Often this is the make or break time of year when earnings have finally passed overheads and taxes, and they are relieved to at last be making money for their own pocket.

Yet perhaps because it is so busy, this is exactly the time most businesses will stumble and drop the ball.

They will get so caught up in servicing customers that they will forget to think about their marketing – and in particular how they will go about following-up.

It happens in one of two ways…

1. You focus on the immediate customers, and forget about building relationships with the past ones who have done business with you throughout the year.

Or even worse…

2. You let all these new customers buy, and then leave – without collecting their contact details and permission to follow-up with them in future!

I was reminded of this just this week when doing a consulting session for a clever businessman about Christmas sales.

I knew he was doing alot of things right because most of the people in his industry have been driven out of business by changes in technology over the past 20 years. Yet he had kept upgrading his marketing and he was kicking along nicely.

He was certainly clever enough to be collecting contact details for his customers.

Much more impressively he had been using those details year-in year-out to recontact people. He was producing excellent repeat holiday business just like clockwork.

But when I asked him how regularly he was contacting these people DURING the year to offer them the rest of his product range, he paused.

“Never”, he said. “I hadn’t considered it.”

Hmmm.

As I say at the top of this blog, there are 3 keys to word of mouth.

By far the easiest to implement is ‘Follow-Up’. Personal, frequent, long-term follow-up.

The easiest sale you will ever make is a repeat sale.

The second easiest sale is a referral.

Both of these are far more likely when you follow-up.

If your follow-up is not bringing you all the results you want (or if it’s just been all too hard) then help is at hand.

Next week I’ll be doing a special-offer webinar specifically on follow-up and Word of Mouth – and demonstrating what I regard as the Ultimate Service to put your follow-up on autopilot. You will also discover…

• A three step seasonal message that eases people into the next level of the buying relationship with you.
• Follow-up that is personal, powerful AND, best of all, automatic.
• How to make your follow-up marketing a profit-centre, not an expense.

Never risk the follow-up mistake again. Click on this link to sign-up and I’ll see you on the webinar Wednesday November 12.

-Martin Russell

Testimonials are about building word of mouth directly into your sales process.

There is one marketer who claims from extensive testing that testimonials are THE most crucial part of an online sales letter (apart from the order link.)

I’ve even seen a successful sales page which was simply testimonial after testimonial down the page. What others say about you can be more persuasive than anything you ever say.

But…

That doesn’t mean that every testimonial helps sell your product, and how do you know which ones sell your product and which don’t.

Here are 3 testimonials that have been tested on “Word of Mouth Magic”.

Can you pick which created sales and which lost them?

“Over a 2 year period your course created a $300,000 a year income. My sales doubled in 3 months from the time I set up a disciplined referral program. This is true and I can document it.”
- Brian McDonald,
Austin, Texas

“Ever since I was lucky enough to discover Martin Russell’s Word of Mouth method, I have included his URL and philosophy as part of my teachings. Before Word of Mouth Magic, it traditionally took a North American 3 years to build an entrepreneurial business which would entirely support oneself, and an additional 5 years of advertising before one could totally depend on a word of mouth reputation. Martin Russell has indeed taught the hungry entrepreneurs “how to fish”… instantly!”
Diana B Cherry,
Canada

“Word of Mouth Magic” has armed me so that sales situations are a more relaxed and predictable. Being able to ‘mute’ the negative challenges and continue the flow is magical. Thanks”
- Dave Deeley.
Dental Salesperson, Ontario, Canada

All 3 of these have had statistical testing to the 99% significance level.

Here are the answers.

Only the middle one actually helped me get more sales. The other two caused people not to buy!

Why?

I don’t know.

I could guess the losing testimonials don’t connect as well with my ideal prospects, but the bottomline is that rather than guess I prefer to add it into the test and let my customers decide.

In fact if you had checked out the “Word of Mouth Magic” sales page you would probably been shown the winner while the others were left off, and you would have had your answer that way.

But I don’t need to calculate all this unless I am pulling it apart to show you.

All I do is simply click a button and the MuVar testing software adjusts the page to maximize sales.

Nice huh. Yet another way to make your word of mouth systematic.

-Martin Russell

The debate is actually a false one, and this mistake is why the battle rages endlessly.

The length is entirely irrelevant.

The answer to “How much copy do I need in my sales letter/optin-page/offer?” is…

“Enough.”

