CHAPTER 12CHAPTER 12

The Biggest Secret in Social Media Is Offline?The Biggest Secret in Social Media Is Offline?

The Cost of Not Following UpThe Cost of Not Following Up

by Dan Kennedy

“The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

—MARK TWAIN

Today, the death of “old” media and offline media is wildly and foolishly exaggerated. For a wide variety of businesses, newspapers, print magazines, merge-mail like Val-Pak, the new USPS’ Every Door Direct-Mail, printed catalogs, even the Yellow Pages directories not only continue to work, but provide improved and improving returns on investment.

A local marketer utilizing FSI’s (Free Standing Inserts) in his city and suburban community newspapers consistently gets an 8:3 to as high as an 11:3 ROI from them. That means he gets $8-$11 for every $3 spent. He cannot match that ROI from any online or social media, despite being smart about it. While his two chief competitors exited this “dead media,” he stayed and doubled his ROI.

One of the media most often, most vociferously pronounced dead is the printed and mailed customer newsletter. Bloggers and social media experts love to conduct its funeral. They are dead wrong. Their opinions—and that’s all they are—are ignorant and dangerous.

Personally, my business empire has not only been built with print newsletters as its foundation and a centerpiece around which everything else orbits, they continue to be the chief reason my companies enjoy TCV (Total Customer Value) 2X to 20X above all our competitors (and yes, I know their numbers).

Well over 50% of my high value private clients rise up out of the newsletter subscriber base. It would cost me a fortune to find them otherwise. You might judge my business “unique,” however, my model has inspired literally thousands of people in a wide range of consumer and B2B categories to aggressively invest in their own print newsletters for their customers, clients, patients, or donors—and all report significant improvements in retention, ascension, frequency of purchase or patronage, and referrals. Many are in their 3rd, 5th, 7th, 10th, 20th year of continuous use of their own print newsletters, and wouldn’t stop their use of this “dead media” under any circumstance.

One of the very best at it is Annette Fisher, founder and operator of Happy Trails Farm Animal Sanctuary, a thriving and growing animal rescue operation. I suggest you go to www.HappyTrailsFarm.org, look around, make a donation to get on the newsletter list, and treat each newsletter you receive by mail as a master class in session. The best B2B model is, un-humbly said, the one I created and still contribute to, obtainable at GKIC.com.

Another demonstration of how very much alive the oft-pronounced dead print newsletter is can be found with Shaun Buck at NewsletterPro.com. Shaun’s company creates and produces semi-custom and custom customer/patient newsletters for dentists and orthodontists, day spas, specialty retailers, and other small businesses, and in total, mails more than 1.5 MILLION of these for his clients every year. It is expensive, in raw terms, for these businesses to print and mail such monthly newsletters. Shaun has a 98% retention rate year to year with these clients, and they can’t all be fools. They must be getting positive results. Shaun eats what he serves, too, and has grown his own businesses by 4,000% in a very short time by mailing newsletters. You’ll hear from him later in this chapter.

So, in this age of digital media and proliferate social media, with abundant opportunities to post and distribute the same content you’d put into print newsletters or even the exact same newsletters free of cost, why the devil are so many business owners still creating, producing, printing, and mailing real newsletters?

Didn’t they get that memo from Al Gore? “Hey, look, I invented the internet!”

Print newsletters arriving by mail, opened, physically handled, read, clipped from, saved, and shared have positive effects that cannot be replicated online.

First, customers recognize and appreciate the fact that you are investing real money in communicating with them, providing information and entertainment, and expressing appreciation for them. This engages reciprocity, and for in-depth understanding of that, I recommend reading Robert Cialdini’s books.

Second, consumers place a higher value on printed publications. One 2014 survey conducted by a major newsletter publisher I work with found that over 80% of respondents indicate they always read the print newsletters and magazines they subscribe to or receive free, regularly, from businesses they have relationships with. Those same respondents said they read ezines, blogs, and other digital media included in paid subscriptions only about 20% of the time. That’s a 400% differential. You can’t win if your output never gets read. Frankly, a whole lot of online communication is killed with the delete button and has no value placed on it whatsoever.

