Today I’ll finish up the list of 7 profit stimulating ideas I started last week.  As a quick recap, here are the first four we’ve already discussed:

1. Create a frequent buyer’s program
2. Provide occasional discounts
3. Use premiums
4. Package your services together

The 5^th way to stimulate your profits is to give your customers the option to prepay for your services.  For example, let’s say you have someone that’s interested in signing a year long contract for services but instead of you sending them a monthly invoice, you give them the option of paying it all upfront in exchange for 2 months worth of services free.

Now, you obviously need to know your costs very well to know how much you can afford to give them, but by providing this type of incentive you’ll get a number of customers that would be more than happy to avoid all the hassles associated with sending payment PLUS they get 2 months worth of services for free.

The 6^th way you can stimulate profits is to accept credit cards.  Now I know this one may seem a bit elementary, but believe it or not, there are quite a lot of companies out there that still don’t.  Consumers today are used to convenience.  They love the convenience of using a credit or debit card, knowing everything happens instantaneously.

Believe it or not, if you offer your customers the option of paying by credit card you’ll pick up a healthy number of new customers that are interested in that convenience.  They just don’t want to mess around with writing a check each month.

Another way you could really take advantage of this idea is to set them up on automatic draft so that each month, their invoice is paid automatically.  Once it’s set up, you don’t have to worry about remembering to charge their card.  They don’t have to worry about returning the invoice.  Everything happens automatically and everyone’s life is a whole lot less complicated.

Of course, you need to remember to cancel the auto-draft if they are no longer your customer.  Trust me, all the hassles and headaches you avoided by having them on auto-draft will be multiplied if you don’t change that when they cancel.

The final profit stimulating idea is to communicate constantly with your past and present customers.  Your customer list is your most valuable asset and by failing to maintain constant contact with them, you’re allowing that asset to simply waste away.

While many will tell you “it’s okay to contact them quarterly”, I say that’s baloney.  If you’re not contacting your customers AT LEAST once a month with something other than a service call or a bill, you’re losing 10% of that relationship.

Each contact doesn’t have to be something extraordinaire and it doesn’t have to be something expensive either.  A monthly newsletter is an excellent way to maintain contact and you can get them printed and mailed for less than $1.  Now, if you’re saying that $1 is too much to spend to strengthen the relationship with the one’s that are putting at least 25 times that much into your pocket each month, then you’re in the wrong business!

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There’s a recent conversation going on in the GopherForum about whether or not telephone directory advertising works.

Here’s my latest addition to the conversation:

“So what can you do to give your prospect a reason to call? Since marketing is a step-by-step process, the reason should be a baby step towards actually becoming a customer. And since at the stage where most prospect are when they’re scanning the yellow pages (trying to decide which of all the choices would be best to call), give them something to help answer the questions in their mind. Instead of just listing your services like all the other advertising lemmings, offer them some free information to help make their job easier. Put something like: “Do you know the ‘5 Questions You Should Ask Any Lawn Care Provider Before Letting Them Care For Your Lawn’? Before calling any other company, listen to this FREE recorded message by calling XXX-XXX-XXXX 24 hours a day.” You would then set up a special voice mail where you list the 5 reasons on the message. At the end of the message, you could present them with another offer that encourages them to leave their contact information after the beep, thus allowing you to continue to educate them on your services. This next offer could also start the process of weeding out the tire kickers. Finally, you could create a free report on any topic that answers any number of questions going through your prospects mind while searching the yellow pages, but that’s the general idea - give them a non-intimidating reason to pick up the and find out more about you. “

You can read the entire discussion HERE.

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