• Direct marketing accounted for 54.3% of all ad expenditures with marketers spending $149.3 billion on this channel.

• The response rate for a letter-sized direct mail piece was 3.42% for a house list and 1.38% for a prospect list. This compares with 2005 response rates of 3.33% and 1.71%, respectively.

• Catalogs continued to be “an effective way for retailers to reach existing customers.” Response rates for catalogs sent to a house list went up in 2009 to 4.92% from 3.56% in 2005. For catalogs sent to a prospect list, the response rate was 0.84% compared with 1.74% in 2005.

• Telephone marketing had the highest response rate of any direct marketing mechanism, but it also had the highest costs associated with it. Catalogs, on the other hand, had the lowest average cost per order/lead, which was $47.61. The cost per order/lead was $47.69 for inserts, $53.69 for e-mail and $75.32 for postcards.

• Of the specific industries reviewed in the report, the publishing, media and entertainment and retail segments had the highest volumes of direct mail use; financial services and nonprofit respondents strongly preferred direct mail over other media.

• Direct mail still represents 17 percent of the overall marketing budget, which is larger than the share held by any other media.

• Email to a house list averaged:  a 19.47 percent open rate; a 6.64 percent click-through rate; a 1.73 percent conversion rate; with a bounce-back rate of 3.72 percent and an unsubscribe rate of 0.77 percent.

• Paid search had an average cost per click of $3.79, with a 3.81 percent conversion rate. The conversion rate (after click) of internet display advertisements was slightly higher at 4.43 percent.

What is a call to action?

Simply put: including a call to action means asking your reader to do something. While it sounds like a simple and fairly meaningless factor, there is great power behind it. What good is beautiful, persuasive copy if the prospect doesn’t know what to do next?

Because it is such an important part of your campaign, you need to give your call to action a lot of thought. Here are three things to consider when writing your next call to action:

1. What the purpose of the campaign?

Hint: it’s not always to make the sale. On your website, it would be nice if every person that visited would buy from you. But that’s not realistic, especially in today’s market. Today’s spenders are smarter; they don’t just want a sales pitch. As such, you may want to consider using your campaign to convert the prospect into a warm lead. Then you can nurture that lead into a sale.

So if your campaign is simply to generate leads, you don’t need to ask them to buy from you. All you need them to do is show interest in your offering. This turns your call to action from a desperate pitch to a more comfortable form of relationship building. When potential customers are comfortable, they are more willing to respond.

2. Have a compelling offering.

If you’re not pushing the customer to make a sale, you need to give them a different reason to respond to your campaign. This may mean giving away something for free: a report, a gift, or a complementary service of some kind, depending on the nature of your business. The key here is to offer value to your prospect; you cannot let your offering be a different form of a sales pitch.

For example, which is more compelling: “Contact us today!” or “Contact us today for our free report: ‘The 42 Secrets to Fast Real Estate Sales’!”? The second one gives a good reason to contact the company. You are obviously benefitting by getting a good lead, but the customer needs to feel that they are getting a great value by contacting you.

3. Make it easy for them to contact you.

In today’s world of constant contact, nobody is going to contact you if they have to write you a letter. It is easy enough to have a sign-up box on your website for the customer to enter their email address, or to pick up the phone and give you a quick call (especially if you can offer it toll-free).

In marketing, your goal is to remove as many barriers as possible between your prospective customer and you. When you need the customer to contact you, it is your job to make it as user-friendly as possible. If they have to think too much about it, they may not bother contacting you, and you lose the sale.

At the end of every piece of copy, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes and ask, “Now what? What do I do next?” If your copy has that question answered, you have a great call to action. If not, then you need to answer it, because your reader will be asking themselves that same question if you don’t.

