There are many ways to attract new customers, but what I’m going to say here is, I hinted on it the other day on the weekend challenge. But it’s simply to refresh something.
The reason is, change is a good thing. Change shows people that you are current, it shows people you are modern.
It actually shows people that you care because generally people change to keep up and to provide a better service to the customer.
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And the customer, here’s one of the secrets by the way, of marketing. The customer is only interested in themselves.
They don’t care about you, about your business, about what you do. They are looking for stuff for them. And that’s it.
So if you change, if you alter things, it shows that you kind of care a bit about them, because you’re staying modern, you are trying to keep them interested and stuff like that. Now how can you change?
So I’m going to give you a couple of examples.
Offline Business
Quite obviously, many of you have shops or stores or trade counters or so on, or you visit people or you deliver.
You may have vans or trucks or pizza boxes. Who knows? But I’m going to describe that as the offline business.
You may have a website fine, but those bits, pizzas can’t be delivered on the internet yet. Hopefully not.
So what we can do is simply refresh. If you do have pizza boxes, when was the last time you changed the design?
Now are you buying the generic ones? What about doing your own? Or if it’s not easy to change the boxes because you have 50,000 of them at the back that you have to get through, how about sticking an offer on top of every box that goes out?
Giving somebody a discount off their next one. Because once you get a customer, you want to keep them as a customer.
Every other pizza company is trying to get your customer that you took from them or they’ve never had. So keep them.
You know you make a lot of money from pizzas so just give them a discount off their next one if used within the next 7 days, 14 days, who knows. If it’s in America, the next day perhaps.
If you have trucks or cars or you know vehicles, when was the last time you changed the design of the truck? How about paying a designer? How about running a competition? Now here’s a couple of ways.
One, tell your customers, contact them, write to them, email them because you will have their email addresses, won’t you?
And tell them all in one mass, in one go that you are going to be redesigning the trucks. Has anybody, can anyone recommend someone who’s great at this.
There’s one thing. You’re getting feedback, you’re getting interaction and you are building that relationship.
Next one, is tell them about the initial designs. When you get them out, get a few designs. Send these out and ask people what they think. And then if you are getting the reaction, ask people to vote.
Now I know, you are thinking to yourself, ‘But what if they choose the wrong one?’ No, if that’s what you’re thinking, you’re getting it all wrong. I’m sorry, my friend. It’s not your ego. It’s for them.
They are the customers, they are the ones you’re trying to impress. You are not impressing you, it’s not for you. You might like green, customers might collectively prefer blue. So blue it’s got to be.
You’re getting used to it. Specially, when you start counting the cash. But involve them, change it up and when they finally do get updated, your vehicles.
Tell them, we’ve done it. We listened to you, we got these ideas from you. This is customer driven. This is what our customers want, what do you think? Let us know.
And then, in honor of our new trucks we are giving a special offer, 2 for 1, 10% off, etc. Any excuse to contact them.
When was the last time you updated your shop window display or your store front? You know the big stores do this periodically, the big stores, the department stores, they actually pay people.
I know one of my friends, good friend. His girlfriend actually, that’s her job at one department store in Canterbury, in Kent in England, her job is simply to do the displays. And that’s a full job. Why don’t the smaller ones do it?
Another one, do people visit your premises? Do they come to you? Do you do training? Do people visit you for other reasons or do you have a trade counter or something like that? How about refreshing the reception area?
Do people visit your accountants’ firm, when was the last time you redecorated? You may think, ‘Well that’s going to cost a bit.’
But when you do it, the important thing is that you tell everyone you’ve done it. Because it gives you an excuse to communicate with them. And then ask people for their opinion.
No one is going to write in and say, ‘Hate it.’ When anyone comes in, ask them for their opinion, of the new reception. And if they say we like it, reach down and give them something. Give them a sweet, give them a mug, or something like that.
People don’t need cash, money. Give them a little candy and something like that and say, ‘If you give the right answer, you win this.’
Because people are going to say, ‘Oh, it looks nice.’ If they say, ‘Well didn’t realize. I’ve never been here before.’ Give them one anyway. What’s it going to cost?
How much does a new mug cost? What are they going to do? Some people might say, ‘Oh, its okay. Fine, give us the next one.’ Some people may take the mug away and just never use it. Who cares? It’s different. When was the last time they got it?
Now if you are a website, yes get back to the online ones.
Refresh Your Website
It doesn’t need to be much. Now of course, I’m not going to go into the fact that yes you should only really refresh your website.
If you are doing testing because you should do conversion testing. So ideally, you would be able to test. Just use the google optimization tool which is free.
Or you can go to Optimizely (www.Optimizely.com) which is what we’ve used or something like that. But try a new design and if necessary.
Go on to Freelancer (www.Freelancer.com), or Upwork (www.Upwork.com), or something like that and say, ‘I’d like you to setup a test of new homepage against the old one. And to see which one gets the best results.’
Or have some designs done and then go to 99 designs.com (www.99designs.com) and you’ll get a load of options. Send it out to your customers and say which one do you prefer?
But by the way, don’t necessarily pick one, I prefer. Just ask for opinions. It’s because people prefer stuff, they don’t actually necessarily use it.
So it does need to be tested. But refresh it, change the logo. Just alter it. Change the headline. Just move something slightly and then tell everyone you’ve made a change.
Say, ‘here’s the website address. Come and have a look. What do you think?’ they will not remember what it looked like last time because when was the last time they came?
And if they do go and do it, you can give them an offer such as, ‘if you do, here is an offer you can use. You can redeem it by phoning us,’ they don’t have to buy online. They can still phone you.
It’s an idea. Just refresh. Honestly, it is a way to attract new customers because what you have there is you have a lot of people on your list who are nearly customers, or who have not been a customer for a year or two, or who have thought of being a customer and this will attract attention.
So they may have bought a long time ago and now they are no longer a customer. This will bring them back. This is different, now of course, you on the offline, it’s generally going to appeal. But not everyone buys from you. If you make a change, people think, ‘Gosh, modern company, putting some effort in.’ try it.
Monday Book Recommendation
Today is Monday at it is time for a book for the week. This book has been around since 2012. It is called ‘The $100 startup’ by ‘Chris Guillebeau’. Now Chris is fantastic.
He now has the World Domination Summit. You’ll find, I’ll recommend another couple of books of his coming up, because they are good. Very popular, very young guy.
He set out to travel and he likes to, his on the art of non-conformity and all these kind of things. He interviewed, I think its 1500 people around the world, and people who had businesses, who are making more than $50,000 a year and generally had to start at less than $100. A
nd he found out how they did it. And this book is the stories of them. If you can’t find some inspiration in there, again you are not reading it right. So read it.
If you love traveling, then you will love this book. He has traveled, quite a bit, around 175 countries I think.
And he does it by using points of credit cards, I think he never pays for anything. Fantastic. So Chris Guillebeau is a fantastic guy to listen to and to read his books. You’ll get inspiration. You’ll love it.
I’ll be back tomorrow. See you then.
