Customer Loyalty & After-Sale Service
You got a sale! Woohoo! But wait–did you think we would be done when the customer bought your product? Fortunately for us, the purchase step is not the end of the Trail to the Sale™. If you stop at this point, you’re leaving money on the table. Here’s why: You have a 5-20% chance of […]
How to Sell Without Discounts
When I started my first business, a custom invitation company, I had my product priced right. Any less expensive and I would have lost my profit. Any more expensive, and I would have lost my customers. So I really didn’t feel I could discount it any further. Let’s face it…sometimes discounting a product is […]
How to Price a Product or Service
So you’ve decided on a new product and maybe even have it developed or produced. Now…how should you price a product? Accountants have a standard pricing formula they often recommend called the cost-plus pricing formula: [overhead and materials expenses] + [profit] =price. It’s easy to figure out if you have a product and concrete […]
How to Get Customers to Buy From You
If you’ve been in business for any amount of time, you have probably asked this question: “how can I get more sales?” Sometimes it feels like we’re doing all the right things but customers don’t go to that final step and purchase. That’s when I recommend that they offer an evaluation step. Evaluate is […]
9 Ways To Stand Out From Your Competition
The third phase of the Trail of the Sale™ is the compare stage. If there are so businesses with the same products or services as you have, it can be hard to make your product or service get seen. But even if your business is one of many (I’m looking at you, nail salons, coffee […]
Is Email Marketing Still Important?
You may have heard that email marketing is dead. Let me set the record straight- it’s not. Email marketing is still the most effective way to communicate with your customers. In fact, multiple studies continue to find it to be more effective than social media, website advertising, and even in-person interactions. And because of Covid-19, […]
How To Create Big Brand Awareness for Your Small Business
When I started my first business, brand awareness was not something I thought too much about. Like many of us, I was excited and started out by building my website (no small feat back in the early days of the internet) and got my social media pages all ready to go. I was nervous to […]
4 Essential Steps to Building a Strong Brand [Free Download]
Why You Need to Brand Your Business When I opened my first business–a design agency–I didn’t think much about my brand. I had a logo of course (I was a designer, after all), but I didn’t think much about what lies beneath that logo until I started getting feedback from clients. I started hearing the […]
Blogging in 2022 [Free Template]
Can I make a confession? Back in the early 2000s, when I started my first business (a design agency), I decided to start blogging. I knew almost *zero* about marketing strategy at that point, but I made a promise to myself that I would blog weekly without fail. Consistency is key, I thought. I […]
What Are You Really Selling?
How to Figure Out Why Customers Buy From You We all think we make logical decisions when we purchase something, don’t we? We like to make sound purchasing decisions. But what researchers have found is that 95% of our purchase decisions are actually emotional and made unconsciously. And after the purchase, we back it up […]