Use the “fishbowl” method to collect an e-mail address from every single customer or prospect that you encounter in your local business this week. This simple method is something you can implement in your brick-and-mortar business by the end of the day today, and it will lead to the collection of pure gold (aka e-mail addresses) for your business – gold that can be leveraged to move the needle again and again for your small business! Here’s how it works:

1. Procure a large bowl that will fit in a prominent location either to the right (as one exits) of the front door of your store at eye level and/or at each your point of sale/cash-wrap stations.

2. Create a sign to affix to the bowl that has a big, bold headline that says something like “Join Our E-Mail List for a Chance to Win!”

3. Add subtext under the sign’s headline, create an irresistible offer that fits your business that follows this basic idea: “Once a month, one entry from that month will be awarded a $250 gift certificate to our store!”

4. Watch the e-mail addresses pile up.

5. Enter the e-mail addresses into your e-mail system at least monthly BEFORE the award notification is made.

6. On a monthly basis, choose an e-mail address and make the award. E-mail them the award notification with an inquiry for their mailing address, so that they’ll come into the store. Also include in that e-mail a suggestion such as the following: “We value you as a customer, and we’re thrilled that you’ve won this prize. You are definitely deserving! We’d love it if you’d share some ideas of what you’ll be buying with your gift certificate with your friends on Facebook and Twitter. You can connect with us there at facebook.com/business name and on Twitter @businessname. I hope you won’t mind that we’ll be letting everyone know who won this month in our e-mail newsletter and through our social media channels as a way to encourage folks to enter this month’s new contest! Thanks again for being such a fantastic customer! We really appreciate your business!”

7. Post who won and what they won and how folks can enter the next contest on Facebook. Tag the person who won if possible.

8. Post who won and what they won on Twitter and @ reply the winner, if possible.

9. Include the winner’s name and a call for new entries in your next e-mail newsletter.

Happy fishbowling! You’re going to love the results you get from this great marketing tip!

Maybe you just made the newspaper or a local magazine – or better – you just got interviewed for a major trade publication, the Wall Street Journal or a mainstream lifestyle slick. Maybe a prominent blogger is going to blog about you – or feature you in an upcoming e-newsletter. Maybe you think you’ve thought of something so smart that an influential person tweets about your article, stuff or activities…

These days, publicity comes in all shapes and sizes – but one thing is the same. It will give you a boom. The boom will be short-lived if you’re not prepared to leverage it into long-term sales for your small business. Here are a couple of tips that will help you leverage publicity into long-term growth for your local business.

Get ready for the traffic on your web site.

This seems obvious, but you really should actively prepare to capture customers as a result of the publicity, especially on your small business web site.

1. Make sure an e-mail list signup form (that is short and simple) is strategically located at the top right hand side of all of your web site pages or posts. This will help you grow your e-mail list.

2. Make sure your social media profiles are apparent at the top and bottom of each page or post on your web site, so that folks can connect with you there.

3. Make sure there is fresh and relevant content and that all contact information, forms, store hours, and directions are up to date.

4. Make sure that your web site has the ability to be SHARED so that when people get to your site, they can – with a single click – share your business with 1300 of their closest *cough* *ahem* Facebook friends…. or Twitter followers or other social media connections. We recommend the ShareThis button at the top and bottom of each page or post on your web site.

5. Similarly, install the Facebook LIKE button at the top of each page or post on your web site, so that with a single click and half a thought, your web content or article can be posted to their Facebook Wall and their friends’ newsfeeds. This exposes you to their friends.

6. Finally, install the TweetMeme’s Retweet button at the top of each page or post on your web site. This button not only allows the sharing feature on Twitter, but it allows YOU the measurement to see who shared your content – so you can thank them and otherwise engage them via Twitter.

Prepare to leverage the publicity on social media.

Social media is where you will turn the publicity into a boom for yourself. Often media in and of themselves are not a direct connector. But the power of your network mixing with theirs can really work magic. Here are a few things you can do to stir that pot:

1. Tweet with the news writers and folks in the media on a regular basis (that means, ideally, BEFORE the story hits). When they post a story about your business or referencing you or your business in any way, use all available methods to THANK them for their kind words. Tag them on Facebook, and tweet out a thanks to them.

2. Do the equivalent of the “reprint.” Re-publish the news at least twice – maybe three times after it happens. Facebook and Twitter news cycles are short these days, so posting an article Wednesday morning and Thursday afternoon are likely to expose your story to a different group of folks. If you have over 1500 fans or followers, you should also post the story again later at night (between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m.) as well.