In other words, “Enough to get the desired action.”

Even better is “Enough to get the desired action now and in future” because you want your copy to create immediate sales and even stimulate further sales, but you also want to make sure it doesn’t give false expectations that lead to buyer’s remorse or refund requests.

“Enough” can mean short.

I’ve listened to a top-class copywriter who would be thought of as a long-copy advocate, telling someone to switch to a 1-2 page letter. The businessman was sending out an 8-page pitch for a rather complex and niched service but at the end of the letter all he wanted the person to do was send for more information.

“Enough” certainly means that you need to stop at some point.

Any salesman will know that sometimes you can talk yourself out of a sale by mentioning an extra detail that stops the prospect in their buying tracks.

Even more importantly for the amateur copy-writer, aka most business people, the longer you write the more likely you are to confuse people, bore them, or lose them in some other way.

So the true question is “How do you decide when enough is indeed enough?”

Back in 2004 I was a long copy fan.

The original salesletter for “Word of Mouth Magic” was a very good selling tool. It was well-written sales letter in the classic long-copy style. It was widely praised, and more importantly it converted well.

However over the years the conversion from this page dropped. This may be because the look became a bit outdated, or maybe internet users have changed over the years.

Whatever the reason, all I could control was the page itself.

Unfortunately it was going to cost me thousands of dollars to have the sales letter re-written, with little guarantee it would bring me more sales than what I had already. So I stopped looking.

Then in the last few years testing software has become available online, and prices have dropped from the tens of thousands they were originally.

I finally had a viable way to improve the salesletter.

I would keep what I had as a control and test it against new versions.

My next question was what would I test?

I’d already done price testing back in 2005, so the next most important thing to test was probably different types of headline but was that all?

In the end I took a radical step.

I decided that besides testing different headline versions, I would test absolutely everything in the rest of the copy too.

I broke the sales letter down into over 80 separate pieces, each the size of 1-3 paragraphs.

Then I set up the testing software to randomly include or leave out each piece.

I was asking the question for each piece of copy, is this helping me make the sale or not?

Of course the immediate result was that I had a shorter sales letter.

It was a random coin toss whether any particular piece of copy was included when someone visited the page so the sales letter instantly shrank to half the length.

The question was, would the testing slowly add all the pieces back as it found they were needed to get the sale?

Here are my results:

Tests where including the copy was better – 32

Tests where removing the copy was better – 50!

Amazingly, the majority of my copy had been harming my sales, usually only by a little, but sometimes by a lot!

The only good news was that the testing software was automatically holding back the unhelpful copy, and showing the successful copy more often.

As a result my sales page is almost a third of it’s original length.

More importantly, on a like-to-like comparison of traffic, it’s converting twice as many sales as it was originally.

It is still not a short-copy sales letter by any means, and maybe there are some extra paragraphs that I could add that might help sales, but I very much doubt it will ever be as long again.

I have tested 3 different multivariate tools over the years and looked at more, but the one I settled on, MuVar, is the same software I ran on “Word of Mouth Magic”. You can find the latest version at…

http://www.MuVar.com

Test. Test. Test. The final say on your marketing, including the length of the copy, comes from your customer.

-Martin Russell

1. Word of mouth is one of the cheapest way to get new clients. You can get referrals without spending any money! Get the mindset right and you will suddenly see all the opportunities for referrals just lying around in your business and your current buyers. It is worth planning for.

Are your word of mouth referrals a lucky accident, or a deliberate, planned result?

2. Studies have shown that referred clients come back more often and spend more than clients brought in by any other marketing method. A client coming from word of mouth can be worth much more so don’t just measure the quantity. Check the life-time value of your referred clients and compare that to any other method you use. Almost always you will find a significant difference.

You are measuring where your clients come from, and how much they are worth to you, aren’t you?

3. Word of mouth clients tend to complain less, pay on time more often, and are generally more enjoyable to work with, when compared to clients from any other method. This is primarily because your best clients usually refer the best people to you. More often than not, clients refer you people who are very much like them.

You are very clear on who your ideal client is, aren’t you?

4. A systematic word of mouth strategy can double the size of your business in less than a year. After all, if every one of your clients refer, on average, just one person each year, then you’ll double your client base every year! You can create referral opportunities, and also arrange to be right there in a person’s mind when someone they know has need of you.

