Many businesses see their website as separate from their main offline marketing. However, by failing to combine their online and offline marketing they lose out to the ‘sum of the parts’ equation where sometimes 1 + 1 can equal 3! It’s a little like having two horses but only using one at a time to pull the carriage. If you use both together, you’ll get there faster.
So, in today’s article I’m going to show you a couple of top techniques for linking your online and your offline marketing together.
#1 – TELESALES
The often overlooked art of telesales can provide you with an exceptional revenue stream. Plus, as fewer businesses take telesales seriously (seeing it only as the province of those really annoying recorded messages) there are fewer ‘quality’ sales calls being made.
All you need to do is simply call your customers and prospects using it as an opportunity to get them looking at the site with you. You’ll probably find that they discover your business can do a lot more for them than they thought! (You could even turn this into a game: Ask them to find the ‘hidden’ picture of you/or whatever and they’ll win a prize. This will encourage them to scour your site.)
Use the opportunity of the call to direct your customer/prospect to a specific ‘secret’ part of your website offering them something not visible to others. This page could contain a compelling offer or a sign-up opportunity to a free report.
You could even use the telephone to step your customer through your ecommerce website and use it to upsell them during the call.
Having your customer or prospect on the phone gives you an unprecedented opportunity to use your website to help your sales process and even if they don’t have Internet access at that moment email them with links to the pages you want them to see.
And, don’t forget to make sure your voicemail message mentions your website!
#2 – DIRECT MAIL
Just like telesales, businesses are getting fewer direct mailers these days. And, once again, by omitting this, often highly effective approach, from their marketing strategy the competition effectively remove themselves from the marketplace.
Send your prospects and customers a sales letter, a flyer, 10 business cards to hand out to their friends, a report, your sales letter scrunched up into a ball with the headline “I’ve pre-crumpled this to save you time but before it hits the bin you might want to read it”. Send them anything you like, just make sure it has your web address on it!
You could even send them a letter simply stating that you’ve got a special page written just for them. You can then use PURL software to automatically generate a URL which inserts their name at the end of your domain name. For example, www.mycompany.co.uk/johnsmith. The response rates from these personalised URLs is often exceptionally high. (You can find the software on Google.)
Whenever you send out direct mail, make sure that you are directing people to a specific part of your website that relates to the content of your mailer and not just your homepage.
That’s just two ways of linking the offline and online worlds together to increase the revenue to your business and I’m pretty sure I can think of a few more, just give me a week…
