Author: Pamela Swift

Categories
Recommendations

Happy Birthday Customers

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Inc.com: Everyone likes presents on their birthday — including your customers. Creating a “birthday club” could ensure that you have many happy returning customers.
Birthday Connections, a new service launched by Moving Targets, a Perkasie, Pa.-based direct-mail marketing company, allows small-business owners to create and send birthday offers based on specific demographics and geographic areas.
Such birthday programs are ideal for restaurants, nail salons, and other types of retail businesses that have limited ad budgets and not enough time or expertise for new marketing campaigns. Birthday Connections works with business owners to define a range of people they want to reach. Using Moving Target’s database technology, Birthday Connections can compile a mailing list for customers in a certain ZIP code, age range, gender, or even income bracket.
Business owners then create the terms of their offer — whether it be a free dessert or a 25 percent discount during the month of the customer’s birthday — and then choose the format for delivery, either a birthday card or a letter. Companies can also choose to use a pre-designed card or have Birthday Connections create a custom one for them with their company logo.
Birthday Connections then mails the offers around the month of each resident’s birthday. Based on market testing results, Birthday Connections will help business owners create the best offer for their company.
Looking for a New Way to Woo Customers? Try Birthday Presents [Inc.com]

Categories
Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneur Profile: Richard Crasnick

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LATimes.com: Richard Crasnick rode in three championship parades with the Los Angeles Lakers, wrote speeches for a basketball legend named Magic and toured Europe with Olympic gold medalists. But the biggest sporting event of his life is playing out in a drab warehouse in Carson, using a thin triangle of leather less than half the size of a credit card.
Crasnick is president of FIKI Sports, which stands for “Flick It and Kick It,” a two-person business that includes his lifetime pal, Craig Matthews. They are betting on a sport that couldn’t be more low tech in an era of sophisticated game consoles that contain more technology than a supercomputer did 10 years ago.
Paper football is played by two people sitting across a table or desk. The “ball” usually is a sheet of notebook paper folded into a flat triangle. Touchdowns are scored by flicking the triangle until it hangs over the edge of the table without falling off. Points also are awarded for “kicking” the ball with your finger through your opponent’s goal posts — formed by his or her index fingers and thumbs.
Crasnick’s version, projected to bring in $1.5 million in revenue this year, is the result of a shared daydream with his brother, Michael, 16 years ago. They took a paper football, wrote the then-Los Angeles Raiders team logo on it and slipped it into a small plastic bag to mimic packaging.
After a long drive, tabletop football scores big [LATimes.com]

Categories
Operations

Time To Grow

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Small Business Buzz: Those of us that own a business know that, at some point, there will be cause for expansion. This can be both exciting and scary. Exciting because it only means that our business is doing very well and demand for the product/service we provide is growing. Scary because it is practically common knowledge that, next to tapping into the wrong market, the transition from a small business to a not-so-small business is one of the top reasons businesses fail.
There are some clear indications that it is time to expand your business, and being able to recognize those signs will help to eliminate some of the anxiety that accompanies such a change, since you will know it is necessary.
New Challenges
One of the first signs that your business is in need of a change is the fact that you are facing challenges and struggles that you have never faced before. There may be an overwhelming feeling that your losing control of the business.
Ineffective Management
Another indication that your business may be outgrowing itself is that your current management (which may even include yourself) is just not cutting it. As a business develops and grows, the dynamics and needs of that business change. The manager or CEO you hired when your business employed 5 people and your product limited to state wide distribution, is not going to be as effective when the demand for your product expands to a national market and you’ve had to hire 20-30 more employees.
Revenue Plateau
If your revenue has been within the same range for the past two or three years, chances are the demand for your product/service has increase, but your business is not currently capable of meeting that demand. Not only do you have too few employees, but it is likely that many of the ones you already have don’t have the ability to perform at the level the business needs to succeed.
How You Know It’s Time to Grow [Small Business Buzz]

Categories
Sales & Marketing

Personalize Your Marketing

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Entrepreneur: Marketers have found a new opportunity for more intimate and direct communication with consumers. Not so long ago, families gathered around the TV; now individuals surf the web and watch video on personal, handheld devices. Consumers have grown comfortable with–and even come to expect–a one-on-one dialogue with marketers. And personalized marketing messages are a smart way to get customers’ attention and deliver communications that increase sales.
As a small-business owner, you’re in the enviable position of interacting with customers you know on a first-name basis. You can more easily maintain a database with in-depth customer information than larger businesses. The key is to use this important data to ensure your communications strike a personal chord with customers.
Personalization is a powerful marketing tactic that’s easy to incorporate. Here are three ways to create messages that personally appeal to customers.
1. Transform mass e-mail into one-to-one.
E-mail is an exceptional tool for small businesses thanks to its low cost of implementation and high return on investment when sent to an in-house, permission-based customer or prospect list. While e-mails range from product promotions to soft-sell e-newsletters, in some instances, a one-to-one approach can have a more powerful impact.
For this e-mail tactic to work, the simpler, more direct and less “crafted” your message appears, the better. Avoid graphics and other advertising design elements–including photos–which you might use in less personal forms of e-mail solicitations.
2. Personalize your offers.
Whether you’re a retailer, e-commerce merchant or direct-mail marketer, if you sell merchandise, you need to know your customers’ purchases, how much they spend per sale, and when or how often they buy. Knowledge of past behavior is a valuable tool for predicting future purchases. Not only can this information guide your business and merchandising decisions, but it’s also critical for creating personalized marketing messages that increase sales. For instance, suppose a customer purchased jogging pants out of a wide range of clothing from your website or catalog. By customizing an e-mail or direct-mail follow-up based on this purchase history, you could successfully sell this customer additional exercise attire and related products.
3. Put it in writing.
What better way to make your message stand out than to express it in a handwritten note? After all, with fast online and mobile communications the norm, a handwritten note emphasizes that you’ve taken the time and thought to communicate something in a special way.
The Power of Personalization [Entrepreneur]

Categories
How-To Guides

How To Create Your Own Radio Ad

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Marketing Deviant: Making a radio advertisement is a good way to target consumers into buying your products or services. In this short article, I’ll show you how to make your very own radio advertisement for little to no cost. You can use a voice recorder to record your ad, but I advise using a computer or laptop with a microphone so you can record your ad and mix in music much easier and faster to create a radio ad.
To record from your computer, you can download some free voice recording programs from Download.com or use the “sound recorder” provided from your Operating System. It should be located inside the “accessories” folder in “program files” (Windows Vista). Most radio ads run for 15, 30 or 60 seconds. In your radio ad you could explain what products or services you offer with the name of your company, website, location, and phone number. If you are selling a very high advance product then you would need to explain the functions and the reason why it is beneficial to buy it from your ad.
Next you would need music to make your radio ad more appealing. There are free programs to combine your recording and music file together. Using download.com again, type in keyword “music mix” and use the “freeware filter box” and choose the programs you want to use (Window Vista users may have a hard time finding free music mix programs). The music you use for your ad cannot be “louder” than your message or your advertisement would be ineffective. If you use music for your ad, you must ask for permission from the music artist (expect to pay a royalty fee) who created it unless you created it! However, there’s a site that gives insight on public domain music which can be used without paying royalties.
Once you are done with your ad, you just saved from a few hundred to a thousand dollars just by creating the ad yourself.
How to Create a Radio Ad [Marketing Deviant]