business is the key to ultimate long term success in any business.

Your goal as entrepreneur or business owner is to turn every first time customer into a life-long customer. However, in order to maximize the value of that customer, you need to encourage regular purchases on an on-going basis.

Encourage customers to come back frequently with special sales, events, frequent-buyer programs, credits towards gifts, unique offers or reminders.

In order to make this strategy work best, you need to buy aware of your customers preferences, buying patterns and styles. Itï¿½s very different between industries as well as individual customers. A window contractor might only buy regular supplies once every 4 months. So if youï¿½re supplying this outfit with screws, caulking, glazing tape, and the like, youï¿½d better be aware of their buying habits, or else youï¿½ll be wasting your efforts and probably annoying them at the same time, by not being aware of their preferances.

Keys To Success

Constant communication is vital. You want to establish a relationship and to do that you need continuous contact. Keeping in touch with your customers on a regular basis helps them remember the benefits they get from doing business with you. Whenever youï¿½re holding a special sale or event of any kind, be sure to inform all customers and prospects on your list.

You may have to notify them more than once to get them to show up. Keep your clientele informed about new stock arrivals, upcoming sales, whatï¿½s hot and whatï¿½s not, special guest appearances, seminars, expansion plans, new store openings, etc.

Enticing offers are critical to response. Even the best customers wonï¿½t show up repeatedly if thereï¿½s not something new or unique or special for them. Make it interesting, inviting and difficult to ignore.

Examples

To renew the buying relationship on a frequent basis, determine the best means of connecting with your customers. A wholesale foods supplier serving cafeterias, lunch counters and restaurants, should be marketing on a weekly (or daily) basis, featuring limited-time specials at reduced prices.

A computer retailer on the other hand, wouldnï¿½t want to contact customers every week. Perhaps a quarterly newsletter would work better in that scenario.

Holding a special event? Try sending invitations out to your customer list. If you hold several sales or special events throughout the year, create a calendar of special events that you can send to give customers advanced notice of those important dates.

The air miles program has become very successful at increasing customers buying frequency patterns and developing loyalty. The lure of getting a free trip to some exotic destination is enough to generate tons of excitement and increase the number of purchases.

Coffee Time Donuts offer another way to get you coming back to enjoy their brand of coffee. When you buy a coffee, they give you a club card that you present with each visit. After buying 10 coffees, you get one free. Then, you start on another card. Itï¿½s using credits to build repetitive purchases.

How?

Building a database and developing ways to keep in touch with customers and prospects is a good place to start. Then figure out some enticing deals you can create and a way to communicate the value of these deals to those most likely to be interested.

Robert Boduch is an author of dozens of best-selling books, reports and articles on the art and science of selling. A free newsletter targeted at anyone interested in selling more of anything is available at makeyoursalessoar.com

Related Information of Interest:

Internet Wealth through Affiliate Programs
Oil tycoon, J. Paul Getty stated, “I’d rather one percent of the efforts of 100 men than 100 percent of the efforts of 1 man.” He also stated, “money is like manure. You have to spread it around or it smells.” So what does this have to do with affiliate marketing and what is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is the revenue sharing between online advertisers/merchants and online publishers/salespeople, whereby compensation is based on performance measures, typically in the form of sales, clicks, registrations or a hybrid model.

Many sites on the internet earn more income from affiliate sales than they do from sales of their own products. Some site owners don’t even sell their own products; they only market the products of their affiliates. Take a look at most any site and you’ll see what I mean.

The Amazon associates program was the first online affiliate program of its kind when it launched in 1996. Today, it is the largest and most successful online affiliate program with over 1,000,000 members world-wide. They pay 10% in referral fees on all qualifying revenue made through their links.

An affiliate relationship with major site owners can raise a virtually unknown to a major player in a short period of time. This is the reason intelligent marketers know that affiliate relationships are a smart business decision. Instead of the marketer paying for the advertising, his affiliates take care of that when they market their own site--a win/win situation.