Third, print newsletters have a much longer shelf life. It’s very common for me to hear from somebody just getting around to reading one of my newsletters sent months ago or even after revisiting an issue from years ago, then asking about products or services. How often do you think somebody settles into their comfy chair for an evening and reads email or blog posts from months ago?

A client of mine who is a financial advisor and wealth manager recently had a new client bring him over $9 million to invest and manage, after being on a prospect list and receiving a client newsletter every month for five years. An article about teaching kids to respect wealth before they inherit it rang his bell. He read it in an issue of the newsletter four months after it had been sent. My client could have gotten nothing else from mailing his print newsletter to his entire list for those five years and still come out ahead financially from just this client and the several referrals he’ll certainly obtain.

Fourth, print newsletters are a great place to profile, feature, showcase, and give recognition to customers, clients, or patients. It’s meaningful to people, to see themselves in print. I get a lot of thank yous from the GKIC Members and my clients when I dispense atta-boys and recognition in newsletters. One of the grand masters at doing this, and driving referrals by doing it, is a long, longtime follower of mine, Dr. Greg Nielsen, a chiropractor. You can find him at: www.docnielsen.com.

Of course, none of this works if you commit the ultimate marketing sin: being boring. A great newsletter is never much about your basic deliverables, products, services. It shouldn’t be technical. Look at what makes popular magazines thrive:

         Human interest stories. They can be about your own adventures, about your customers, and about celebrities that somehow relate to what you sell. The long-standing giant Reader’s Digest was built on and lives by its human interest stories.

         New, unusual, and fascinating information. Information people are motivated to repeat to peers and friends, thereby supporting word-of-mouth advertising for you. It’s called a NEWS-letter for a reason; it’s supposed to contain news. If you want to see the most successful newsletters built of “many short bits” of fascinating and new information, look at the publications by Boardroom, notably BottomLine Health (http://bottomlinehealth.com) and BottomLine Personal. (http://bottomlinepersonal.com). My friend, the late Marty Edelston, created this now-giant publishing company from a tabletop in his spare bedroom. The most successful topics that he made his bones with include “Foods Never to Eat on an Airplane” and “What Big Drug Companies Don’t Want You to Know About Cancer.”

         Opinion. Yes, care must be taken. But if you have a personal relationship with customers and your personality is linked to your business or you operate in a business where trust and affinity matter, then people are interested in your philosophy, ideas, and opinions, and can be motivated by shared values.

                By the way, the best work on “being fascinating,” as a person, as a marketer, and with content, has been done by my friend and colleague Sally Hogshead. Both her books are important reading. You can learn more at www.howtofascinate.com.

         Useful tips. “How to” relieve a sudden headache (from a chiropractor), remove pet stains from carpet (from a pet store or a carpet cleaner), ready your car for a long trip (from an auto service shop or an insurance agent), grow giant tomatoes (from a lawn care company), etc.

You also want to incorporate limited but direct promotion, such as introduction of new products or services, lead generation offers of free information about a different specific product or service each month, and seasonal “preferred customer” offers.

It is my firmest conviction, based on solid and overwhelming evidence, that nothing can “glue” customers to your business like a good print newsletter mailed to them frequently, on a regular schedule.

You can, of course, link and integrate it with online and social media in many ways. Extensions of short “teaser” articles, videos, tools, contests, and surveys can be housed online and driven to by the print newsletters. Engagement, comments, and contest participation can occur on Facebook or other social media sites, pushed by the print newsletter and reported in the newsletter. The circular possibilities are endless. Addition, multiplication, and integration are all, as Martha Stewart says, very good things. But subtraction of the proven and reliable print newsletter from your media mix is just dumb.

