by Alyssa Craft | Jun 24, 2014 | Loyalty Marketing
When sales are flat or falling, many small businesses resort to common marketing tactics as a quick fix for the problem. Many of these tactics work in the short-term, which is why they have become the norm. But some marketing tactics can do long-term (and possibly irreversible) damage to your business. Let’s examine the drawbacks of five common marketing tactics so you can decide whether they will help or hurt your business in the long run. How can common marketing tactics hurt your business? Five common marketing tactics are lowering the price, offering a promotion, and appealing to fear, aspiration, or novelty. These tactics manipulate the customer into buying from you. Carrots and sticks such as these can be the best way to elicit the desired behavior for a single transaction, but they may do more harm than good if you want customers who have a loyal and long-lasting relationship with your business. Price Many small business owners are reluctant to play the price game, but cave in because it works. Most small business owners have lowered a price to close a deal. If you drop your prices low enough, people will buy from you. How this tactic can hurt your business: Slashing prices or having a sale may be a quick fix for your sales problem, but once your customers get used to paying a lower price, they will never want to pay full price again. Promotion Whether it is “two for one” or “free toy inside,” promotions are so common that we often forget we are being manipulated. Like price, promotions work because an extra goodie is sometimes all it takes to close a deal. How this tactic can hurt your business: Over time, giving things away for free can erode profit margins and attract customers that are doing business...
by Alyssa Craft | Jun 9, 2014 | Blogging
For some small businesses, blogging can be a great way to gain and retain customers. If you’re blogging, you’ll get better results if you encourage readers to engage with your content. Whether you’re looking for views, comments, newsletter signups, or simply want to stay in touch with your existing customers as part of your loyalty marketing strategy, these six tips should help you get started. 1. Include social share icons A simple way to encourage readers to share your blog post is to include social share icons at the beginning or end of the post (or both!). If those icons aren’t there as a reminder to share your useful post with friends and followers, then readers may not make the extra effort to do it. The likelihood of sharing goes up if those buttons are easily accessible. Think of social share icons like candy bars at a grocery store. You may not hunt them down on your own (and if you do, feel no shame, we’ve all been there), but seeing them near the checkout line may suddenly whet your appetite and motivate you to buy one. In a similar way, social share icons remind and encourage readers to share your content. 2. Encourage readers to participate Many businesses blog (or should blog) to interact with their readers. Interaction requires two-way communication, so you want to encourage readers to respond to your post with their own thoughts and comments. One way to do this is to ask the readers a question at the end of the post to get them thinking, and also to let them know their...
by Alyssa Craft | May 26, 2014 | Loyalty Marketing
Marketing is a lot like dating. While some people date for fun, many people date to ultimately find the person they are going to marry and have a life-long relationship with. As a business owner you want your clients to “marry” you. Dating is unstable, and you want stability and predictability in your business which is what marriage provides. You want to develop trust and loyalty in your customers, but you need to go through the dating process to get to marriage. Let’s take a look at those steps and what they mean for your business. [Tweet “You want clients to ‘marry’ you. Dating is unstable, and you want the stability of marriage.”] Courting Courting is really the process of getting someone to go on that first date with you, or the process you need to go through to get the first sale. Getting a first date and getting a first sale can be a lot of work. You need to look as attractive as possible, have the right message, be in the right place at the right time, strut your stuff, and have some good conversation: all so that when you ask for that first date they will say yes. This can be exhausting. While some may enjoy the chase in the dating world, many crave stability, loyalty and consistency in the business world. The First Date So you finally go on your first date, or get your first sale. Let’s say it went okay. If you want to go on a second date, you can’t just sit around waiting for the phone to ring. You will need...