Here is a list of call to action phrases to get you started:

1. Click Here

2. Call Now

3. Buy Today

4. Register Now

5. Contact Now

6. Enroll Now

7. Add to Cart

8. Sign-up Here

9. Reserve Now

10. Get a Free Quote Today

11. Talk to an Expert

12. Immediate Download

13. Join Now

14. Start Now

15. See it in Action

16. Watch Our Tutorial

17. Learn More

18. Take the Tour

19. Donate Today

20. Find Out More

People do not have time to search around your site or other marketing materials to figure out what to do. So make it as easy as possible for them to do business with your company. If you do this to every blog post, every ezine, and every web page, you will immediately make more sales, get more subscribers, increase your revenue.

When Kinesis starts working with a new client on their branding, website design, and marketing strategies, one of the areas that we tackle aggressively is to help business leaders to quickly see the best path to get results. And by results, I mean a Return on Investment from their marketing and sales dollars. When it comes to increasing revenues, there are four primary strategies that business leaders must examine and improve within their company. As part of our process, Kinesis focuses on each one of these areas to determine the best way to maximize it.

Strategy One: Generate more prospects. This means that you develop specfic tactics to increase the number of people who are aware of your company brand and interested in your services and products. While there are literally hundreds of approaches you can take to increase your visibility with your target market, don’t take a shotgun approach. Instead, choose around least 5 to 10 marketing systems that you commit to implementing on an ongoing basis. These will work for your company to attract more prospects using multiple marketing channels.

When Kinesis starts working with clients, we find that many companies have only 2 or 3 ongoing marketing tactics – and for most professional service firms these are referrals and networking. And these are certainly excellent marketing tools. However, by limiting your marketing in this way, you put your company in jeopardy. If these pipelines dry up for a period of time, your future revenue drops.  The more visible you become through multiple marketing pipelines that you implement on an ongoing basis, the more business you will generate.

Strategy Two: Increase your conversion rate so that more prospects buy from you. We talked about visibility in Step 1. But, this isn’t enough – once you get your prospect talking with you, then you need a process to convert them to becoming a customer. This means your company must hone its sales process. For instance, many professional service businesses put up a pretty new website and then focus on driving lots of traffic to their website. Traffic by itself does you no good if your visitors aren’t buying your products and services. A more profitable strategy would be to focus first on having a website design and copywriting that converts your visitors to customers. Similarly, if your busines has an in-person or cold-calling sales-oriented businesses model, you must develop a consistent, constantly-improving sales process, so that every sales person follows proven best practices that converts prospects into customers.

Strategy Three: Increase the number (or frequency) of sales per customer over time. It’s always more expensive to attract new customers. Therefore, developing ongoing relationships with customers and generating a high lifetime value – is essential to your success and your sustained growth. Develop a company brand with an amazing value proposition that not only keeps customers coming back but has them raving about your business to others. As a business leader, it’s your responsibility to develop processed and systems to build ongoing relationships with your customers that provide high value. By doing this, you’ll be the first business a customer thinks to call when they have a need.

Strategy Four: Increase the average price per sale. Obviously, the easiest way to increase the average price per sale is to increase your rates/prices. And you can often do this by positioning your brand as the premium choice for your target audience. However, there are other ways to increase your average sale. Most companies have an opportunity to earn more revenue by being creative about how the business sells its products and services. You can bundle complimentary products/services, cross-sell, up-sell, and offer larger units of sale. For instance, at Kinesis we offer marketing strategy, web design, graphic design, and copywriting and we often create packages that not only bring us more revenue per but offer a better deal for our clients and provide them a suite of services that will give them the best possible result. It’s a win-win for everyone. You can do this with your company, as well.

If you work on mastering any one of these strategies, your company revenue will grow. Combining all these four strategies will grow your business revenue exponentially. Of course, this means that you have to develop systems to implement each tactic as well as operational capacity to handle growth (not the worst problem to have!). Kinesis works with business leaders to develop the smartest strategies and tactics, set ambitious marketing and sales goals, and design an action plan to optimize each strategy. By implementing our process, our clients are able to take their company to the next level of growth and profitability.

