4 Strategies That will get you Success with Interruption Marketing

Answer these questions honestly:How do you feel about telemarketers? What about promotional emails? On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate most television commercials? If you’re like most consumers, you not only said, “don’t like ‘em” — you might have even gotten mad. Telemarketers are the bane of our existence, right? That’s […]

  • Answer these questions honestly:

    How do you feel about telemarketers? What about promotional emails? On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate most television commercials?

  • If you’re like most consumers, you not only said, “don’t like ‘em” — you might have even gotten mad. Telemarketers are the bane of our existence, right? That’s why more than 45% mobile users in India have registered on a “do not call” list. And most people now fast forward through TV ads. What about promotional emails? Well, no one likes their inbox cluttered with ads for products they don’t care about and don’t want.

So, Why are there still telemarketers and promotional emails, and TV Ads?

The simple answer is that they still work. According to John Pritchett writing about telemarketing for LinkedIn, for example, “Done properly, picking up the telephone is still one of the most effective tools for lead generation and demand creation.” And, although many consumers find a way around television spots, many others still watch them, and still make purchases based on their content.

As for promotional emails, even Hubspot (the leader of inbound marketing) agrees they’re indispensable to a comprehensive marketing strategy, and that consumers respond to them—for example, 66% of consumers report that they’ve bought products based on an email marketing message.


When Is It OK to Interrupt Someone?

People don’t like it when you interrupt them, right?

Well, it depends. If you’re telling a friend that you’re about to pay 15 Lakhs for a new car and he interrupts with, “Wait — I know a dealer who’ll give you that car for 13 Lakhs” — will you get mad, or will you thank him?

Interruptions are OK when they help people, give them smart advice or steer them in the right direction.


What Is Interruption Marketing?

Interruption marketing gets its name from the fact that it interrupts whatever someone is currently doing to grab his attention. Tech Target defines interruption marketing this way:
“Interrupt marketing, sometimes referred to as interruption marketing, is the traditional model of product promotion, in which people have to stop what they’re doing to pay attention to the marketing message or deal with it in some other way.”
Examples of interruption marketing include telemarketing calls, mail campaigns, email campaigns, television and radio ads, interstitial and transitional online ads, and “preroll ads” that play before video content. Whether or not these traditional marketing strategies work for your business depends on how you deploy them.

So what’s the Secret?

The trick to successfully deploying interruption marketing is to understand the fine line that separates curiosity and nuisance. If a telemarketer calls with a pitch on refinancing your mortgage, you’re annoyed — unless you happen to be thinking about refinancing your mortgage, in which case you might want to know more. A promotional email for landscaping services is a nuisance for many consumers — except those who are searching for top landscaping services.

Said differently, the secret to successful interruption marketing is understand your audience — what they want and how they want you to communicate with them.

Here are 4 strategies to make interruption marketing work for your business:


  • 1. Target the right people: when you send a product email to a prospective customer who has zero interest in that product, you don’t just lose that sale—you also create mistrust. That customer probably won’t pay attention to subsequent promotional emails, even when they’re about products he does want. You need to segment your email list based on who your customers are, what they want, and where they are in the buying cycle.

  • 2. Don’t make customers jump through a lot of hoops: whatever your call to action is, you need to make it easy as possible for customers to do. If you send an email with a link to an online form on your website, don’t ask for too much information, especially if it’s a new customer. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes—how much action would be too much for you to take?

  • 3. Appeal to their pain points: consumers are motivated to buy products and services that help them solve problems. You need to clearly understand what that problem is, how your product solves it, and how to most persuasively make that case to prospects. Generally, that means stating the problem upfront (it’s good to do this in the form of a question, as in, “Are you still trying to get rid of that annoying belly fat?”) to pique curiosity, then answering the question with your solution to the problem.

  • 4. Ask for their permission: you can’t bully people into buying your products — when you push hard, the natural tendency is for them to push back. You can make your statement of a given consumer problem as straightforwardly as you want, but you still need to ask for permission to make your case. If what you want, for example, is someone’s contact information, offer them something they want (like a discount or useful content) as an incentive. And, when it comes to emails, always (ALWAYS) be sure recipients have opted in, and always give them an opportunity to unsubscribe.
 

Conclusion

To drive sales and grow your business, you need to identify the weaknesses in your sales process — whether it’s generating leads or closing sales — and then craft a strategy to eliminate it. That means understanding your audience and leveraging the right technology to put your plan into action. To learn more about the ways our technology services can help you achieve your business goals, contact us today.

