Tag Archives: Email

Do You Always Begin With The End in Mind?

Posted on 09/21/2011 by admin
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It always astounds me how many email newsletters and blog I receive that make a really good read but they have no ultimate ‘Call to Action’ about them. The whole purpose of writing blog, articles, newsletters, direct mail, website copy etc should be to get yourself more business and if you are just writing with no outcome in mind then you may as well be writing for charity because you certainly aren’t going to make much money out of it.

When writing anything you should start out with the end in mind, what do you want your readers to actually do when they read? Are you wanting them to email you, go to your website and register for tips, get in touch for a free consultation, order something? If you don’t actually have an idea of what you want them to do then I can guarantee that the people you are talking to wont have a clue what to do either.

It is vital on all your writings to have a ‘Call for Action’ that your customers can respond to and for you to tell them exactly what to do. If you are writing to the telling them about a new design of jewellery then make sure you include a link of the item directly onto your website where they can buy it. Don’t just link onto the website, make sure its the specific page because if they then have to look for it on your website I can guarantee the majority of them will give up and not bother.

Its important to take away every barrier to doing business with you that you can so make sure your instructions are clear and simple. If you want someone to email you as a direct response to your newsletter then show the email address AND make it a link – make it easy!  And don’t just tell them once at the very end of the newsletter, tell them several times how to take action because if they decide half way through your newsletter they want to buy they may well have changed their mind by the time they get to the end !

So – the moral to this story is, with ALL your communications START with the end in mind! Decide what outcome you want from what you’re writing and make your writing lead to it!

 

Claire

P.S Have you heard the news I’ve written a fab book about how to SUCCEED at Wedding fairs? Wedding Fairs – From Waste of Time To Goldmine! More info here.

 

P.P.S  If you need help developing your Wedding Business so that you get MORE clients, MORE profits effortlessly then join the Wedding Wealth Program NOW!

How Much is Too Much?

Posted on 08/16/2011 by admin
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I was inspired to write this blog today because a couple of businesses irritated me this morning with their marketing. The first one was on Twitter and they were promoting a package they were offering and they tweeted the same thing about 4 times in less than hour. Now, I’m all for repeating yourself, especially on Twitter because your audience changed from minute to minute and hour to hour but 4 times in an hour is REALLY overkill and will just lose you followers. If you have something to promote then do your homework about your followers, find out who is online when and tweet it several times a day but at different times of day and different day of the week so that you are reaching different people each time, don’t just bombard the same poor people with the same message constantly.

My second encounter with irritating marketing was through email!  I subscribe to lots of different newsletters and sometimes I read them, sometimes they get instantly get deleted. Well one that I hadn’t heard from literally all year suddenly started emailing again and my instant response was, oh, so they are looking for business now, but ok I thought and read the newsletter. Then just 2 days later I got another newsletter from them, equally as salesy and not interesting at all, and then just 1 DAY later I got a third email from them and that when I decided to hit the unsubscribe button!

People don’t mind receiving newsletters, thats why they sign up to them, they think you are going to give them something interesting and of value and if you deliver that part then they are happy to have a bit of sales patter thrown in. But be CONSISTENT! If you send them a newsletter make sure you keep sending them at regular intervals that suit your customers. More than weekly and personally I think you are pushing your luck, but equally if you send them not often enough you will go out of the customers mind and you will be equally as irritating. You could always be super-clever and ask your customer how often they want to receive it, give them the choice!?!

Claire xox

 

Need help marketing your Wedding Business so that you get more clients and more profits? Join the Wedding Wealth Program – 100% of my clients have said that they were glad they did!

How Many Tricks Are You Missing?

Posted on 05/24/2011 by admin
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My parents Wedding Anniversay is at the end of March, and they’ve been married for 48 years this year (Well done Mum and Dad!) For the past 10 years I’ve bought them an anniversary cake, always a nice yummy one and always something different and because I’m lucky enough to know lots of cake makers I get something really lovely for them every year. This year however I must have had other things on my mind and I completely forgot! Now, bearing in mind that over the past 10 years I have had cakes from about 4 different cake makers when I finally remembered the cake situation a few weeks later, I was actually MORE surprised that not ONE of the cake makers had sent me a reminder and asked me if I wanted a cake than I was that I’d forgotten!  Lets take a couple of companies that gets it right on this – Moonpig, Hotel Chocolat, Interflora – all of these, if you register to buy something for a birthday, anniversary or valentines (in fact anything that happens year after year) they send you a reminder and ask if you want to get something this year and often I do!