When you are developing a brand for your company, one of the most important considerations is your mission.

Up until this moment, you may not have considered a mission statement to be very important…or relevant to you. Perhaps you are under the impression that mission statements are just for non-profit organizations or Fortune 500 corporations. And let’s face it – you’ve probably read a lot of mission statements that are reeeeeally boring. They don’t get you all fired up.

Unfortunately, in recent years mission statements have become watered down in the corporate world to the point where they are essentially meaningless and have negative connotations. In some business circles, mission statements are received only slightly better than tax increases.

In addition, most marketers don’t talk about your mission because they don’t think it has anything to do with your brand.

But they’re wrong.

Knowing your mission will accelerate your brand like nothing else can.

“I believe that purpose and principle, clearly understood and articulated, and commonly shared, are the genetic code of any healthy organization. To the degree that you hold purpose and principles in common among you, you can dispense with command and control. People will know how to behave in accordance with them, and they’ll do it in thousands of unimaginable, creative ways. The organization will become a vital, living set of beliefs.” –Dee Hock

Why You Should Have a Strong Mission Statement

Kinesis approaches branding as a process (not a project) – one that has deep roots inside each company’s mission. A well-crafted mission statement can provide the focus and motivation you need to take your business to the next level. These are the values that drive your business personality, customer service, and marketing messages. In fact, your mission is the soul of your brand. It is your Why. It is the very reason that your company does what it does.

Your mission is about getting really clear and staying really focused. It provides your company with direction. It helps you find the right customers…your most profitable customers. I call this your internal branding. Your mission is something that you should write and post in places where every single member of your staff can see it. As the leader of your company, look at your mission often during the day. Remind yourself of it. Then live it and breathe it. Every. single. day.

Your mission statement should be the driving force behind everything that your team does within your company, and externally with prospects, customers, vendors, and associates. It also shapes your internal corporate culture.

One of the reasons your team needs this anchor is to stay on track. It is so easy for business professionals to get bogged down in the day-to-day of our business lives. We get our to-do list tunnel vision and lose sight of the big vision. Your mission statement always reminds each person in your company of your overarching raison d’etre…where you are going…what you are doing…and why you are doing it.

How to Develop Your Mission Statement

To develop your mission, here are some questions to ask:

• What do we do?
• For whom do we do it?
• Why do we serve our clients in the way that we do?
• How do we serve our clients in the way that we do?
• Why are we in this industry?
• Why did we start this business?
• What image of our business do we want to convey?

When writing your mission statement, use vibrant, exciting words. Get really clear about your passion and values for operating your unique business. Create dynamic, visual images and inspire action. Describe your purpose using unusual, colorful verbs and adjectives to spice up your statements. Drop in words like “passion,” “sizzle,” “outrageous,” “fun,” and “marvel” to add zest. Keep your mission statement fairly short and make sure that it feels really good when you read it and say it. It captures, in a few succinct sentences, the essence of your business’s goals and the philosophies underlying them. It signals what your business is all about to your customers, employees, suppliers and the community.

And, woweeee!

When you live your mission through your business brand, then amazing, phenomenal things start to happen. Your perfect, dream clients are drawn to you. People get really excited about what you are doing. They spread the word to their friends, they sign up for your services, they give you great testimonials. You get more customers, make more revenue, and your business grows with ease. And best of all – your team is more creative and having more fun than ever before because everyone is in absolute alignment with your Why.

Examples of Mission Statements

Let’s look at some phenomenal examples of other brands and their mission…their “reason for being.” This should help you get some ideas for developing your own.

Nike: To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.

Starbucks: To inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.

Chevron: To be the global energy company most admired for its people, partnership, and performance.

Amazon: To be the most customer-centric company in the world, where people can find and discover anything they want to buy online.

Intel: Delight our customers, employees, and shareholders by relentlessly delivering the platform and technology advancements that become essential to the way we work and live.