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Do You Think That You’re Cut Out For Running a Start-Up? Take This Quiz

Do you think that you’re cut out for running a start-up? That’s awesome. Starting a business can be your ticket to earning a steady income and leaving the corporate world for good. The trick is to map out your idea and then to secure different sources of capital so you can test it. But, first, […]

  • Do you think that you’re cut out for running a start-up? That’s awesome. Starting a business can be your ticket to earning a steady income and leaving the corporate world for good. The trick is to map out your idea and then to secure different sources of capital so you can test it. But, first, we want you to take this quiz that every would-be entrepreneur should:

1. Will you do whatever it takes to get the business off the ground?

We say this because business owners typically invest hundreds or thousands of hours during the start-up phase, and they aren’t collecting a paycheck. If you’re sure you can dig deep and make sacrifices, you might survive the first lean year of operations.


2. Are you tired of working for someone else?

If you hate going into your annual performance review meeting to hear how the boss has rated your work, we hear you. When you run a start-up, you’re the boss. You handle the hiring and firing and/or get assistance with this business function. You decide when to open and close the business and what products or services to offer.


3. Do you hate representing business values that don’t match your own?

Anyone who has worked for a business with different values than their own has had to bite his or her tongue multiple times. It could be when explaining a policy to a dissatisfied customer or when justifying a decision to your boss. When you own the company, you determine the business values and hire the people who will follow them.


4. Do you want to earn money on a par with your hard work?

If you work on an hourly or salary basis for a company where you never get to touch the revenue, it’s hard to feel motivated. The profits go into someone else’s pockets, and your value is limited to your salary. What’s more, most employers don’t give annual increases at a pace that matches rising living costs. You could begin developing an idea and then leave the corporate world once your business gets off the ground. This way you start forging a path towards financial independence without getting rid of your job as a source of stability.


5. Are your talents being wasted in your current job?

Sometimes, we take jobs because we need a salary and benefits. We must support our family, but we begin to stagnate when the organization ceases to challenge us and develop our talents. We want you to find a new sense of purpose as a new business owner.


6. Do people like working for you even if you aren’t the top dog?

If you find it easy to build relationships with people and motivate them to complete tasks for the benefit of the organization, owning a business could be your vocation. It’s a question of when to begin.


7. Are you ready to change careers?

Few management positions provide enough flexibility for managers to feel as though they’re running their own company. You could feel this way as the general manager of a restaurant or a regional manager of a chain of stores. To some degree, however, you are limited by the corporate office’s policies and directives. What would you do if you started a chain of your own stores? Entrepreneurship offers 100% flexibility. As a start-up business owner, you’ll create and enforce business practices your way unless you take on partners in the firm.


We want you to realize the dream of business ownership so that you can test a new idea on the market. How much longer can you stand working for your present boss? Do you really want to change companies again? We help you start a company in ways that makes sense. For details, please contact us today.


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Burning Cash: The biggest Problem of Startups & How to Solve it

Some of the biggest, most famous startups are known — or even notorious — for spending venture capital infusions lavishly on offices, employees, and equipment. Generally, those startups fall into one of two categories: Fast-burning failures, or companies with a known quality product that use some of the cash their massive funding rounds to attract […]

  • Some of the biggest, most famous startups are known — or even notorious — for spending venture capital infusions lavishly on offices, employees, and equipment.

  • Generally, those startups fall into one of two categories: Fast-burning failures, or companies with a known quality product that use some of the cash their massive funding rounds to attract employees with high-end amenities.

In truth, these types of stories cover major outliers on two opposite ends of the spectrum. Startups mainly exist somewhere in the middle part of that spectrum, with extremely varied amounts of initial funding or even none at all outside of what the founders can personally pay for or borrow. The strategies so closely associated with the word “startup,” mostly amounting to hemorrhaging cash until the product takes off or at least does well enough for the company to be acquired, are not a sustainable model for most new businesses.

For most startups, huge spending isn’t an option. Especially at the beginning. The true nature of most successful startups is a lean start, with funding gradually increasing until — in the best case scenario — their product proves itself in the market and receives a big boost from investors.


The Lean Startup Methodology

The basics of the lean startup methodology are:

  • Build the minimal functional example of your product. Work with your engineers to create the leanest example of your product and get it in front of customers as soon as possible to start gathering usage data. There is immense value in getting your product out of the imagination phase and in front of customers.
  • Continuously deploy new versions of your product. Instead of slowly building the full suite of dream features for your product, add new fixes and features as your customers need them. This keeps every man hour focused on the most efficient work at all times. This also leverages the phenomenon of customer needs often being out of sync with engineers’ ideas. Each new feature implemented considers customer feedback from the previous version, instead of engineers and designers dreaming up their own solutions to problems customers might not even have.
  • Make decisions based on actionable metrics, rather than vanity metrics. In this case, actionable means a circumstance with a high chance of bringing in new revenue. A vanity metric, in contrast, is data that sounds nice, like targeting anything that nets new customers, but the best ways to do so sometimes cost more money overall than each individual customer brings in. Prove you can make money before spending too much at once!