Nurturing Prospects into Sales and Retaining Customers Through NewslettersNurturing Prospects into Sales and Retaining Customers Through Newsletters

by Shaun Buck

Side note from Kim: Why include a chapter about print newsletters in a book about social media? Because once you bring in a lead, your job is to do EVERYTHING you can to nurture them into a customer and to have them keep buying from you for life. Dan shared earlier in this chapter, “So, in this age of digital media and proliferate social media, with abundant opportunities to post and distribute the same content you’d put into print newsletters or even the exact same newsletters free of cost, why the devil are so many business owners still creating, producing, printing, and mailing real newsletters? Print newsletters arriving by mail, opened, physically handled, read, clipped from, saved, and shared have positive effects that cannot be replicated online.” Shaun Buck, president of The Newsletter Pro, www.TheNewsletterPro.com, is my go-to expert for newsletters and the no-brainer choice for this chapter, and on the following pages he does an excellent job of connecting the dots.

A few months back, I was sitting in the audience of the largest internet marketing conference in the world when one of the main presenters took the stage and told us he was going to reveal the latest and greatest “new” thing in internet marketing during the next presentation. After a short 15-minute break, I, along with 3,000 or more other marketers, anxiously awaited the big reveal.

The presenter took the stage once more and repeated his promise of letting us in on this big new idea. I opened my laptop, prepared to take notes, and after a few moments of monologuing, he dropped the bomb we had all been waiting for. “The biggest new thing in internet marketing,” he said, “is direct mail.” At first I wasn’t entirely sure I heard him correctly, but then, almost on cue, he repeated it. This time there was no mistake; at the world’s largest internet marketing conference, the main presenter had just told the audience that generating a new lead via social media, and immediately taking that lead offline with direct mail, was “the new big thing.”

I couldn’t help but laugh to myself at the thought that offline marketing was considered “new.” After all, the United States Postal Service can trace it roots back to 1775! But for many of the marketers in the room, the new idea wasn’t offline marketing; it was generating a lead online and following up with that lead using offline media.

The Case for Online Lead Generation with Offline Marketing

How could offline marketing be considered a “new” idea? Offline marketing was around for decades, if not centuries, before online marketing was ever invented, so why did it seem like such a novel idea to so many of my fellow audience members?

When it comes to online marketing, the idea of spending money on offline media after you have acquired a lead from social media can be hard to swallow; it could even feel a bit counterintuitive, but let’s look at the reality of the situation.

Shortly after waking up each morning, you sit down at your computer and open your inbox—sound familiar? You’re instantly flooded with dozens of new messages ranging from spam to special offers to important memos. (Isn’t it a good thing our computers no longer say “You’ve Got Mail” every time we get a new email?) The first thing you do is search for any and all emails you can instantly delete without ever having to open them, in hopes that you can get your number of emails down to a manageable level.

As a business owner, here are a few email stats you need to know:

         The average commercial email deliverability rate is just 67%.

         The average open rate is 9%.

         The average time spent reading each email is 3 seconds.

         The average person gets 147 emails per day (according to a recent study by Forbes magazine).

According to the USPS 2015 fact sheet, the average delivery point (household, business, P.O. box, etc.) only receives 3.92 pieces of mail in their mailbox each day. Compared to the average 147 emails hitting inboxes per day, you are marketing in a vacuum with direct mail.

Can you imagine 147 pieces of mail showing up in your mailbox each morning? If they were all checks, it would be cause for a celebration! But if they were bills, commercial mailers, or advertisements, you would likely start to dread going out to the mailbox each day.

I’m not suggesting that you don’t use email in following up with your newly acquired leads or that you don’t continue to optimize them through social media, but I am saying digital marketing alone is leaving a massive amount of money on the table. Let’s look at how complementing your current email efforts with a prospect-nurturing campaign can drastically increases sales.

The Path to More Customers

How long do you follow up with someone who inquires about your product or service after the initial inquiry? If you’re like most businesses, it’s not long.

The following stories illustrate the importance of the follow-up.