3. When you post, drive the traffic to the story via your web site.

How does this all turn readers or viewers or listeners into sales? Again, as in the first edition of Leveraging the Boom: Turn Events into Sales the goal is to make new connections – to capture contacts that you can turn into relationships and then keep as customers for a long and profitable lifetime value of the customer. It’s about short-term tactics that lead to marathon relationships and long-term growth and profitability.

What say you? How have you turned publicity into sales?

Photo Credit: Eivind Z. Molvær

By design, you’ve got customers and lots of them – because they are attending an event that you are hosting or sponsoring. They are a captive audience. Now what?

How do you hold on, keep the edge, make the big event pay off? It’s all about “Leveraging the Boom.”

When you have a dense customer population in your small business – a.k.a. a boom – you MUST make the most out of the event attendees literally while it’s happening in order to grow your business for the long-term. This is the only way to truly get the most return on investment from your event.

To make the most of the bump, you must make smart use of marketing tools to do two things:

1. Capture new customers.
2. Educate them about the benefits of using your company.

There are a lot of ways to accomplish these things, but here are three easy ways to connect that are extremely easy and efficient to accomplish – and fast – ways to turn a short-term boom into long-term sales and business growth for your small business:

1. E-mail. Get that e-mail address! It might not be a hard fact, but it seems like at LEAST 50% of folks have an e-mail enabled smart phone. For example, here’s a fun way to gather a bunch of e-mail addresses at a large event venue: Ask attendees to send an e-mail to you during the event. Then, announce the winner of an immediate prize: move to the front row, get a chair at the chef’s table, win a free dessert, receive an upgrade to the super-duper best package. “Just e-mail us, and we’ll pick a winner… right now.” Taking the 3-5 minutes at an event venue may net you 15 to 100 email addresses – easy.

2. Facebook + TEXT (SMS). While there is a lot you can do with text messaging, here is one free way to gain a connection to your new prospects and customers so that you can sell them more stuff over and over again for a long time.

Start by looking at the number of Facebook “Likes” or Twitter followers you have before the event begins. During the event, post signage and also just ask folks to text “LIKE YOURPAGENAME” to FBOOK (36556). For us we’d say “text LIKE RESULTSREV” to FBOOK on your phone right now. Guess what — you just got a new like! Live events can produce huge bumps in the like numbers for a Facebook Page.

3. Twitter + TEXT (SMS). The same thing holds true on Twitter. Have attendees text FOLLOW RESULTSREV to Twitter (40404). Yep, that’s all it takes to start tweeting. They’ll get your tweets on their phone – even if they’ve NEVER signed up for Twitter before.

But at the end of the day, did that ring you more sales? Probably not today – but it did make sure that you made contact with the people who attended your event. Now, tomorrow, you can stay in touch with them and get to know them better and expose them to new elements of your business – and yes, increase your sales accordingly. It will blow your mind. I promise.

What about you? What is your best method to turn an event into long-term customer relationships (and sales)?

Photo Credit: mastermaq

In case you missed it, local customers are on-line. I believe there is a lot of low-hanging fruit out there still for local small businesses who play it smart when it comes to web-based or on-line marketing – whether it be via web sites, e-mail marketing, social networks/media, or web-based advertising. Here are some places where I often see huge gaps in what local businesses are doing to capture search traffic looking for what they’re selling. Maybe you can close some of these gaps in your own small business’ on-line presence or marketing by the end of today.

Web Sites

1. Small business owners can make more money by giving customers and prospects more reasons to buy. Being able to update your own web site (content, photos, and links) should be as easy as writing an e-mail to a friend. If it’s not, you have room to improve.
2. Small business owners should know who is visiting their web site and how they got there. Web site traffic is like a focus group of valuable information – without the expence. If you don’t have this data from your web analytics (which should be basically free to access), then you’ve got room to improve.
3. Small business owners should be able to understand and implement (or have someone who can) basic search engine optimization techniques for their local web site. If you don’t know what searches are popular in your local market in your category, and how to optimize your site to grab that traffic without breaking the bank, you have room to improve.
4. If your local business web site isn’t the center of your marketing universe and isn’t well-positioned as an extension of your brick and mortar customer experience, then you’ve got room to improve.
5. If your web site doesn’t provide a way for customers to sign up automatically for your e-mail communications, then you’ve got room to improve.
6. If your web site doesn’t provide a way for customers to connect with you via social media (and vice versa), then you’ve got room to improve.

