This a new service for small business owners.
It is our $100 Tip of the Day. We call them $100 Tips, because if you can use the idea, it will make you at least $100.
Most of these tips are less than 50 words… so they are short and profitable.
Ed King is an MBA and CPA who has been Director of Small Business Services at Wayne State University (Detroit) for 30 years. He has helped thousands of businesses become more profitable. For more information go to www.TheSmallBusinessDigest.com/wordpress/.
Making a small business decision is easy…
if you have the facts!
Cut postage costs with private mail-delivery.
Jeff Edelman, founder of startup catalog house SoHo Designs in New York, needed less costly and more effective ways to introduce teenagers to his collection of artsy T-shirts and hats. A mailing broker told him that could cut postage costs with private mail – delivery services, such as alternative postal delivery (Trade association number is (405) 478-0006), that could couple his catalog in a polybag with Seventeen Magazine which is geared to teen readers… and cut postage costs
It’s cheaper than using the U.S. Postal Service, Edmonds solo designs mailing costs sixty dollars per thousand catalogs using private delivery, compared to $200 by mail.
Want to increase sales?
For the first ten years of its existence, supermarkets wouldn’t give a Stash Tea, a twenty-five-year-old company in Oregon on the time of day. Then Stash placed a small advertisement for its tea catalog on the back of its foil wrapper, and thousands of letters began pouring in and an increase sales.
Their increase sale success started when they offered a free catalog on their packaging. “Basically, we developed this list of qualified leads at no cost to us,” says Tom Lisicki the, president of Stash Tea. “We’re getting a 6% to 8% response rate just by sending the catalogs out.” Then Stash went one better: three years ago the company began including a personal note with each catalog. An online database of the letters and sophisticated querying capabilities made the task fairly easy. The response rate jumped nearly 30%. Armed with a printout of people clamoring for its tea, Stash has pushed its way into retail stores around the country… and increase sales.
- Collect names and addresses from e-mail “signatures” on Internet discussion boards and e-mail lists.
- Also swap list with noncompeting businesses or work out other partnerships to capture new businesses. Craig Rosen, owner of At Athletic Supply in Dallas, partnered with big companies. To build his mailing list database, he tried ad inserts in credit card bills and a special offer with Procter & Gamble. He gave space in his own catalog to GTE’s NFL – theme calling card in exchange for the names of buyers GTE obtained from its Super Bowl ads and other venues. His one year goal: to add 100,000 names to his house list at little cost. After only seven months, he obtained 75,000 new names for free!
Affiliate programs are perhaps the most powerful way to generate quality traffic to your website. An affiliate program is much like engaging a commission salesperson. Each affiliate sends qualified traffic your website through “affiliate links” that record where the visitor came from. If the visitor buys, the affiliate gets a commission on the sale.
- Teach them how to promote your product or service.
- Give them the tools to do it (banners, text, photos, etc.)
- Give them extra incentives to promote your products.
It helps if your affiliate has used or at least reviewed your product or service themselves.
The most effective banner ad are those that contain only text on them. Use words like…
- “Do you want to save 30% on your insurance in 10 min.?”
- “Click here to discover the most important download of your business career.”
Create curiosity and get people to click on your banner ad. Graphical banners shout out “advertisement” and trigger visitors’ natural tendencies to avoid any type of promotional content.
Always provide a list of “frequently asked questions” on your site. This does two very good things…
- Frequently asked questions helps to sell your product or service by answering common questions.
- Frequently asked questions saves time and effort by decreasing the amount of customer service you need to provide to prospects and customers.
Every Thanksgiving, the owner Hugh Pollard writes a personal “thank you” letter to the clients and sends it to their homes. Each letter describes the individual relationship he has with his clients and lets them know how important they are to him not only professionally, but personally.
- Look at the text box on your sign-up page… is it long enough? If your customers can’t see their entire e-mail addresses when they’re typing, they can’t tell if they made a typo. It should be at least 50 characters long.
- Look at the error message your site generates. Does it help customers understand what they’ve done wrong so they can fix the problems?
- Some sites use a double entry process: “enter your e-mail address”, then “verify your e-mail address”. You want to encourage people to type carefully, not force them to type twice. Many people simply cut and paste the faulty e-mail addresses from one box to the other so double entry registration rarely solves the problem. The best method of self proofing is a confirmation page or a pop-up. Show what they typed again and they will probably notice typos or mistakes and go back and fix them.
