I think Pattie Simone has exactly the right message in her article about A Marketing Tool That’s Obvious, Overlooked and Cheap. As she says, Use superior service as a thrifty and effective in-house marketing mechanism.
While many entrepreneurs are scrambling to attract new business, some have discovered one of the easiest (and least expensive) tools to keep their sales engines humming: holding on to current patrons through superb customer service. When you weight the cost of attracting new clients vs. the cost of keeping the ones you have, superior customer service will beat most any ad campaign on ROI.
It was unfortunate that the article uses pop-ups like this:
These particular ones are cheap, very obvious and almost impossible to overlook. Indeed for a few seconds you can only move them and not make them disappear. Why do the marketers of Resource Nation use such push marketing, intrusive methods. They will alienate most prospects and are hardly in tune with the spirit of this article.
Dear Barry –
Thanks for sharing my Entrepreneur.com article with your readers! In-house marketing – in the form of simply delivering the best service – is too often the “800 lb gorilla in the room.” To paraphrase Seth Godin – stop looking for the next best thing or magic bullet, and do the obvious thing. Re the pop-ups – have to agree with your assessment; they are intrusive and will most likely achieve the exact opposite of what they are touted to do – tick people off as they try to learn something of real value!
Look forward to hearing more of your “different point of view”…
Cheers,
Pattie, The Thrifty Marketer
A few websites i use have them on and i get annoyed at them when i accidently roll over a word and it forces itself upon me, thus stopping me reading the sentance because 9 times out of 10 it covers about 200-300px of the screen. Grrr
This is so true, I know so many people with email subscribers list who dont bother to send an email, Ok so a large % wont open them but at least they will keep seeing your company name once a week. When I launch my discount code site its the first thing I’ll be doing!
Any product or company that uses pop-ups is after being “top of mind” amongst their customers and potential customers. It is effective in such a way that you do remember them or their brand. As to whether these efforts push toward making new sales, maintaining existing customers, or creating new customers is an entirely different scenario to be assessed. Offhand, I think majority of people are annoyed. But to assess whether this technique is effective or not mainly depends on the objectives of the advertiser.
Along those same lines, it’s important to market to your current customers, too. A lot of people think that marketing should be focused on new client acquisition only, but it’s actually more effective marketing to your existing clients, because they already have a relationship with you.
Hello,
Indeed blogs cost only time. The only problems is if you are not doing the right thing it can take a very long time before you see some results. I have learned from my own mistakes and I still do.
Blog marketing is cheap but you have to know what are you doing or use the service of a blog coach.