If ANY of the cake makers had reminded me a few weeks before the anniversary and asked if I wanted a cake again I would have instantly replied and said Yes Please ! Sale made for the cost of an email – could it BE any easier?

As a Wedding Supplier you have the privilege of already knowing a special date for your clients, their Wedding Day and every year after that you have their anniversary! Are sending emails to say do you want a cake, are you having a party and want invites, would you like a special piece of jewellery made or photo taken on this special occasion?

How about asking for the birth dates of the bride and grooms when they make enquiries? You can then write to them even more and ask if they are celebrating a special birthday etc? The possibilities are ENDLESS!!

The easiest people on earth to sell to are……. people that have bought from you before – its a fact! So get clever with your marketing and DON’T think the sale stops after just one deal!

 

 

Claire x0x0x

 

If you would like first hand help with attracting more clients and developing your Wedding business then contact me today about the Wedding Wealth Program, 100% of my clients have said that it helped their business.

 

 

How To Make Sure Your Emails Are Getting Read???

Posted on 05/04/2011 by admin
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These days we get absolutely inundated with emails and messages and if you’re anything like me a lot of them I delete without even reading, and your customers are exactly the same, so how do you make sure that YOUR emails are the ones that get read and noticed?

When sending emails to your potential customers there is nothing worse than sending constant ‘buy me, buy me, buy me’ messages – these are guaranteed to be deleted and marked as junk straight away. The wholepoint, once again, is to build a relationship with your customer so that they can get to know you, get to know your business and what you are offering and decide for themselves whether they want to do business with you. This is the easiest, less pushy and in my experience the much more successful way of converting potentials into customers!

So what should your emails say? They should always be informative and valuable to the people you are contacting, make them about the latest trends, focus on case studies, testimonials, latest products, celeb weddings in the news, anything that your potential customer will actually be interested to read and know about do NOT, and I repeat do NOT make it all about you! Tempting as it might be to tell people how wonderful you are at this stage in the relationship they are really not interested, you want them to come to that conclusion on their own!

So thats what to put inside your emails but how do you actually get your brides to even open the email? Well the title has to be FAB! It has to make your potential customers sit-up and want to read more, it has to be relevant to them and it has to incite curiosity enough to make them read further…

If you want some inspiration on how to write fabulous headlines start checking out all the womens mags on the shelves, the headlines on the front are amazing and the people that write those have researched and researched what works so use their results! They often have Top Tips, or really emotive words in the titles, no one is ever ‘sad’ that they’ve broken up with their partner in ‘Hello and OK’ world, they are always ‘devastated’ ! It creates much more of a response that just sad doesn’t it? Also get ideas from some of the best selling books, they are always Seven Steps to… Ten ways to….. The secret of……

Remember some of the key motivating factors when coming up with your titles  are

  • Saving time
  • Being appreciated by others
  • Improving appearance
  • Being up-to-date
  • Avoiding criticism
  • Avoiding pain
  • Avoiding losing money
  • Improving Social status

………to name but a few

Of course, remember YOU are marketing to brides so the biggest things on THEIR minds are their WEDDING DATE and their NEW NAME so if you can get those into your titles you are onto a guaranteed opener!!!!!

 

Claire x0x

 

Do you need help with attracting more clients to your Wedding Business? The Wedding Wealth program is specifically designed to generate more leads and more customers in an effortless and cost effective way. Find out more HERE Now…


Follow-up, follow-up, follow-up, follow-up……..

Posted on 12/14/2010 by admin
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No one likes selling, we all worry what people will think of us and we don’t like rejection but the truth is if we are in business we are selling all the time whether we like it or not so we might as well do it really, really well!

When I work with clients one of the common problems of course is not having enough clients and one of the first questions I ask is “Do you ask for the sale?” Of course they say, “OK, how many times do you ask” Well one they tell me – ONCE? Just once??? Ah  - well that could be one of your problems then, once is NOT enough! I’m not saying that you have to badger and harrass people until they buy from you, of course not, but if you only ask for the deal once the chance of you asking when they are actually ready to buy is pretty slim, but the odds increase the more you ask. After all, how many times do you receives snail mail or email and read it and think, oh thats great, and then forget all about it until a few months later when you remember that you’ve seen an email about exactly what you currently want, and you look for a while for the email without luck, so end up getting it somewhere else…. I know I do it all the time!

So, by not following up you are actually stopping people that want to buy from you, its your obligation to follow up so that you can allow them to buy from you!