FIRST STORY

My company, The Newsletter Pro, is a print newsletter company that specializes in custom content and design. Our average clients range from $1 million to $100 million in annual revenue. One of the many ways we generate new leads is by exhibiting at trade shows, but it’s not always easy to find a trade show that fits in with our average client. On the rare occasion that I do come across the perfect show, I usually do anything I can to get us in.

Most recently, I discovered one of those rare gems and immediately inquired about exhibiting. I had a good conversation with a salesperson and even received a follow-up email, promising more information to come, but that was over six weeks ago. I haven’t heard anything since. If it was like any other trade show, they probably had an exhibiting fee between $5,000 to $10,000—a fee we would have willingly paid. How much is the lack of follow-up costing this company?

SECOND STORY

I recently visited Disneyland with my oldest son, Brandon. I had Brandon when I was 16 years old, but, at 18, he’s now the oldest of five boys. We were there for the first leg of a high school graduation trip I had promised him last spring, and in between riding Splash Mountain 20 times and eating a ton of Dole Whip, I convinced him to join me for a timeshare presentation put on by Disney Parks. I had sat in on one years ago and remember being blown away by the presentation. It was a really great learning experience, plus my wife and I have been considering buying a Disney timeshare (with four little guys running around, we spend a lot of time in Disney parks).

From the moment the salesperson walked in the door, I knew this was not going to be the same presentation I had seen before. At 35 years old and accompanied by an 18-year-old kid, the salesperson immediately judged my ability and willingness to buy. My 90-minute presentation was completed in less than half that time, this including a tour of the mock Hawaii property. The salesperson didn’t ask me any qualifying questions, like “Where do you work?” or “How do you plan to pay for the timeshare?”

If he had, he would have found out that I own the largest full custom print newsletter company in the world and mail millions of pieces each year. He would have learned that I have a team of 35 employees, four young kids, and a serious commitment to Disney. In fact, he would have discovered that I was ready to lay down the cash for a timeshare right then and there, but he judged this book by its cover and, in doing so, he lost a huge sale. In the months that followed, that salesperson made one very brief follow-up phone call and promptly marked me as a “bad lead” in the system.

If you think the above examples are rare, or unlikely to happen to your business, think again. Disney is arguably one of the best marketing companies on the planet, and even they failed at landing the follow-up sale.

There are many reasons leads don’t turn into customers. Hundreds of books have been written on the subject, but the number-one reason leads don’t turn into sales is due to the lack of follow-up. Just because you are ready to sell a prospect and turn him into a customer doesn’t mean he is ready to buy.

         18% of prospects are ready to buy right now

         82% of prospects take greater than three months to make a buying decision

         61% of prospects take greater than one year to make a buying decision

         44% of salespeople are only making one follow-up call after a meeting

When you look at those facts, does it make you wonder how many sales you’re leaving on the table? What would happen if you implemented a follow-up process that would continue to nurture your leads until they were ready to buy?

Here is an example of a near perfect prospect follow-up sequence:

Many years ago, when I was in my early 20s, I was looking to buy a franchise. Being the nerd I was (okay, am), I requested UFOCs (now called FDDs, or Franchise Disclosure Documents) from dozens upon dozens of franchisors. At the time, I was 9 to 12 months out from making a purchase, but I wanted to research my options.

Within six weeks of requesting these UFOCs, all communication had stopped with every franchisor but one. This single franchisor called occasionally, but her primary way of following up was with a monthly print newsletter. Now, as a guy who creates hundreds of newsletters per month, I can tell you it was one of the best newsletters I have ever seen. Each edition featured a cover article either about herself or a fellow franchisee. When it was franchisee, they most often talked about how excited they were to be a part of the business or how fast their franchise was growing. They talked about their upcoming convention and all the exciting benefits of attending.

Each time this monthly newsletter hit my mailbox, I immediately opened and devoured it. I even forced my wife to read it so we could chat about it over dinner. This franchisor reminded me each month who it was, what they did, and why I should be excited about its opportunities. I ended up buying a franchise nearly six months earlier than I had originally planned—primarily so I could attend the annual convention.