Do you follow-up, are you memorable, and have you made it drop-dead easy for people to give you a referral?

Finally, and best of all…

5. A client who comes by referral is far more likely to send you more referrals. There is a virtuous cycle. A referred client already understands you accept referrals, they have experienced how you will treat someone they refer, and they are already proven to talk to others about what they needed when they came to you.

How are you leveraging that first referral into a growing chain of additional referrals?

With all theses benefits of word of mouth, can you see why creating a system to get the maximum number of high-quality referrals is going to really benefit your business?

-Martin Russell

Three weeks ago I stumbled across a just-released e-book on referral marketing from a UK trainer called Vince Golder.

So I contacted Vince, not expecting much to come of it. Anyway it turns out that Vince is much more than I thought. He understands that merely having a referral strategy is not enough, he is squarely focused on small to medium-sized businesses, and even though he prefers not to use the term – he does get Word of Mouth marketing as my previous post about him shows.

Vince gave me a little bit of the background to how he found himself in this field:

My book is based on my own model of referral marketing, which I developed some years ago when I was a director with a marketing association.

On this project I conducted a marketing survey to 287 SMEs in my region. Most of them stated that traditional marketing was not working any more, too costly etc. When I asked them about word of mouth their eyes lit up and majority of them stated they get most of their business through referrals. What shocked me was that they achieved this without any form of structured strategy or commitment and that they were only receiving what I estimated was approx. 40% of the referrals they should be getting!!!

Vince’s book has endorsements from Ivan Misner the Founder of the international networking organization BNI, and Penny Power the Founder and Director of the online business community ECademy.

In the book he covers networking, referral programs, customer service, business plans, follow-up, mindset, endorsements, joint ventures and even how to start word of mouth going when you are starting a business from zero.

He also includes examples and templates that can get you started straight away.

This book is for service and retail businesses that are larger than just one person, because it goes into such issues as employee issues, staff training, and customer surveys.

Vince told me he wonders if he crammed too much into a single book. Well I’ve read all 218 pages but if is too much for you to take in all at once, I suggest you jump to page 200 for Case Study #1. He has a money-back guarantee, but that one example alone should give you enough immediately-actionable ideas to make the purchase well worth it.

Vince’s own website has more details (and pricing in UK pounds):

http://www.GoldnetReferralMarketing.com/

But it’s discounted 50% down to US$25 if you order from the special page below.

It’s not my product so I haven’t been able to screw him down to my usual 60+% discount, but you can get it at half price until Thursday midday Pacific Daylight Time (GMT -8 hours) from the order link on this page…

http://www.WordofMouthMagic.com/resources/gold/

-Martin Russell

I’ve been slowed down by having to turn it into emails each time. A blog is a simpler way to deliver so much more of this material to you.

So let me start back at a real marketing fundamental.

If there is one thing you absolutely must do it is MEASURE YOUR RESULTS.

People say word of mouth isn’t worth doing because it isn’t measurable. They complain that they just send stuff out and then start wishing and praying that people will tell their friends.

They have it flat wrong.

Don’t allow yourself to EVER start marketing without having some measurement in place to give you feedback on your efforts.

Those advertisers who tell you you need 6 ads in their paper before people have seen you enough to respond? … Well let me just suggest you check whether there could be a hidden motivation in their trying to get you to believe that. You might get more the second time around, but if you get zero the first time, the most likely result of repeating it is simply more of nothing.

However measuring doesn’t mean that you only measure dollars.

Let me give you an example of a measurement I am following for this blog that you can check out too.

It’s from a simple and commonly available tool called the Alexa toolbar

Alexa is a service that assesses the popularity of websites on the internet. It ranks websites in comparison to other sites, and it will monitor changes in a website’s popularity too, so the more popular the more the ranking climbs.

Well it falls actually, since the Alexa numbers get smaller as you get more popular.

Yahoo is #1, Google is #2, MSN is #3 and I am starting at….? Well get the toolbar and find out.

The toolbar shows you the Alexa rank in the bottom right corner of every page you visit, and also a little wiggly link with the ups and downs as the popularity changes.

You can install the Alexa toolbar from:

http://www.Alexa.com

Tomorrow I hope to have a Word of Mouth marketing discount offer set to go!

Speak to you then.

-Martin Russell