Ebay: Provide a global trading platform where practically anyone can trade practically anything.

Here is my challenge to you and your company: Write a mission statement with a goal that’s an action, not a sentiment. Make it quantifiable, not nebulous. If you have an old wonky mission statement that sounds like a corporate Hallmark Card (you know what I’m talking about), then take it and rip it to shreds. Then reflect on your true passions and values, and write a mission statement using the guidelines above that reflects the difference your business will make in the world.

If you can answer this question in a sentence, then you have a strong unique value proposition. A strong and differentiated value proposition can go a long way to position your business to succeed in your target market. It is the promise of your brand.

Without exception, Kinesis clients have a company that focuses on delivering incredible value to their customers. Ironically, many of these same clients came to us without a clearly-defined value proposition – while they provide high value, they did not have a concise way of describing the value. Many businesses face the same problem of conveying vague messages about their products and services. I’m going to help to make sure you aren’t in this situation.

What is a Value Proposition?

Let’s start by making sure we are all on the same page: A strong value proposition speaks directly to your target audience and it tells them exactly why they should purchase your products and services (and in the case of non-profits, it’s why your donors should support your organization, members should join your programs, etc.). A value proposition is a clear statement of the concrete results a customer will get from purchasing and using your products and/or services.

A value proposition is a short statement that tells your prospect why they should buy from your company. It is focused on outcomes. Your value proposition distills all the complexity of the value you provide into an easy-to-remember phrase that your client can easily grasp and remember. This helps spread word-of-mouth marketing and it differentiates you from the competition. Keep in mind that your value proposition should identify and remedy an unmet need that your customers face. It should relieve their pain.

Regardless of the size of your business or the type of industry you are in, your company should have a value proposition. To help you, here are some guidelines to follow in creating one for your business. A strong value proposition does the following:

• Creates interest, so that your prospects ask questions and want to learn more. Your value proposition opens the door so that someone might be willing to meet with you instead of blowing you off when you call or mail them for the first time
• Differentiates your offer from your competitors’ offers and creates a strong differential between you and your competitors
• Increases the quantity and quality of your sales leads and makes conversion to a customer much easier
• Wins your business greater market share in your targeted segments
• Aligns your business operations more closely to customer needs
• Focuses on your customers’ point of view.
• Include demonstrated results that will catch the attention of decision-makers–results like increased revenues, decreased costs, improved operational efficiency, and faster times.

Examples of Strong Value Propositions

Business Consultant: Our clients grow their business typically by a minimum of 30-50% over the year while cutting costs by 35%.

Hubspot: B2B companies recognized a 61% lower cost per lead and increased their organic traffic and lead conversions by an average magnitude of six-fold in 6 months.

Sales Trainer: I help salespeople crack into corporate accounts, speed up their sales cycle and win big contracts. One of my recent clients won a verbal commitment for $5M in business in just 90 days.

Internet Marketing Company: Our products help people leverage the internet to triple their market reach and cut marketing costs in half when launching new products.

Are you starting to get a feel for a strong value proposition?

How Do I Write My Value Proposition?

Crafting a value proposition requires insight on what is unique about your company and your products/services. Your existing customers are your best resource to learn the value you offer. Your goal is to learn how your customers define value – not you. Call or visit some of your customers who started using your product or service in the past 6-12 months. They remember what things were like BEFORE they started working with your company so they can most readily tell you the value of your offering. Tell them you need help understanding the real value of your offering and that you’d like a chance to learn their perspective. Most people will be more than happy to oblige.

Do you have a value proposition yet? If you do, how strong is it? Have you asked your customers about the value you bring to them? I’d love to hear your tips in the comments section below.

In case you’ve never heard of the NSAC their goal is to be the acknowledged leader in:

• providing accounting, tax and business education uniquely tailored to cooperatives
• providing networking and professional development opportunities for our membership; and
• supporting cooperative business interests in standard setting processes
  enabling our membership to effectively serve cooperatives.

