iii)How often do they update their information? They should be able to answer this question and should be updating their information monthly.

You can get burnt on mailing lists – it is most expensive part of your campaign. Ask friends who own businesses. Don’t just purchase from first person that tries to sell you mailing lists. Do your research.

3. Select what media to use. (i.e., Direct Mail, Television, Radio, etc.)

This decision will depend on both your budget and your target market. If you have not done a good deal of marketing in past we recommend picking one media to start. This is much easier to keep track of and you will better be able to tell whether or not it is working. Also, since repetition is key to marketing success, using one media to begin with will help you reach same people multiple times. If you run a newspaper ad and send out a postcard, you run risk of majority of people only seeing your ad once. However, if you send out postcard twice you can guarantee that you get your message to same people twice and you will start to build recognition.

Once you are getting returns that you want from first media, or if you decide that it is not working for you, you can branch out into another form of advertising. Over time you will build up a very diverse marketing plan.

4. Make a Schedule and Stick with It.

Figure out how many people you have in your target market. For this example we will use Direct Mail Marketing. If you have a mailing list of people in your target market that has 1500 names, figure out how many times per month you can mail a postcard to them and still stay within your monthly budget. Once you come up with this number, do it!

The importance of having a marketing plan cannot be stressed enough. Create one and follow it and you’ll start seeing benefits.

Each time this happens you will receive $25 credit and there is no limit, so feel free to go crazy referring your friends to us. If you refer enough people who become customers you could end up getting your next order FREE.”

When you set up your own referral program you will want to do two things:

First, make sure that incentive you offer to your customers is in proportion to price of what you are selling. If your least expensive service is $5000, then a $25 discount is probably not going to be enough to get them interested in spreading word.

And secondly, you need to promote it. Make sure that your customers know about new reward program by:

1) Having your sales associates mention it whenever someone places an order.

2) Posting notices in your business if you have customer foot traffic.

and

3) Sending out announcements to your customer address list on a regular basis.

All of these things will help you to increase number of customers that you receive through word of mouth, and at same time help keep down your marketing costs. Is this a great idea or what?

Offering discounts or special incentives to customers who refer another person or company to your business is a win-win situation.

Reward customers that reward you. One of greatest compliments is when someone refers another or others to your business.