The above story lends itself to an important question: Why did I buy early? Was it because she sent a newsletter? Was it the follow-up? Was it something else entirely?

Because I’m a self-acclaimed newsletter guy, you might assume I’m going to give all the credit to the newsletter, but the newsletter was just the vehicle used to deliver the message. The reason I bought early was because of the relationship I had developed with the franchisor, a person I had yet to meet face to face. After months of receiving her newsletter, I felt I knew and liked the person I was getting into business with. I felt connected to the franchisees and the business model the corporate office was selling. I was excited about the opportunity and truly believed this franchise was going to benefit my life and the lives of my loved ones.

It all comes down to this: People want to do business with people they know and like. When you take the time to build a relationship with your qualified prospects, and both educate and entertain them through the buying process, you will close more sales at a faster pace. You can accomplish this by inviting your customers over for Sunday dinner each month, but unfortunately that’s not a scalable technique and it could very well lead to a divorce.

In years past, you could simply send an email, but with the average person receiving 147 emails per day, that’s no longer a viable option. On the other hand, with the average person receiving 2.7% the number of direct mail pieces per day as they do emails, a print newsletter, delivered directly to your prospects and customers, can have a huge impact on conversions, retention, and referrals.

Now that we have a plan for turning your social media prospects into new customers, let’s look at the single biggest mistake entrepreneurs make after the sale.

Congratulations! By now you’ve managed to create an ad, get your ad approved by the powers that be, convinced someone to click on your ad, redirected them to a landing or sales page, encouraged them to take a positive action, and ultimately, with some nurturing and follow-up, persuaded this lead to make a purchase. Your job is done, right? Wrong. It has only just begun. Right about now is when most entrepreneurs miss the boat. You have just done an incredible amount of work to make a sale—now is not the time to forget about your new customer. As Dan Kennedy would say, “The purpose of making a new sale is to get a new customer.” If you implement a long-term relationship building a value-adding system, these new sales will turn into repeat sales, long-term customers, and referral sources. But that begs the question, how do you begin to build that relationship?

The first step is to stop participating in customer neglect.

Many businesses are treating their customers all wrong. But in most cases, it is not even the business owners’ fault. They are just copying what they have seen other companies do.

There are two very common customer neglect scenarios. The first: The business successfully lands a sale, but never communicates with the new customer again. Can you imagine? Who would do this? Well, as I pointed out earlier in this chapter, businesses and salespeople alike abandon customers and prospects all the time.

“We live in the single most difficult time in history to make a first sale, but we live in the single easiest time in history to make a second sale.” —Perry Belcher, cofounder of Digital Marketer

The second and more common type of customer neglect is to land a new customer and then bombard them with nothing but bills and sales material. Like any red-blooded entrepreneur, I’m all for selling, but the “buy or die” strategy some employ is not my cup of tea. When I see a business that’s always selling but never adding value outside of those purchases, it reminds me of that friend or relative—you know who I’m talking about—the one who never calls unless they need a favor or a cash advance. I have one family member I tend to dodge simply because they constantly suck both the money and the life out of me and never add extra value. Most entrepreneurs have at least one of this type of person in their life and work hard to avoid them, but many of us also are this person to our customers. Crazy, right? You don’t want to be known as an annoying pest to the people who have proven they are willing to spend money with you.

Both of these very common business practices are killers when it comes to overall customer lifetime value and referrals—they even interfere with additional short-term sales.

Once you get a new customer, you must immediately pivot and start focusing on the long-term retention of that new customer. Remember, people do business with people they know and like. Businesses that live and breathe that phrase thrive.

         A 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits 25% to 125%. (Bain and Company, Harvard Business Review)

         The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60% to 70%. The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5 to 20%. (Marketing Metrics, a think tank)

         Companies that prioritize the customer experience generate 60% higher profits than their competitors. (Leading on the Edge of Chaos, Emmet Murphy, and Mark Murphy)

If you take nothing else from this chapter, make sure you get this point: The real money and long-term growth for your business is in increasing the relationship you have with your existing customers. Nothing can maximize profits faster.

