The challenge with most business planning methods is that they don’t seem to take much of you into account. Plan for Super Success! (whatever that means); Turbo Charge your Business for the New Year and so on… What about what you want? And perhaps that is what you want, but it always helps to be asked.

As a part of our very popular Focus and Flourish workshops, one of the core things we get our guests to focus on, is what success looks like to them. It’s all very well wafting around concepts of success, but success is a very personal thing, and the sooner you define a tangible (and ideally, realistic) goal, the better. Based on the feedback I’ve had about this workshop, I thought it might be very timely to share the key concepts with you so that you can use it in your own planning. So here goes:

What does success look like to you?

What’s important to you about next year? How does your business fit in with your values. Why are you running your business and how does that fit in with your life? How will you know whether next year has been a rip-roaring success?

Start with your brand

Take a stock check on your business brand. What do you want to be known for? Where is your niche in the market? What makes you different from everyone else? What do your profitable clients value about what you do? What core message do you want to communicate next year?

Brainstorm the things you could do to market your business

Don’t hold back – think of at least 30 activities that you might do to market your business. However crazy they sound, get creative. You don’t need to do them all! But you do need to open your mind. At the last workshop we had suggestions ranging from walking along the A303 with a sandwich board (not advised…) to roundabout sponsorship (again, rarely advised) to creating welcome packs for your clients. Create as large a list as possible of potential marketing activities.

Shortlist based on personal values, your budget and your brand

You can’t do everything, but you should have around 10-15 core marketing activities that you do on a monthly basis as well as more specific activities for focused seasonal campaigns. When you’re thinking about what to do, remember that every business needs to spend some money on marketing, you can’t build a business on thin air alone, but planning where to spend your budget to get maximum return on investment (ROI) is crucial. What people often overlook is tying their marketing activity back to their personal values and their brand: essential for ROI and consistency.

Make a plan: And stick to it!

Obvious but true. Too many of us hurtle from one month to the next, only implementing marketing activity as a panicked response to a quiet month. Plan a consistent level of marketing plus seasonal campaigns to drive your business forward for 2012.

I hope that gives you a bit of inspiration and a template for moving forwards. We do still have a couple of places left on January’s Focus and Flourish workshop, so do join us if you can, it promises to be an incredibly inspiring day. Full details on our website.

How to make a January Sales Promotion work for your business

1. Avoid the blanket “10% off our services” at all costs. You’re better than that
2. Think about what you can offer that will compel people to take action now. Get creative, brainstorm with your team (or your marketing partners – Flourish are happy to help!) and think about what you can afford to give away that your customers will value.
3. Consider what it will take to get people to focus. Remember, this isn’t about what you can do cheaply, it’s about what your clients will value. Think about it from their shoes.
4. Think carefully about how you communicate your reasons for running your sales promotion. When worded carefully you’ll gain loyalty and new business so take your time to write your copy well.
5. Really make it worth your clients while – for example, if you’re a photographer, give a credit towards a set of images. If you’re a hairdresser, give them a voucher for a free cut and blowdry or an upgrade to a full head of highlights or whatever it takes to make it worth their while not putting it off until next month

The Great Little Trading Company have had a fab campaign to persuade their clients to shop now for Christmas rather than leaving it any longer. I can’t say I’ve seen the comprehensive marketing that Stu describes with his eBuyer experience, but it’s a compelling sales promotion nonetheless.

You see the problem with sales is that the retail industry has taught us that the longer we wait, the better the deal. And whilst we love the instant gratification of walking home with armfuls of bags, and we persuade ourselves that we need to buy it now or it might be gone, this strategy isn’t helpful for business owners. You need people to buy now don’t you?

And letting people even remotely assume that if they wait, you’ll slash your prices further is bad news for margin, bad news for your conversion rates and bad news for business.

That’s why when I found this promo during a spot of Christmas shopping on Sunday I just had to share it with you. Isn’t it fab? Great Little Trading Company (GLTC) have been completely upfront about the fact that their best deals are available for people that take action now. Wait, and you won’t save as much money. I love the fact that they’re showing all the discounts – past, present and future. It really compels you to take action doesn’t it?

I know I’ll be looking forward to spotting opportunities to use this with our ecommerce clients – how about you? Could you use this in your business?

Postscript: The fallout from not following through

I’m really disappointed. I nipped over to the website to check the URL and look what I saw on the homepage!

I’m so gutted. Why did they do it? I did think twice about whether to reword the whole blog post in the light of this, but I do think it’s important that I share a) what worked so fabulously well and b) how you can undermine it so easily.