E-mail Marketing

1. If you aren’t using e-mail marketing to promote your business, you’ve got a huge opportunity awaiting your local business marketing program!
2. If you aren’t using an e-mail marketing program that allows you to split test, segment lists, trigger an unlimited amount of e-mail communications and measure who opened what when and how often – then you’ve got some serious room to improve – and sell more stuff for your local business!
3. If you aren’t consistently sending e-mails to your list – you aren’t staying top of mind, and you’ve got room to improve. If you think “regularly” is less than once a week, then you have room to improve.
4. If you aren’t collecting e-mail addresses aggressively in your business (collecting better than 80% of everyone that walks into your business), then you aren’t doing enough. E-mail addresses are worth gold to your business, and you’ve got room to improve your local marketing!
5. If you aren’t sending a series of thank-you e-mails to new folks on your list to train them to read your e-mails for the rest of your customer relationship, you’ve got room to improve your local e-mail marketing program.
6. If you aren’t using your social media, off-line and web site interactions as a way to gather e-mail addresses straight into your database, you’ve got room to improve your local business marketing.
7. If you aren’t using e-mail to drive traffic to your web site and to learn more about what interests your customers by having multiple options available for their “click,” you’ve got room to improve.

Social Networks or Social Media

1. If your local business doesn’t have a YouTube channel with a username that matches your other social network usernames, and if you don’t have a way to create video quickly and cheaply to share your customer experience and to educate your customers – you’ve got room to improve your small business marketing.
2. If you don’t measure video views by posting a link to the same video link  (usually on YouTube) across all social media and on your web site to replicate your efforts using video, then you have room to improve.
3. If you’re not showing not telling by using a social photo sharing site like Flickr to both show your customer experience, give samples of what’s inside the store and to create inbound links to your web site – then you’ve got lots of room to improve.
4. If you’re not getting a lot of business out of Facebook for your retail business, you’ve got room to improve. Think about how photo albums, video, wall posts, custom tabs, notes and Facebook messages can help you share your customer experience and sell things at full price. Facebook is a powerhouse – if it’s not being one for you, then you’ve got low-hanging fruit to go pick…on Facebook.
5. Don’t get Twitter? Don’t know how to pick customers up – as easily as you’d hail a cab in the city? It’s just that easy… If you’re not listening on Twitter and using Twitter to drive traffic to your web site, you’ve got serious room to grow your local business.
6. If you’re a restaurant, coffeeshop, café or local commercial district and aren’t on Foursquare, you’ve got to get with the program and you’ve got room to grab customers for your local business or business district! If you haven’t claimed your business on Foursquare and haven’t posted offers for folks who are nearby or to reward loyalty, you’ve got some low-hanging fruit ready to pick!
7. If you’ve never heard of Google Buzz – or don’t know how it can help your business strategically get the word out, then you’ve got room to improve.

Ratings & Review Sites

1. If your pin isn’t on the Google Map, you’ve got room to improve your local business marketing.
2. If you haven’t claimed your business on Google Places and optimized your Google Place Page with current status updates, coupons and offers, then you’ve got room to improve your local business marketing.
3. If you haven’t claimed your business on Yelp and if you don’t check it regularly and stay in touch with your customers there and keep your information up-to-date and if you don’t have a system in place to encourage positive reviews on this site, then you’ve got room to  improve the image of your locally owned small business online.
4. If you are a restaurant and you haven’t optimized your business’ presence on Urbanspoon, and if you don’t check it regularly and stay in touch with your customers there and keep your information up-to-date (including menus, food photos, Twitter connections, and comments back to customers), then you’ve got room to improve your small business online reputation.
5. If you don’t know about CraigsList, Thumbtack, Ebay, Angie’s List, Judy’s Book, Merchant’s Circle – or how they can help you sell more stuff for your business of nearly any sort – then you’ve got some serious room to improve your small business sales.

Maybe the easiest way to close the gap is to engage someone who makes it simple and easy to get help with new media and social media marketing  - and grab some easy wins for your local business in the sales department – an expert that really understands locally owned businesses. Get in touch with us directly if you have such a need…

I bet you didn’t know there was so much low-hanging fruit out there, did you? I bet you didn’t know that HOW you did all of these tools mattered so much – but it certainly does. Where will you start today picking low-hanging fruit for your local small business?

I got this message from MyScoop Mississippi a while back and stuck it in my “idea file” under “great retail promotion ideas using Facebook.” In this case, the message was probably distributed other ways, but the only way I heard about it was through a Facebook message that I received as a results of being a member of their Group on Facebook. (If you’re not familiar with MyScoop, check out Mississippi Publisher, Elizabeth Fowler’s interview on ResultsRevTV).

