Albert Einstein said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." In marketing there are three simple numbers that determine your marketing performance. Tracking and maximizing these three statistics for your business will guarantee your marketing success.

The first one, lead generation rate, is the one that most people think of when they think of marketing perfomance. Lead generation rate measures how quickly you identify new quailified prospects. (leads)

The second one is close rate, or how many of your leads turn into sales.

The third one is lifetime value of a customer, or how much a customer buys from you for the life of the business relationship.

Multiply the three together and you get your projected sales rate. For example, if your bsuiness generates 10 leads per week, your close rate is 30% and each customer on average spends $100 with you, your sales rate is $300 per week.

If you want to increase your sales, decide which of these numbers you can increase the most with the least investment. By doubling any one number you can double your sales rate. Increasing two or all three will rapidly multiply sales. Its as easy as 1-2-3!

That was my reaction when I recieved a Thanksgiving greeting via e-mail from a local business owner. It's not that I don't appreciate being wished well, its that the e-card stated how thankful the sender was to have me as a clinet -- but I wasn't. Now this may seem like a small thing, but in my opinion it is as off putting as the old "dear occupant" and about as likely to make me feel like this buisness new me or really cared.

Of course, I know that this was a mass mailing, not a perosnal greeting, but the statement that was lound and clear, though unspoken, was that the sender didn't feel it necessary to take the time to segment their list and make a version of the message for two groups. In this day and age, appropriate personalization easy to do and not doing it in an era of one-to-one marketing will make you stand out in your audiences's mind-- but not in the way you want!

Do you know what your biggest strength as a small business is ?

Marketing guru Dan Kennedy recently said in his 2009 Info Summit  https://gkic.infusionsoft.com/link/19d9e910f40/5e9ac0 (and I'm paraphrasing here) that what really matters to your prospects when they hear your marketing message is not the quality of the way its packaged or produced, but the emotional connection they feel with you. Wrapped up in this insight is a clue to the strongest advantage every small business has compared to large companies. What almost every small business can do better than almost every large business is build that personal connection that is critical to forming a business relationship. Though large companies are very good a many things due to their scale, vast resources and sophistication, it is extremely difficult for them to create and maintian a strong personal connection with thier customers.

So if you find yourself worrying about competing with the "big guys" ask yourself "What can I do to communicate my enthusiasm for helping my customers?" If you do, you can't be stopped.

A few days ago I was talking with the marketing director of a local business. She had run onto resistance from the business owner to moving forward with some new marketing ideas. The owner had tried various marketing approaches in the past that had failed and his fear of failing again had him stuck doing the same things and hoping for better results. Now I would concede that this decision might make some sense had he been getting acceptable results from his current approach, but revenues were far below break even and had been for some time. Maybe the economy will improve and pull his business levels up with it. I hope for his sake that it does and soon. But if it were me, I would not want to risk my business on the hope of an economic turnaround.

I realize that it is hard to risk doing something new when your buisness is losing money, but is that really worse than ongoing losses into the indefinite future? My recommendation - regularly try new marketing approaches but keep investments low until you get the formula right. When you have a winner (you're getting back many times the dollars you're spending on your new approach) pour on the investment and scale up your results. Where to get the funds? Cut back on your least effective marketing investment and shif the dollars to the new approach. If you fail completely to find a profitable formula, your situation will only be little worse than it would be had you done nothing -- and there is a good chance that you'll end up much, much better off.