What should small business owners hungry for sales do? There seem to be so many obstacles to generating more business! Here are 3 great idea’s you can begin using this week!

1. If you’re serious about increasing sales, then you’re going to have to come to terms with the web. Whether you have a website or not, you can still use internet marketing strategies to build your business. (My first 5 months in business I didn’t have a website, but nearly 30% of my sales still came from the web) How is this possible?

It’s a concept known as “lead capture.” In a nutshell, what this means is that instead of relying on prospects to pick up the phone and call you, your website, ads, or other online media focus on getting the prospect to take a specific course of action, such as giving you his.her email address, phone number, or even physical address.

This is where most small business owners drop the ball. In preparation for this article, I reviewed over 290 websites for local businesses and only 36 of these sites had anything resembling a lead capture mechanism. Scary isn’t it? The idea of lead capture is based on the fundamental marketing truth that says “it’s easier to get someone to take a smaller course of action than a larger one.” This is very true. Ask 10 people to give you $50 and how many will do it? Ask those same 10 people for their email address and how many would do it?

Increasing sales is all about timing. If the people who don’t buy from you today are kept in the loop, and continue to be reminded of what you have to offer, you will find that a respectable percentage will take the next step and buy.

2. Automated email marketing - Here’s a great way to experience a huge boost of business in a short period of time! A complete professional grade auto-responder! Wouldn’t it be nice to know that your loyal customers were getting regular rapport building messages, thank you’s, and special offers from you?

Wouldn’t it also be nice to know that those who are interested, but haven’t bought yet are also getting messages on a regular basis? (Studies show that regular email based follow up can increase sales by 10 - 30%) Unfortunately this takes time that you don’t have. However, a properly structured auto-responder campaign has the ability to automatically deliver specific email messages to different groups of people (Prospects, current clients, past clients, etc.) at preselected periods of time.

Better yet, each email will be customized to the recipient and can appear as if it were personally written by you! Imagine what it would do for your business if you could deliver special offers and promotions to the specific groups, while simultaneously sending thank you messages and holiday greeting to others? A proper email campaign can do all this and more. The beauty of using this approach is it increases sales, and saves you time at the same time. How often does that happen?

3. Lead Tracking - Let me ask a simple question. What if there were a way to know exactly which marketing campaigns would be successful, and which campaigns were a waste of your time? Would you want to know the details? Of course you would! Who wants to waste time and money on marketing efforts that don’t work? There is a way to make this happen! It’s called “call capture.” Call capture is simply a professional toll free phone line that captures and tracks prospect information. Let me illustrate:

You get an 800# for your business

- each number comes with a large number of extensions

- each extension allows you to record audio messages providing directions, descriptions of products, free reports, or even just different extensions provided for different advertising promotions

- Caller A see’s an ad online and calls in on extension 100. Caller B receives an email ad and calls in on extension 200. Caller C reads a newspaper article or ad and calls in on extension 300.

- Your call capture system records all these statistics and more. (It pulls name, phone number, and even the address of each caller) -

At the end of the month, you log into your admin panel to view and print your statistics so that you can see how many people called in from ad A, B, or C. Wouldn’t it be nice to see which marketing methods are pulling their own weight? Since your call capture system also provides you with the address of each caller, you now have the option to mail a newsletter, sales flyer or some sort of follow-up to pick up extra sales that otherwise would have fallen through the cracks!

See? Marketing Intelligence at its finest! It also doesn’t hurt that this type of phone system also allows callers to download sales flyers, order forms, or printable menu’s and directions to your place of business.