I just love presenting to niche groups like the NSAC; since most folks in the room face similar challenges, we’re able to address topics relevant to large portions of the audience. For this presentation, for example, I added a section on how to use Linked In. While many businesses are interested in the “big players” like Facebook and Twitter (Facebook just topped 400 million users), professional service providers can get tremendous return by leveraging business-centric sites like Linked In. I also discussed how the group could use simple and free resources like Google Alerts to monitor online activity.

As a follow-up, I’m posting a PDF of the presentation as well as the compelling video I shared. If you have any questions, feel free to shoot me an email (or better yet, see me on Twitter!)

Thanks again to the NSAC for hosting a great event! If your business or organization is interested in having Kinesis speak at your group, drop me a line at our contact page.

Looking for a Medford web design firm? Our Medford, Oregon web designers and developers work with a diverse array of clients in many industries including professional services, manufacturing, medical and healthcare, dental, financial and accounting, commercial businesses, and more. All of our designs are grounded in a sold foundation of marketing strategy.

To see our website design work, click here to view our portfolio.

Kinesis Design serves clients in the Medford, Ashland, and surrounding communities. We also work with clients throughout Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. You can click here to learn more about our diverse clients.

Our Medford Web Design services include a full range of web design, development, programming, search engine optimization, and internet marketing strategies. We have many years of experience serving web design clients in Medford, Ashland and the rest of Southern Oregon. Our entire web design team takes great pride in our ability to provide exceptional web design that is rooted in a solid foundation of effective marketing. We make sure that every website we develop is easy to navigate, user friendly, and relevant to your customers and leads.

When you hire Kinesis to design your web site, you can be sure that you are getting a team of experts in web design, usability, online marketing. Our philosophy is to provide every client with exceptional service, innovative design, and response-driven solutions.

As a result of our work, Kinesis web design clients realize powerful results and priceless brand loyalty. We have a detailed web design process that is based on our years of experience designing websites and implementing effective online marketing strategies for our clients. Take it from our Medford and Ashland web design clients! Feel free to look at our client testimonials to see what they have to say about our web design services.

To learn more about our Medford web design services or to request a free quote, click here to contact us or give us a call:

Medford/Southern Oregon office
PO Box 683
Ashland, or 97209

ph: 541.482.3600
fax: 866.773.1269

Today, I want to address an issue that I see afflicting many professional service businesses. It directly relates to your profitability and how you are positioning your brand. The issue is this: when you do not have a strategy to select your best-fit Dream Customers, you hurt your bottom line.

Let me explain.

Earlier today I had a great meeting with a prospective client. As part of our interview process, I sat down with the prospect and drilled down into her business model and financial objectives. My goal with initial meetings is to ask lots of questions to see if we can contribute significantly to a company’s success and to see if they fit our criteria as a Dream Customer.

Check out this photo from the whiteboard process I led her through. As you can see from all of the notes on this board, our conversation was quite detailed and oriented around results.

Our method of selecting the RIGHT customers

Having a process is essential. Most businesses (especially in a down economy) are willing to take just about any work that comes through the door. After all, if someone has money in hand, why turn them away? Unfortunately, this line of thinking actually hurts your bottom line.

I’ll use our business, Kinesis, as an example. Each new client we sign up represents a tremendous opportunity. New clients mean new revenue, future referrals, and a chance to learn industry-specific knowledge. Even better, really great clients help us become better businesspeople, as we learn from their success.

See the opportunity and look at the risk

A client is an enormous asset to Kinesis and they are a major investment of our time, energy, and resources. And most of the time, this relationship results in significant results for both parties. Administrative costs aside, we spend many, many hours getting to know the client’s processes, politics, industry, goals, and marketplace. While we charge for much of this work, there  are untold hours that are done at a reduced (or free) rate.

