What do most businesses focus most of their marketing activities on? Photo / iStock
In many businesses there are three types of sales you can make.
1: Sales to brand new customers and clients
2: Repeat sales to existing customers and clients
3: Referral sales to people introduced by your existing customers and clients.
How important is each type of sale?
According to Ross Reck author of 'Turn your customers into your sales force'
"25 per cent of your success in business is getting a sale from a customer.
Another 25 per cent of your success comes from getting repeat sales from a customer.
A whopping 50 per cent of your business success comes from getting existing customers to recommend and promote you to their friends, associates and colleagues."
In other words up to 75 per cent of your business success comes from making repeat sales to existing customers and getting these same customers to recommend and promote your business to their friends, associates and colleagues.
Yet what do most businesses focus most of their marketing activities on?
That's right, they focus most of their time, money and other resources on making sales to brand new customers and clients.
And invest very little effort on doing things to attract repeat sales and referral sales from their existing clients.
So what can you do to get easy regular repeat and referral sales from your existing clients and customers?
My favourite way to do this is to use what I call AVSIT Marketing.
AVSIT means Add Value Stay In Touch
The basic concept behind AVSIT Marketing is very simple.
1: Pick a group or existing clients and customers. (Choose at least 100 people to start with.)
2: Once a month send something to these clients and customers that adds real value to them.
You could do this for instance with something like a helpful added value newsletter in either hard copy or electronic copy format.
3: When you send out the added value newsletter include a cover letter or cover email that explains why you are sending the newsletter.
And invite your customers in a low key way to give you referrals if they know someone who might be interested in what you offer.
There are two reasons that AVSIT Marketing works well when done consistently.
First of all you get positively remembered once a month by many of your clients and customers.
Secondly because you are regularly adding value when you make contact, a number of these clients and customers will be quite receptive to helping you.
This makes it very easy to get regular repeat and referral sales.
Let me chat for a moment about added value newsletters:
I personally use both hard copy and electronic added value newsletters and recommend both types of newsletters to many of my marketing clients.
The advantage of hard copy newsletters is that they have a very high readership rate from the people you send them to. The disadvantage is that you have to spend money on printing and postage for hard copy newsletters.
The advantage of an electronic newsletter is that it's relatively affordable to send out to large numbers of people. The disadvantage is that you will usually get a much smaller number of people who will actually read it compared to a hard copy version that is sent by snail mail.
There are a number of reasons that many businesses don't send an added value newsletter to their existing clients and customers.
The biggest reason is they don't have the in house resources to create a regular, professional looking newsletter that adds real value to the people who read it.
One potential solution is to use a business that can produce an added value electronic newsletter for your business.
One company that does this is called Newsletter Ready
Newsletter Ready will create a professional looking electronic newsletter for each business client and they will also send it out to your own database of customers and clients.
They charge a very affordable monthly fee to do this and their newsletter service is helping many of their clients to enjoy delightful amounts of repeat and referral sales.
Helpful News Letter Resource:
Newsletter Ready have produced a short, easy to read 20 page guide called 'Newsletter Magic'.
The guide is crammed with useful ideas and well worth reading if you've ever thought about using an electronic newsletter as part of your marketing.
You can get a free copy of this guide at this link
My main point in this marketing column is very simple.
The real money in business often comes from repeat and referral sales to existing clients and customers rather than just making first time sales to new clients and customers.
And the more times you add value and stay in touch with existing clients and customers the easier it will be to create high volumes of repeat and referral business.
"The purpose of a business is to create a customer who creates customers."
- Shiv Singh
1: How can you make regular contact (in a way that adds high value) with a number of your past clients and customers every month?
2: If you would like some more ideas on how to create repeat and referral sales watch my brand new video presentation called 'The Six Figure Revenue Booster.'
Just contact me using the email links at either the top or bottom of this article and I'll give you the link to watch this video. (There is no charge for this video and I think you'll find the ideas I cover in it will work well to grow your revenues substantially.)
Stats NZ has revealed its latest Retail Trade Survey for the September quarter.