What I think is a real shame is that in the grand scheme of things, what difference does 2% really make? Are they going to lose clients tonight just because they are “only” offering 16% off? I really don’t think so. I honestly think the original banner would have trained the consumer to get in early next year (as well as sign up to the newsletter so that they could be the first to hear).

What do you think? Did they make a mistake in backtracking on the offer? I’d really love your thoughts on this one.

The great thing about retail is that your customers expect you to run a January sale. So if you’re worried about a sale damaging your credibility, don’t be. If you are serious about running your business as a business, then come January, you need to think seriously about running a sale. Why? Because we all have limited funds in January, and unless there is a compelling reason to spend money, we just don’t.

We all know one of those people that buys all their Christmas presents in the January sale don’t we? Or the person that just can’t resist a bargain. Or the one who stocks up the present drawer with January sale bargains. People are spending money, but if your product isn’t on sale, why will people buy from you rather than your competitors?

Here’s how to make a January sale work for your retail business

1. Analyse your products. Which are selling really well, which haven’t sold? Rank them and use this understanding to decide what you put on sale
2. You don’t need to put your bestsellers on sale so unless you desperately want to, leave those half price. You rarely see wardrobe staples on sale in the big retailers do you? That’s because they know they can sell them full price all year round and they don’t need to
3. Mark your slowest sellers down as far as you can whilst still making a profit. Many retailers go to 70% – you ought to think about going to at least 50% if you can to really create some momentum
4. Pitch the rest of your sale products between 20% and 40% off RRP – please, please please avoid 10%. It just isn’t compelling enough
5. Consider whether you also want to think about other sales promotion techniques – BuyOneGetOneFree (BOGOF), product upgrades, shipping discounts, bundle offers and so on
6. Keep it short and sharp – it needs to end on 31st Jan at the very latest
7. Launch your sale on Christmas Eve/ Christmas Day – don’t wait until 1st Jan or you’ll miss the boat
8. It sounds dreadful, but if you do one thing, send a sale emailer on Christmas Day or Christmas Eve. We were genuinely shocked at the number of online orders Yarwood-White received on Christmas Day. Just because you wouldn’t shop on that day, doesn’t mean that your customers won’t, so think about it seriously
9. If you’re really committed to making this work, back up your online offering with direct mail
10. Keep up the communication throughout the sale one email on Christmas Eve isn’t going to cut it, you need to be persistent!

We as consumers often see January sales as a way of retailers clearing stock. If you run a business that doesn’t hold stock – be it a craft business where you make everything to order or a service based business where you sell your time, then it’s easy to dismiss sales as not being for you. But is it worth looking at them from a different angle?

Sales are just as much about stimulating demand as they are clearing stock.

And when you think about it like that, it sounds a whole lot more attractive doesn’t it! If your business is quiet in January, rather than sitting about moping about it, should you be doing something about it? A sale could be just the thing, with one caveat, it needs to be planned and executed well.

Discounting can look desperate and damage your brand. It can also affect your pricing strategy in the long term, so I would only ever do it with caution. But it really can work.

A poorly planned sale also looks weak. 10% off everything isn’t a sale – it just looks desperate. You need to give people a compelling reason to buy, and a blanket discount just won’t cut it. If you sell product, consider slicing between 25% and 70% off various groups of products rather than applying a global discount to everything. Again, this gives people a more compelling reason to buy.

Last year Clare Yarwood-White ran a sale that started on Christmas eve – her sales increased by 600% compared to the previous year, and it didn’t cannibalise her figures for the rest of the month. printing.com have run a January sale since around 2003 and it works wonders for stimulating demand (although it certainly affects margin for the month). I’ve yet to see a serviced based business pull this off, but I wonder – can it be done? Should it be done? What do you think?

It has never been cheaper to start an ecommerce business. Gone are the days where you need to spend hours learning HTML to build your own website – businesses like Shopify and Create mean that you can create an online shop from around £30 per month. Which is great news for cash-strapped startups – or is it?

Getting your ecommerce website online only tells half the story. What’s much more important is getting people to buy. And that means having the right product, at the right price, in the right place, with the right promotion. Hang on? That sounds like old school marketing! And yes, it still has a place in running an ecommerce business today.

Just because getting your ecommerce business online is can be cheap, that doesn’t mean that you can ignore the basic rules of business. In fact, these rules apply more than ever. I firmly believe that if you want to succeed with an ecommerce business that you need to invest properly in branding, a decent website and in promoting the business properly to get it off the ground. But there is one question that you can ask yourself that will cost you nothing and gain you everything.

Why should people buy from my shop over my competitors?

There it is. It’s not rocket science. It’s not earth shatteringly off the wall. Just a basic business question.