As most creatives will attest, some of our best “work” is done while walking the dog, looking out a window, or just daydreaming. It’s impossible to calculate the mental investment in a client but, at Kinesis, it’s a large portion of our time. With a great client, this investment pays off handsomely. We learn their business and create powerful marketing campaigns that bring them a significant return on their investment.

In contrast, when a client is a poor fit and the relationship is a struggle, most (or all) of that initial investment is wasted. And you typically spend hours of unbillable time putting out fires and spending your time feeling bad about your client. When the relationship finally comes to an end, you often do not get the great referrals and “follow-on work” (subsequent projects). Even worse, the poor fit results in huge opportunity costs and a client with a limited Lifetime Customer Value.

It’s also just not fun.

Experienced business owners will tell you that the best clients are a pleasure to work with. They’re profitable, appreciative, and truly collaborate to create a win-win scenario. Not-fun, poor-fit clients take more time, mental energy, and cause you to take your eye off the ball. They’re usually less profitable too. Sadly, this distraction causes you to provide less value and benefit to their business, creating a lose-lose scenario.

The solution to make your business more profitable

Learn to say “no.” While this is a tough adjustment for many business owners, it’s absolutely critical that you say “yes” to the good fits, and “no” to the bad ones. Selecting the right customers will make you more efficient, attract like-minded referral work, and allow your organization to be more profitable.

Here’s a quick exercise that helps many of our clients:

1) Get a piece of paper and draw 3 columns.

2) In the first column list your clients in order their profitability – most profitable at the top, least profitable at the bottom.

3) In the second column, write the annual revenue the client brings to your company.

4) Use the third column to apply adjectives to each client (ex: pleasant, fun, easygoing, motivated, distrustful, draining, etc.)

5) Now go back and circle all of the clients that have negative adjectives.

What is very interesting is that 9 times out of 10, the most PROFITABLE (don’t confuse this with gross sales!) are also the ones with the most positive associations (pleasant, easy, friendly, respectful, loyal). The least profitable usually have the most negative associations (high maintenance, untrusting, hagglers, etc).

To make your business become increasingly profitable and enjoyable, there are two actions to take:

The first is to carefully define your Dream Customer. Write down as many things about them as possible – their annual revenue, personality, industry, business approach, and the amount of money they spend with your company. Look at the list you created above. In most cases, this description will align with your clients who are at the top. Now, commit to using the criteria you just defined as your new rulebook for accepting new clients. If a prospect doesn’t fit, then respectfully decline the engagement. Only take on new work that is a match. Pretend your business is an exclusive nightclub and you only let a select few past that velvet rope. And yes, your company is that special!

The second action is difficult, but in the end amazingly rewarding. Again, go back to the list that you created. Draw two boxes (you may want to use different color markers). The first box goes around the top 20% of your profitable clients. The second box goes around the bottom 20% of your clients – those that are the least profitable for your company.

Now, over the next year let go of the clients who are the least profitable. Yes, fire them! It is one of the hardest things you will have to do, but in the end you will feel so relieved. Next, use your Dream customer criteria and the top 20% of your list to plan all of your marketing and sales efforts. Your goal is to replicate your most profitable, best -fit clients. Each year, rinse and repeat – eliminate the bottom 20% and focus your marketing and sales on your Dream Customers.

If you are diligent about following these steps, your business will not only grow its bottom line but it will become more profitable and waaaay more fun. You will have nothing but clients who appreciate and respect the work that you do and are a great fit for your goals.

Good and bad: it’s all relative

As a parting thought I’d like to share why I’ve avoided talking about “bad clients” in this article. Certainly, there are businesses out there that are truly “bad.” They’re dishonest, unethical, disrespectful, etc. However, the majority of businesses are well-intentioned and truly looking for a good partner to help with their efforts. Your goal, as a business owner, is to identify those organizations that align with your services and values. They’re your BEST clients and will lead to long-term success.