All businesses have those times when sales seem to slow to a worryingly low level. Times when the phone doesn’t ring …. or orders don’t click through to the website as often as you’d like. If you’re in this situation here are a few things you can do – at very short notice – to start the orders and enquiries flowing again:

Send a direct mailing to your existing customers

Your existing and past customers are more likely than anyone else to order from you again, or increase the size of their current orders. So they should always be the first people you contact when business is slow. Chasing them up with a direct mailing (or emailing if you have reliable email addresses) is a very simple way to get orders rolling in again.

The trick to making this effective is to carefully construct an enticing offer and pitch it just right …. so that it doesn’t sound like an ‘everything must go’ fire sale.

Send a direct mailing to your past contacts

Those who have enquired about your product/service in the past but who have not actually bought anything should be next in your sights. The good thing about contacting these people is that you can make them more powerful, more persuasive offers without compromising your existing business.

One of the main reasons past contacts don’t become customers is a lack of confidence in doing business with you. Some kind of risk free trial can be a very good way of converting them into customers.

Important. You should always have a mailing list (physical or emailing addresses or both) of existing customers and past contacts so that you can contact these people whenever you like. (If you don’t, get started with creating one now!) A regular newsletter is an even better way of keeping in touch.

Do some PR

Your next plan of action should be to start attracting more brand new customers. PR activity can be an incredibly effective way of making a big splash at very short notice. So write a press release, or many press release, and distribute it to all relevant media.

The secret to making PR work quickly is to create a PR story that is topical, current, newsworthy and very immediate. This way the press will want to run with your story ASAP.

More marketing ideas

In the medium term, there are things you can do to ensure the phone doesn’t stop ringing again. Social media holds potential to be very effective but takes time to get doing. But do set up a Facebook, Twitter and maybe even a YouTube presence and start posting to these sites regularly. It’s also a very good idea to have a blog (on Blogger or WordPress) and post to it regularly. These can be an incredibly effective way of getting your business found in online searches, but it can take weeks or months before your posts start to appear so you need to plan well in advance.

If you would like more help with planning and writing your advertising campaigns do get in touch. Take a look at my website: www.markhempshell.com