Let’s say, for example, that you have ambitions to pull together a shop that takes the best local designer makers in your area and showcases them to your customers. You want to create a gift shop. The bad news is that whilst you can certainly do this cheaply, doing this well, in a way that means you won’t compete on price, is going to be a lot harder.

You need to think seriously about your competitors. Not On The High Street (NOTHS) and Gift Wrapped and Gorgeous do this sort of thing really well. What do you bring to the table? What are you doing differently? What are you doing better? Why should I spend my £30 on a gift in your online shop rather than, say, NOTHS? If you really want to get volumes of people buying from you then you need to be able to answer this question. And you also need to take steps to ensure you can compete.

And that means having a logo that looks enticing, an ecommerce website design that looks engaging, compelling and reassuring, a process that gets people to the checkout page and beyond and a meaningful brand that keeps your customers coming back for more. There are a host of other things to consider too: how do people find your online shop (both via SEO and Pay Per Click advertising and with offline PR and promotions), what does your packaging look like, how do you set the business up, control your stock and manage deliveries?

But you have to answer the most basic of questions first: Why should people buy from my shop over my competitors? After all, if you can’t answer this question, how are your customers going to be able to?

Image Credits: Nice Package via Paisley St Claire

If consumers are feeling jaded, short on disposable income and reluctant to part with their hard earned cash, then how do you stimulate spending? How do you attract, engage and compel your current and prospective customers to spend their money with you?

It all comes down to creating a proposition that excites your customer. One that creates satisfaction, not just within the product, but the buying experience as well. It’s about truly engaging your customer in a way that compels them to buy.

Of course, this is easier said than done, and over the next couple of weeks I’ll be sharing with you some of the things you can do to create an engaging customer experience.

In the meantime, I’d like to extend an invitation to you.

The Summer Social: Creating an Engaging Customer Experience and Compelling Proposition

Thursday 21st July, 6.30-9.30pm, Horsley Park, East Horsley, Surrey KT24 6DU

Fancy joining us?

Liz Machtynger and I are running a couple of seminars around this theme as a part of our Customer Greenhouse summer social. We’ll be looking at how you create a proposition that excites your customer and how you create an engaging customer experience through your website: be it ecommerce or otherwise.

As you’d expect, the content will be inspiring and easy to understand, it’ll be peppered with things you can do the very next day, and packed full of real life examples. As you might also expect, there will be plenty of delicious nibbles on offer as well as drinks to ease the evening along. You can find full details of the Exciting Customer Experiences and Engaging Propositions evening on the Customer Greenhouse website

How would you like to join us? I have five tickets to giveaway – on me!

Tickets are £97 each but here’s the thing. I’d like to give away five tickets to you lovely blog readers as a celebration of the summer and a big thank you for your support this year.

I’ll pick five winners at random by 2pm on Friday 15th July. All you need to do is tell me what you’d like to gain from the event in the comments section below. (do make sure you also put a working email address in the comment box so that I can contact you if you’re lucky enough to win)

Good luck!

{The important stuff} My decision will be final. No correspondence will be entered into. You are responsible for getting yourself (safely) to the venue. No other costs will be covered other than the seminar entrance fee which includes a glass of wine on arrival and complimentary nibbles. Please ensure you’re able to make the event (on 21st July) before entering the competition.

Why are we so reluctant to raise our heads above the parapet and say “I’m good at this, I’m successful”?

We’ve just started the process of developing the brand identity, website, blog and marketing materials for a visionary image consultant. She’s incredibly successful at what she does, she’s received oodles of high level press and exposure and she boasts an impressive client list. Her logo is gorgeous, but her website lacks a certain confidence at the moment. And her blog design is so uninspiring that she hasn’t posted since July.

Excitingly this client was confident and visionary enough to be brave. We’ve planned a photoshoot, creative brainstorming session and complete overhaul of her communications. And of course we will be sharing the story with you in time…

But this client got me thinking. She’s just a one-woman band, it would be so easy to be cautious, so easy to say “It’s only me, I don’t need more than x clients a week” and shrink back into “safe mode”. So many of us spend hours on end building our own websites, trying to learn a bit of HTML to get our blogs working the way we want them to – and the end result doesn’t usually pay off.

By thinking small you’re undermining your own professionalism and weakening the confidence your prospective clients will have in you. You’re also limiting your market to people who also think small. That’s fine if that’s your strategy – but if you want to think big then you need to act big.

By being brave this image consultant is being visionary enough to expand her business and create some tangible successes.

