Business  Networking Rogue Valley, Networking Medford Oregon

ABOUT RVNC

5 WAYS TO GROW

your business.

 

1. Clean up and segment your e-mail list.

E-mail to your existing clients and prospects is the least expensive and most productive on-line marketing activity. For less than $0.03 per delivered e-mail, you can quickly remind a customer or prospective customer about a hot new product, a new business initiative, a recent PR story or simply to share an interesting article from a business publication.

Send that e-mail today.

 

2. Write up expert commentary on a topical issue.

Blog is a fancy name for a commentary on a current issue. Millions already do, which speaks equally about the popularity of the technology as well as the problem of being oversaturated. If you do decide to start a blog, the best advice is…don’t stop. Keep a pace of two to three posts per week. Be brief, be brilliant and be gone! If you can’t do all three, hire a professional writer to write for you. Think about ideas and notions that keep your customers thinking about you.

 

3. Update your website…or create one (if you don’t have one).

In the old days (ten years ago), creating even a small but decent looking website cost a lot of money to hire designers and programmers. Today web publishing tools are low cost, thanks to content management systems (CMS) like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. While not quite as easy as firing up a Word processor, web publishing today is more affordable and effective.

 

4. Upgrade your web marketing strategy.

While the entry barriers to creating a website have gone down, what has increased is the importance of search engine ranking. It is not a sufficient marketing strategy to create a nice looking website. You must consider driving traffic to that site and then set and measure, specific performance goals.

 

If you sell products via the web, performance goals are relatively simple to understand. One primary goal is sales, and the performance goal is to either increase the average revenue per transaction or reduce the cost of customer acquisition.

 

However, if your business is not set up for on-line sales, you should still create and drive performance goals. Every site should carefully watch metrics such as unique visitors, average page views, bounce rates and keywords. These are basic metrics that determine your site’s popularity, focus and quality. Goals could be simply to improve traffic (unique visitors), improve search engine results (keywords that describe your business with or without using its name), and content quality (average page views and bounce rates).

 

5. Call big customers who have not ordered lately.

Customers who are happy and ordering regularly don’t typically attract much attention, things are running smoothly. But what about customers who haven’t ordered regularly.

 

It is important to keep up relations with your current customers but it is even more important to monitor order patterns to detect and prevent customer defections, unresolved issues or competitive overtures. Start today by looking at simple average order patterns. You can get fancy by looking at order size or historic patterns, either by individual customer or by customer’s market. The point is: don’t get blindsided by smoldering problems and passive aggressive customer behavior.