The Ultimate Referral Machine – Free Extract
While the Internet and social media has the power to connect you with thousands of people and rekindle old friendships, it can make us lazy when it comes to creating and working on meaningful relationships. In the past, keeping in touch with people meant calling them on the phone, sending a letter or meeting face to face to catch up. It was all about personal connections.
Relationship Marketing
These days, staying in touch with friends and even family has been whittled down to just reading their tweets or Facebook messages. It is quick and easy, yet the strength of the relationships is generally not what it was 10 years ago.
As a business owner, what does this mean for you? Does this make things easier for you to generate more referrals or more difficult? In a time where the Internet and social media play a huge role in marketing your business, how do you foster meaningful relationships with your prospects and customers?
People are now more comfortable communicating online, however we are all bombarded with so many marketing messages online that we tend to switch off. It’s far too easy to click delete on that email promotion or simply ignore the marketing messages you see on social media websites.
Personal connections are the backbone of referrals however, we have in some ways lost the depth of connections we once had with our contacts. Yes, our contact lists are much bigger when you look at connections made on social media however, the depth of the connection is usually far less and not enough to generate referrals consistently.
Greeting Card Marketing
If you really want to generate more referrals and increase word-of-mouth, you must stand out from the competition and show you genuinely care about relationships. You must cut through the marketing clutter, get noticed and build relationships. One of the easiest, most effective way we have found to do this is by mailing personalised greeting cards.
Greeting cards with a personal note are generally well-received and even greatly appreciated. In fact, we have found they tend to be more engaging than any other print-based marketing material, since they are not perceived to be ‘salesy’.
According to studies, personalised mail like greeting cards and notes are opened 95 percent of the time where email is nowhere near that success rate. This means snail mail is more welcome than email, making it easier for you to strengthen your relationship with customers.
I am not suggesting you do away with email marketing or your Facebook and Twitter strategies. In fact, we are strong advocates for social media and online marketing. I am simply suggesting you strengthen your marketing mix through greeting cards in order to generate more referrals. Of course there is a greater cost to sending out physical mail than an email however, the increase in response in terms of referrals should far outweigh the additional costs.
In this e-book, you will learn how to build powerful relationships in order to create more repeat sales and increase referrals.