The startup planning stances outlined above are even helpful for new businesses with heavy initial funding. Proving you know how to make money efficiently leads to a broader cross-section of investors willing to take a risk on your startup. And if the final goal is to sell the company off to a larger entity, you increase your chances of being well-compensated if the product is operating at a profit or at least losing very little compared to similar potential investments.

These three basics are the tenets of running a lean startup, and will point entrepreneurs in the right direction towards building an efficient, profitable product that proves to potential investors that your startup is worth their time and money.

Do you want to gain more tools to ensure your startup runs in the most lucrative and efficient fashion possible? That’s where W3 Business Minds come in. We specialize in helping startups and new businesses hit the ground running with the absolute best strategy possible, by identifying inefficiencies and plugging in new, data-driven ideas with proven success.

Whether you’re in the planning stages or you have a successful, established business that you know could be doing better, contact us today for a consultation.

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Customer Money vs. VC Money

For any startup business, there are three major sources of money. There’s the money you raise from personal funds, friends, family and loans, followed by investment from venture capitalists (VCs), and finally the money you make from happy customers who buy your product or service. While the large lump sums can be tempting, it’s very […]

  • For any startup business, there are three major sources of money. There’s the money you raise from personal funds, friends, family and loans, followed by investment from venture capitalists (VCs), and finally the money you make from happy customers who buy your product or service. While the large lump sums can be tempting, it’s very important for young businesses to put every ounce of energy into creating a rewarding customer experience and increasing your annual profits from customer money. A business exists in order to perform that vital and profitable interaction with customers. They strive to become efficient to provide valuable services at a lower overhead. This, in turn, gains them more satisfied paying customers, whose payments fund the next round of overhead and growth.

What is Venture Capital?

The venture capital method has two sides: the investors and the companies. On one side investors are normal people who pool their money, then invest in batches of startup companies in hopes to make back more money than they put in. That’s the simple part. On the other side, businesses who accept venture capital are making a deal with the devil. You see, the way the VC system makes money for the investors isn’t based on your profits or happy customers, but how much you sell for. Venture capital is a lot like a backward mortgage: when you ‘succeed’ at paying your investors, you lose control of your company by either selling a large number of public shares or being bought out by a larger company and the VC investors take most of the money.  

Using VC Money

For many businesses, this doesn’t sound so bad, especially if the founders enjoy the challenges of starting business after business. Each one funded by VC money, sold for a tidy profit and another, often nearly identical business is started using the ‘success’ of the first one to persuade more VC investors to buy into paying the startup costs. This method is fine, but only if you see your company as a disposable means to an end. For young companies, the offer of large VC startup funds can be tempting, but this is not free money! Your investors still want their money back and then some, and unlike a bank loan, there are strings attached to how that money is repaid. While they may want you to succeed, they will then want a big slice of that success when you sell.  

The Value of Customer Money

Customers are the reason businesses exist, they are the demand for your supply and without them there would be no point in founding a company. Many startups skip the snazzy offices and ergonomic chairs for the first few months in order to start providing to customers as quickly as possible. When those first few checks come in from happy customers, that is when business truly begins. From there, it’s a matter of balancing overhead with income, generating profit, and expanding. Customer money comes with no strings attached, and each successful sale increases your company’s value and respect in the industry. As your customer base grows, so too does your business.  

Dealing with Investors

It’s nearly impossible to start a business without investors. Just like most people would rather buy their homes in cash instead of taking out a mortgage, most companies would rather already have the startup capital needed to provide services right away, but this isn’t how it usually works. If your company is like most, and you have investors to make happy, customer money is the number one way to achieve your investor goals and gain leverage in dealing with them at the same time. When they see you making money with happy customers, they see the value of your stock rising and their payout increasing when you finally sell. This, in turn, gives you the power to negotiate and insist on doing things your way, the way that is making more money for the company and investors alike.

There is nothing more important to your business than customer money. W3 Business Minds has dedicated years of experience to helping small businesses build their sales results with a custom-tailored combination of solid financial and marketing strategy, web development, and IT service you can count on. Whether you’re dealing with pushy investors or just want to increase your customers money, contact us today.

 

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