The single best vehicle I have found for building relationships, increasing lifetime value, and skyrocketing referral rates is a monthly print newsletter. Dan Kennedy himself has said, “My single biggest recommendation is the use of a monthly customer newsletter. Nothing, and I mean nothing, maintains your herd better.”

If you have tried a newsletter before and determined it didn’t work, it’s probably because you did it wrong. I can confess that my very first newsletter was horrible. To make matters worse, I mailed it for over two years. You can see an example of this awful newsletter in my book, Newsletter Marketing (2013). To help prevent you from making the same mistakes as so many others, let me give you a few guidelines when it comes to “what not to do.”

Mistake 1: Ineffective Content

Every communication you send shouldn’t be about your business. You need to focus on subjects that will interest your customers (even if they don’t interest you). When I look at dental newsletters, most of the time the newsletter is all about dentistry; how implants work, the signs of dry mouth, and what a cavity really looks like. In all honesty, if I was that interested in dentistry, I would have become a dentist! We work with a good number of dentists, but reading about and seeing before-and-after pictures of dental work is frankly scary, boring, and could be a form of cruel and unusual punishment (a clear violation of the 8th Amendment of the Bill of Rights, I might add).

The same goes for all businesses. Would you want to read a newsletter about newsletters? What about a newsletter from your dry cleaner about getting grass stains out or from your plumber about unclogging clogged toilets? Do you want to know what people really want to read? Just check the second most visited site on the internet: Facebook. People are interested in you and what’s going on in your life. If that wasn’t true, Facebook wouldn’t exist.

Mistake 2: Sending an Email Newsletter Only

People have way too much email, which means way too much competition in their inbox. The USPS found that a print newsletter can linger around a home or office for up to four months. Granted, an email might linger in someone’s inbox for four months, but by then it’s extremely unlikely that it’s going to be read. How many emails do you refer back to from four months ago? Don’t be cheap here, your customers know email is free, and because of that, they’re likely to pay little to no attention to your email newsletter. If a customer is not worth spending $1.00 per month to maintain a relationship with, you might be in the wrong business.

Mistake 3: Not Mailing Monthly

I have a small percentage of people who ask us to mail quarterly newsletters; however, as a company we have decided not to take on those clients. As I write this, we send out over 3 million print newsletters per year. We have offered a quarterly service in the past, but after a lot of data crunching, we determined that quarterly newsletters simply don’t work. When you send a quarterly newsletter, your customers simply won’t realize it’s a regular publication. A monthly newsletter requires about six months to see best results—on the other hand, a quarterly newsletter might take years.

Think about it, how many close relationships do you have with people you only talk to four times a year? Even if you consider them a close friend, how close can you really be? Relationships need to be nurtured, and once a quarter just isn’t enough.

Using a newsletter to create relationships, increase customer lifetime value, and skyrocket referrals is a complicated subject with many moving parts. For a more in-depth look, I’d like to offer you my book, Newsletter Marketing, for absolutely FREE! All you have to do is go to www.thenewsletterpro.com/nobs, fill in your information, and my office will mail you a complimentary copy on the next business day.

Want to know more about Shaun Buck or The Newsletter Pro? Visit www.TheNewsletterPro.com.

 

      #NoBSsm Tweetable Takeaways#NoBSsm Tweetable Takeaways

             Print newsletter subscribers are much more loyal and way, way, way less fickle than online-only audiences. #NoBSsm

             A good newsletter increases retention because a newsletter builds relationships, especially when you are careful to build in personality. #NoBSsm

             The number-one reason leads don’t turn into sales is due to the lack of follow-up. #NoBSsm

             The purpose of making a new sale is to get a new customer. #NoBSsm

             Communications you send shouldn’t be about you. Focus on subjects that interest your customers (even if they don’t interest you). #NoBSsm