Here’s a copy of the actual Facebook message promoting this special retail event:

Subject: Debit Cards Ready…Set…Sale!

Does your debit card love a good sale?  Mine does!

I hope you will mark your calendar for a special sales event at Blithe & Vine and Cosmo Tots.  Stop in this Thursday night (May 27) from 5 PM until 8 PM to take advantage of 30% off full-priced merchandise (sorry girls, handbags, shoes and jewels not on sale).  If you’re already “booked” and can’t do a drive by for the event, stop in anytime tomorrow (Tuesday) through Saturday and ask to see the sale items.

Keep your eyes peeled for a sneak peek; My Scoop will be posting snapshots of our favorite sale items to our facebook group now through Thursday.  If you live out of state, just give Blithe & Vine a call — they have UPS on speed dial!

All my best,

Elizabeth
Editor & Publisher, My Scoop Mississippi

Let’s analyze why this message and this promotion works:

1. Subject line is snappy, sassy and grabs attention. It doesn’t just say: Sale and Blithe & Vine starts on Thursday. BORING. This subject line is fun and attention grabbing.

2. Body copy is also snappy and sassy with the perfect level of attitude and cool for the target audience. How can you bring the perfect level of personality into your e-mail messages?

3. The offer makes a special event out of an everyday thing: a seasonal sale.

4. The offer is flexible and accommodates the customers – it’s EASY to participate. (insiders who got this message can ask to see sale items ahead of time or call and order and they will even SHIP it to you!)

5. Sneak peak of sale items will be posted using a Facebook photo album – great cross media promotion and engagement opportunity beyond this message!

6.  It’s a personal letter style format similar to the letter style format for e-mail marketing that we recently discussed – except this letter was send through Facebook’s messaging system where you can send messages directly to all of your Facebook connections using your administrator options.

Great job by MyScoop Mississippi! How can you spice up your promotions, your promotional messages and get more out of ordinary business happenings? Share your ideas in the comments, and you might also get a featured post on this blog!

The “letter” is probably the oldest form of written communication. But when it comes to e-mail marketing, most of us regularly use HTML based e-mail marketing formats full of photos and image graphics. We’ve also discussed why subject lines mean so much to the effectiveness of your e-mail campaigns. But do you ever get in a rut and just have some things you want to say to your customers without a bunch of fluff and graphic fireworks? If so, maybe it’s a good time for you to go back to basics and just write a letter.

Recently, I got just such a letter from the Editor-in-Chief at a marketing e-zine to which I subscribe, and I actually opened it and read it – something I honestly, rarely do with their mailings.

What do I mean by letter format?

Just how it sounds. A letter format when it comes to e-mail marketing for your small business is just that – a letter written in normal e-mail typing text with a greeting, body, and salutation. A P.S. is also a great bonus because statistics say that those get read the most of any element of a direct marketing letter.

Why does the letter format work so well for e-mail marketing?

I think it boils down to being a real human every now and then. We humans of the earth like to connect with other humans – not mechanical, fancy looking businesses. As a locally owned small business owner, you have an edge on this marketing opportunity – and you should use it. Don’t overuse it, or you’ll lose your authenticity, but maybe once a month, this method would work phenomenally well for your small business. Insert your personality, your passion and your knowledge. Connect with your customers and share something valuable with them. Maybe it’s an event or maybe it’s just knowledge about your business niche that you thought would help them out. Maybe it’s a thank you for their loyalty. But at the end of the day, the letter format inserts another human element into your customer relationships, builds authenticity and leads to increased trust… And these elements lead to higher lifetime value of the customer, increased customer loyalty and stronger referral values.

With that in mind, what are the elements of a letter format, e-mail marketing communication?

Here are some common elements I would probably include in your small business e-mail marketing letter:

1. Greeting with real name. As in “Hi there, Marianna…” or “Hello, Marianna.”

2. A personal, authentic and thoughtful first paragraph.

3. A link to the relevant information.

4. Supporting information in subsequent paragraphs, maintaining the chatty, authentic, personal tone of the human sending the e-mail.

5. Bullet lists of relevant information

6. Close by repeating the main details in summary list format. For example, if you’re sharing an event with them, re-state the details as follows:

Webinar entitled: Seven Marketing Strategies that Work in Any Economy

Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 9 a.m.

