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CreativeXchange Marketing Newsletter Debuts
Welcome to the first edition of Marketing for Success newsletter. Marketing for Success will be a quarterly newsletter designed as a tool to assist small to medium sized businesses in their sales and marketing efforts.
Each newsletter will contain useful tips and articles relevant to sales and marketing. In this issue ten marketing musts will be outlined. What ten techniques should all businesses do to get the most ROI on their advertising and marketing
budget? Also in this issue we will look at how over-the-top customer service earns good word of mouth advertising. Do you know what the impact of your customer service is as it pertains to sales and marketing? What are some techniques you can begin to implement to create more repeat business, referrals and good word of mouth advertising?
Marketing for Success has its readers in mind. Reader’s questions and suggestions are always encouraged. If you have a question you want covered in an upcoming issue, simply e-mail it to: beth.boen@ creativexchangemarketing.com.
Our reader’s corner will discuss many of these questions submitted.
I am confident Marketing for Success will be a helpful resource to everyone who receives it. As Marketing for Success grows, your comments and suggestions will help make it successful and constantly improve in content.
Thank you for your interest in Marketing for Success.
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Earning Good Word of Mouth Advertising
The best kind of advertising that you cannot buy is word of mouth. Not only can you not buy it, you have to earn it, but the pay off is big. Consider these staggering statistics:
- Companies who provide ongoing exceptional customer service can often times spend half the money in marketing and attain twice the results as a company who does not.
- It is 6-7 times more costly to gain a new customer than it is to retain an existing one.
- Unacceptable customer service experiences are told to 9-10 others, who in turn may tell up to five other people. This poor word of mouth advertising can decrease results on other costly marketing efforts.
- 96% of unhappy customers never let you know they have a problem. Sometimes the 4% who do complain are viewed as an interruption to the workplace by employees.
Given the choice between lower prices and poor to average service or slightly higher price, but exceptional customer service, which would you prefer? Most people are willing to pay a slightly higher price if they know the service is over-the-top.
So how does your business give over-the-top customer service that people will talk about? Well it cannot be summed up in one article, but in future articles, we will cover different areas how your business can have a competitive advantage with exceptional customer service techniques.
In this first issue we will begin by defining exceptional customer service and who your customer is.
Exceptional customer service can be defined as meeting and exceeding customer expectations, treating the customer the way they want to be treated and being at your best with every customer.
There are two kinds of customers—internal and external. Knowing both types of customers is important to provide exceptional customer service.
An internal customer is anyone you count on or rely upon to complete a task or a function or to provide you with information so that you can get your job done…and anyone who counts on you to complete a task or function or to provide them with information so that they can get their job done.
An external customer is a person outside your organization who requires a product or service.
Delivering exceptional customer service must become a culture in an organization that starts at the top. Exceptional customer service must be practiced with internal customers to demonstrate what level of customer service is expected to be given to the external customer. If your internal customers receive poor customer service, they will be more likely to treat their external customers the same way.
In upcoming issues we will discuss techniques used to deliver exceptional customer service to both internal and external customers.
- Phone etiquette
- E-mail etiquette
- Voice mail etiquette
- Dealing with angry customers
- Body language and physical appearance
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10 Marketing Musts: Get the most ROI out of your marketing budget
- Develop a marketing budget appropriate for your type of business. Determine what percent of sales should be invested in marketing and advertising.
- Create a marketing and sales plan that meets the goals of your business plan. This working document is for a specific period of time, includes your overall goal, strategies and tactics to support that goal, responsible parties, budget and timelines.
- Implement your sales and marketing plan—writing one is only part of marketing success—you must reference it and keep your goals in sight.
- Have a good website—your website can be an extension of your business card or advertisements you place.
- Have a consistent branding message and image on all company communications including website, letterhead, business cards, advertisements, etc.
- Identify and promote your competitive advantages—why should someone do business with your organization.
- Track where your customers are coming from. Always ask your customer, “How did you here about us?”
- Make sure you are getting the best price on all your marketing materials and advertising. Get bids on printing, play hard ball when negotiating advertising rates. If you don’t know how, find someone who can help, it could save you thousands of dollars in expenses.
- When using advertisements, make sure your headline grabs the readers attention, if it doesn’t you could be losing up to 80% of your advertising budget.
- Know your target market and market to them by utilizing the right marketing and advertising mix.
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