A famous Market Research company actually did a study on this and found out that 80% of all high ticket sales (which applies to weddings!) comes from the sales people that follow up at least 5 times!!!! In fact :-

44% of sales people give up after the first ‘no’
22% give up after 2 ‘no’s’
4% give up after 3 ‘no’s’

and 12% give up after 4 ‘no’s’

So – 92% of people give up after 4 ‘no’s’ and only 8% of people ask a 5th time, SO – those 8% of people are actually getting 60% of the sales…….

I bet you’re going to start asking for the sale a bit more now aren’t you?????????????

 

Have a great day!

Claire x0x0


If you want your Wedding Business to bring you WEALTH in 2011 then join the Wedding Wealth Program NOW


 


Space Invaders….

Posted on 08/05/2010 by admin
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I’m sat in the middle  of nowhere in the Fens whilst writing this blog, I’m not originally from this part of the world  (hence my slight obsession with a certain Football club called Reading) but I find it incredibly beautiful and unique, if you’ve never been here it really has the biggest skies you’ve ever seen and I think there is something strangely magical and peaceful about big skies – it feels open and wide as though you have a huge amount of lovely space all to yourself and that is blissful…

It occurred to me the past few weeks how important space is within a relationship, and at no time is this more important than right at the beginning. Recently a friend of a friend of a friend (you get the picture) started dating someone new, the first date was a drink in a pub and that went well, the next date was the following week and involved a sleepover (yeah ok maybe too soon but hey ho) and then the 3rd date was the following week again and another sleep over and thats when things went wrong and I’m sorry to say that it was the female part of the relationship that played it all wrong. From date number 3 she was not only completely in love with the date and best friends with everyone that knew him but she had crossed the line from casual, having fun, get to know each other to bunny boiler in about 24 hours.

The poor guy didn’t answer his mobile for a few hours and rather than be a sane person and wait for contact the woman phoned and text constantly to the point that when he finally did charge his phone up and was in a position to contact her he didn’t want to! She put him off her in one evening and he went running for the hills! Now I’m not psychic and have no idea if this relationship was going somewhere if she had acted more ‘normal’ and laid-back but I do know that it would have had a whole lot more chance of success if she hadn’t done this. Not only did she do all the texting/phoning but she also poured her heart out by email saying that she was only acting like this because she had been hurt and was insecure, blah, blah, blah – Big Mistake! We all want to think that the person we are dating is perfect and wonderful and it’s a huge turn off  when you’re told early on that they are not – leave all that for heart to heart WAY down the line…

We’ve all done it, we’ve all made fools of ourselves over someone we are really keen on and acted like the crazed girlfiend when they haven’t answered a text for hours on end, only to find that they were actually dying to talk to you all day but had mistakenly forgotten their phone or lost it etc. I’m sure we have all been on the other side of the equation too, when someone constantly texts you or emails you etc and you actually quite liked them to start with but the intensity just makes you less and less keen because they are coming across so pathetic and needy, and no one wants needy!

We live such fast-paced hectic lives that sometimes its easy to forget that relationships take time to develop.  We want everything at once, including the fairy story of meeting someone new. After all,  at the movies we see someone meet, fall in love, have children, have an affair and get married to someone else in the space of 90 minutes and celebrities seem to get married and live happily ever after (yeah right!) after knowing someone for about a week so why can’t it happen for us? Its called real-life!

I admit its tricky sometimes to get a grip on reality, just this week I’ve even done it myself, I’ve got in the habit of seeing the boyfriend nearly every day lately and its been like this for a few weeks, but this week circumstances are such that we cant see each other for a massive 4days!!! Well the first day I could have quite easily wound myself up and convinced myself that he’d completely fallen out of love with me because he hadn’t answered a few text messages, but when I told myself to get a grip, in reality it was actually about 12 hours since I’d actually seen him and probably only about 3or 4 hours since I’d heard from him! Not only that but he drives a lot for a living and being the (to his complete credit) sensible and safe soul that he is he doesn’t use his mobile at all whilst driving (lesson for us all there!) So in reality the time I hadn’t heard from him was minimal, and to be fair when I was living in the same house as my ex we could go for days more than that without talking! Lol

And space isn’t a bad thing, having your other half wondering what you are doing and where you are is all part of the fun and keeps them interested, we all want that excitement in our relationships and our partners, its what keeps it all alive!

The moral to the story is to keep the chill pills on hand, let love and relationships develop at a nice slow pace and don’t be so anxious to constantly move on to the next step, once again we all need to learn how to enjoy the ride of life rather than try and reach the final destination in a flash, because once you are there where else do you go?!?


Claire xoxo