Register here: insert bit.ly link

7. Friendly closing that says something like “I hope you can join me…”

8. Your first name

9. P.S. This is the place to restate your offer or add a bonus to the existing call to action offer, if there is one.

10. Skip two lines then insert your “signature file” with links to your web site and social media, general business and contact information, etc.

Please let me know if you’ve ever used this format and what the results were. If you’re considering this idea, what stood out to you or what ideas would you add to this post? Post in the comments below! Happy letter writing!

Photo Credit: a.drien (the letter)

With social media usage and marketing efforts growing by leaps and bounds, it’s not only important for your small business to be on social media – it’s important to say the right thing. How can you tell when you are saying the right thing?

Here are some of my tried and true tips for improving what you say – and therefore the engagement and resulting sales – from social and new media marketing.

What’s wrong with ordinary?

We live in a world with thousands of messages coming at us daily. Is your message boring? Possibly. For example, I received an e-mail from a statewide organization this morning. The subject line simply said “May e-newsletter XYZ organization.” I had no reason to open it.

We recently helped (through HALO Business Advisors) with an e-mail campaign on a weekend when snow hit Mississippi. This doesn’t happen often, and when it does—our world shuts down. For this small business owner, restaurateur, client and good friend of mine, closing on the weekend wasn’t an option. With little time to make it happen, his text message to me went something like this. “We have to send an email – let folks know we are open!!”

I could have sent an e-mail with a simple subject line stating “WE ARE OPEN.” Instead, we sent an e-mail out that said: “Who won the ROCA snowball fight?”

This e-mail had the highest open rate of any email we’ve ever sent. Significantly north of 40% of the list opened it within 12 hours, and sales that weekend were very strong. (The body of the e-mail message showed a picture of the chef throwing snowballs with his boys with the announcement that the restaurant was open that night.)

Traditional newspaper folks are losing steam in some areas, but they know how important a headline is to sell a newspaper.  The same thing is equally important to having a tweet read or an e-mail opened. Words matter. Pick a few good headline concepts from the major media outlets or note their style – and copy them!

Here are a few more of my tried and true tips for improving what you say – and therefore improving the engagement and resulting sales – from social media and marketing. These rules apply especially well for both e-mail subject lines and for tweets with pictures:

1. Shorter is better. People are reading 20 characters on their Blackberries and iPhones in the subject line. It’s becoming the tool that more e-mails are opened on. Shorter subject lines will work better than long ones, but you have to also follow rule #2.

2. Make me open it. If you can tease me with a question or factoid or humor, I’m going to invest the extra 10 seconds to read about it. Just tonight I sent out four different photo tweets. The one with a short title and a little humor had 35% more opens in the first 10 minutes than the rest of the tweets.

3. Grow a personality. If you aren’t witty or funny, find someone who is. That class clown or guy that always makes folks laugh is probably a good person to help you figure out the subject line of an e-mail campaign. Use teasers like: “Why didn’t Joe Smith eat supper here last night??” (Joe Smith can be interchanged with the name of a local celebrity or local news anchor.) More people will open that e-mail to find out that Joe is coming TOMORROW for a special event that THEY should plan to attend as well.

4. Follow through. Having a great subject line is important. Test it out on your staff or friends for some quick feedback. This shouldn’t be a 2 hour process, but maybe 20 minutes. Remember that spending an extra 20 minutes on a subject line that gets 10-20% more opens on an e-mail campaign is probably well worth the time. Look at the numbers. Let’s say you have a moderately sized 2000 person e-mail list for your small business with a nominal 8% open rate. This means 160 people confirmed opening your email. If you can fix your subject line problems and get that number to 20%, you’ve more than doubled the number of people who open your e-mails therefore improving the overall ROI of your e-mail marketing campaign.

5. Check for typos. Send your e-mail to a select group of your staff or friends who will promise to catch errors. We try and make sure EVERYTHING that goes out has 2 sets of eyes on it. It’s too easy to look at something for an hour and miss a glaring typo because you just aren’t focused anymore.

In closing, I’ll leave you with these sample social media messages that could work for different types of businesses.

Retail Menswear: “What can $250 buy at our store?”
Most people will want to know exactly what you are talking about — they’ll open.

Woman’s fashion line: “Your mother wouldn’t be caught dead wearing this…”
Wonder what that’s all about? I better check and see… They’ll open.

Restaurant: “The best lookin’ plate of food you’ve ever seen… details inside”
Hrmm, wonder what’s so special about the plate of food?

Retail Store: “The ONE thing you need to see from our trip to Market last week.”
Wonder what that one thing is?

You guessed it, they’ll open.