Ladies such as Katie Pirson and Natalia Barbour exude this confidence and vision I’m talking about. They have the confidence in themselves to realise that investing in their image will pay dividends. It’ll enable their own clients to see that they take themselves seriously and it’ll help them attract new clients.

Whatever stage you’re at in your business it’s so tempting to think small: to believe that your clients will never spend more, buy more often or value you more than they do. But if you think big, you might just get what you wished for!

What is this obsession with chasing after new customers all the time? Driving the children to school this morning I was incensed by a Direct Line advert, bragging about introductory discounts, presumably for new customers.

Remember the Nationwide advert for “Brand New Customers Only”? That ad worked because we’ve all experienced the injustice of special deals being offered to new customers and not us loyal ones.

And is it just me or do you also to go through the same rigmarole every year of needing to take out a new car insurance policy (often with the same provider) because it’s cheaper to sign up again online than it is to renew?

Seriously? It doesn’t make sense and financial service providers are some of the worst culprits. But I wonder if small businesses aren’t just as bad? Do you spend your time and energy on looking after the clients you have, encouraging them to do repeat business with you? Or is your marketing strategy all about the new business?

New customers cost up to seven times more to win than leveraging business from your existing customers. And your existing customers, who presumably know you, like you and trust you, are likely to spend up to three times more than new clients. So if the financials don’t add up, why do we do it? Why do we spend so much time and energy chasing new business rather than nurturing our valuable client base? And if we should be nurturing our client base, then how do we do it?

I’m running a Customer Retention conference with customer management expert Liz Machtynger and a host of other experts on 3rd Feb (do join us if you can!) so this is a subject that’s very close to my heart. Here are seven ways you can nurture your valuable client base:

1. Brand for the long term. Is it possible to create a brand that helps you retain as well as attract new customers? I think so! And tomorrow I’ll share with you how to do it. For now, just think: retention.
2. Be clear about what sort of clients you want to retain. Not everyone you work with will be your ideal client. The client that waves the biggest cheque won’t necessarily be your most profitable client. Think hard about which clients will be delighted with what you know you can deliver.
3. Take some time to nurture the relationship at the outset. Liz calls this “getting your customers safely on board” – listen to your customers: what they want and how you can deliver that
4. Recognise and reward your customers. Take the time to say Thank You for a piece of work. This might be as simple as a postcard in the delivery box, a range of tailored offers or inviting special clients to an event you’re running. Make them feel special.
5. Lose with grace. If a customer leaves you recognise when it’s best for both of you. Don’t take it personally. Get yourself ready to win them back (assuming it’s the right thing for both of you – it isn’t always…)
6. Take your clients on a journey. Develop a range of products and services to keep your clients coming back. It sounds obvious but I know of so many wonderful businesses who don’t think further than the first interaction. Explore how you can help your clients over the long term as well as the initial quick fix.
7. Find out what your customers are really thinking. Ask them! Either via a questionnaire, online survey or just face to face. Call them to say thank you and find out how their experience was. You can use this feedback to improve your service.

Has this got you thinking? I’d love for you to join us at the Customer Retention conference. It’s ramajammed with expert speakers, practical know-how and a wine tasting and tour of the vineyard at the end of the day. Hope to see you there!

Image: almostalwaysthinking.com

But there’s more to the sale than just shifting unwanted seasonal stock. Sales are a way to generate sales at a time when consumers don’t want to buy. Think about your own buying behaviour at this time of year. Are you putting off buying items after your Christmas splurge? I rarely buy anything in January (necessities aside) that isn’t discounted. But for me January is the perfect time to stock up my present drawer. And heavy discounts mean consumers are compelled to buy.

One of our clients, wedding jewellery company Yarwood-White is running a sale this year for the first time ever. MD of Yarwood-White, Clare, has resisted my encouragement to run a January sale for years, believing that it will cheapen her product and weaken her brand. I must’ve ground her down because this year, to tie in with the launch of her new website she has launched her first ever January sale. Has it worked? I’m delighted to say that yes, it has! With knobs on!

Clare’s year on year sales for the period 24th December-1st January have increased by a whopping 600%!

Yarwood-White’s sale has compelled brides to buy now, rather than put it off until later.

Another company that has run a very successful sale for several years is printing.com. Like Yarwood-White, printing.com print to order – so they’re not running their sale to shift stock, they’re running a sale to stimulate demand. By launching a 50% off sale in January printing.com have cleverly enhanced what is typically a very quiet time in the print industry. And as a printing.com franchise you can take advantage of their fantastic print offers through Flourish Just ask Izzy for prices and samples…

So tell me, are you running a sale right now? Do you see it as something that’s not right for your business? If so, why? I’d love to hear your thoughts and get some debate running!