An example of an affiliate only website would be fatwallet.com Here you will see links to anything from books and magazines, computers, video games to Viagra. They even pay you $5 in cash back when you sign up to learn more about their hot deals.

Some sites provide information only and use their affiliate status to generate income.

Starting a site can be something even a novice to the internet can do. With a little bit of ingenuity and creativity, you could be on your way to a part-time or even full-time income thru just your affiliate relationships.

See what I mean about J .Paul Getty’s quote in my first paragraph: you have many people carrying the burden of advertising with affiliate marketing, thus taking the burden off the product seller. And by having many affiliates marketing for him, many people may see his advertising several times before they purchase.

For more information and a free e-course, visit www.internetwealthmethod.com

The Best Way To Save Money On Advertising - Target Locally
Over the years I have discovered exactly what derails an ad. More often than not, when an ad fails to produce results, the problem isn't with the ad. The problem is with WHO the ad reaches.

Before you start blaming lack of response on your ad, stop a moment to consider who it is TARGETED to.

Let's take a moment to look at Internet advertising. First off, let me say I dearly love advertising on the Net. The advertising rates for search engines and ezines are far, far lower than advertising your business on traditional media like TV or newspapers. For what one TV commercial would cost, I can advertise a business extensively for weeks, even months.

But, as I'm sure you've realized by now, the Internet is no magic advertising medium. Just as often as with anywhere else, your ad can pull less than expected response. The problem is with lack of targeting.

If most or all of your customers live in the geographical area of your store, using a search engine to reach people all over the world doesn't make much sense. You can consider your money wasted when somebody who will NEVER walk into your store reads your ad.

The solution is to advertise on sites or ezines that reach YOUR customers at a very high rate. This could be a local site that provides sports scores for dozens of local sports teams. Or a site that lists a great many local building contractors. Very specific information needed by people in YOUR area will draw just the kind of local crowd you can capitalize on.

We're seeing a sudden rise of local pay-per-click search engines. These use the same popular technology as Google and Overture, but limit their reach to businesses in a particular city, state, or region.

Often these local pay-per-click sites have very low rates, a little as one cent per click. Many offer as many as 1,000 free clicks to any business that signs up.

Be sure to check if the pay-per-click site has plenty of businesses listed in their database. An empty site won't attract many visitors and you may not reach enough audience to have any effect on your sales. Also watch for a pay-per-click that is promoting in your area. If they are visible to you, they are probably getting the attention of lots of your customers.

Linda Stevens is CEO of MyCalgaryClicks.com, the local Pay-Per-Click city search directory for Calgary, AB Canada. Linda believes in following her own advice and is offering $10 in free bidding cash to any site that signs up to advertise. Reach Linda at support@mycalgaryclicks.com

Drive traffic to your website by posting free articles

With well over a billion web pages worldwide, there is only one sure way to get a web surfer's attention. It's not banner ads, popup windows or any number of gee-whiz marketing gizmos. It's content--pure, solid, usable information that will make visitors come to you again and again. The Internet is driven by information, and the fact is, people are more concerned with information than they are with how fancy your site is. That's what makes article submission the number 1 way to drive targeted traffic your site.

There are hundreds of "free article submission" sites that will gladly accept your articles written to provide readers with useful information (Here is a list of hundreds of article sites and mail lists: Article Post Robot, Post Your Articles Automatically! ). As long as these articles are not thinly disguised sales letters, but provide solid content, these sites will accept them for publication, copyright free. In turn, they will then make those articles available for reading--and for publication--for anyone else browsing their article archives. Ezine publishers hungering for good, quality information to provide to their subscribers will include some of these articles in their own publications. Soon, your articles are making their way across the Internet. And at the end of each article (and as a stipulation for free publication), is your resource box, a brief description of you--and a link back to your web site! Soon, you are getting targeted traffic from visitors who have read your article, found information about you in the resource box, and clicked on your web site link provided there. It doesn't take long for the famed "viral effect" of marketing to take place, and you've got traffic coming from all over!

David is the leader of a software development team, whose developed www.ArticlePostRobot.com, the software which can post articles to hundreds of article sites and mail lists automatically.