The course was built as a result of the needs of people who’ve been using our training materials to help in their own training. What’s interesting is how important your current inventory and inventory management is to managing the cashflow and profitability of a project.
While I was getting my hair cut the other day, I casually asked the hairdresser how her business was doing. Now this woman is a highly experienced and personable stylist who runs a modern and professional-looking salon with terrific co-workers.
Yet she lamented the fact that business was quiet and she was struggling to get new clients. So what’s going wrong?
Stumped on how to engage more with your clients? Start collecting their email addresses – and start a conversation.
The hairdressing salon owner I spoke with the other week was quite downcast about her sales. This is despite regularly receiving ecstatic feedback from her clients about the service they receive and the way the salon looks.
But here’s the thing:I come across countless hard working and talented business owners who just aren’t pulling in the sales they need on a regular basis.
As consumers, we’re hit with a tonne of messages from the start of the day — all vying for our attention online, offline and everything in between. You have to find a way to cut through the noise.
But how? You can do this via a combination of ways, but consistent email marketing, also referred to as content marketing, is a powerful place to start.
With the right strategy, email content marketing allows you to inexpensively stay in touch with current, potential or lapsed clients. It’s a way that you can start to connect with people, as often as you want, by sharing your story and what it is about you and your business that makes you unique. These days, it’s getting more informal too, so authenticity is key.
Get the ball rolling on your email marketing campaign
Not sure where to start? The very first step is an easy one and will start you on an email marketing strategy for your business.
Collect your clients’ email addresses
What’s a beautiful email without someone to send it to? A waste of time…
Get your client database started by using every opportunity to collect as much information about your clients as possible. It’s this information that gives you a valuable and complete database and it must be kept up to date. And happy customers won’t mind.
Start collecting client email addresses with these ideas:
Record email addresses every single time you have a relationship or interaction with a client
Whenever a client calls you, immediately add them to your client list
Add a signup or subscribe form to your website so clients receive your monthly e-newsletter: make it really easy for them!
You can’t be everything to everyone; it’s never going to be possible to create a single email that all your clients will love.
Basic rule of thumb: Keep your content relevant and personal. Try to be yourself. Business speak is much more conversational than ever before. In fact, businesses are increasingly using Instagram and Facebook messenger to converse with clients; a domain previously reserved for informal contact with friends, family and sometimes colleagues.
People will be much more likely to open and read your emails if they can relate to them and don’t feel like you’re wasting their time bragging about how great you are. (Remember, they are expecting you to say you’re good, so it’s very ho hum to your clients; you’re not exactly going to tell them how bad you are, are you.)
So you’ve started the conversation, now lead capture forms will make it easy for people who visit your website and social media sites to enter into the conversation with you.
We use WordPress for our website content management and there are other providers that, these days, make it easy for you to create and edit your own online content.
It’s official and we GUARANTEE it! Our Xero Advanced Certificate Training Course is the best value for money short course in Australia. If you’re upskilling or want to do a refresher Xero course, there’s even better news for you.
One thing is essential when you operate a small business with staff — that is your payroll obligations. I wrote about a hairdressing salon owner a few months ago who told me how easy payroll was to manage using a printed timesheet book. However, most tech-savvy people prefer to use software.
When I started my first business in Sydney’s Dee Why in the early 1990’s, I was amazed that most restaurants and cafes, as well as other retail shops like dress shops, didn’t even know who their customers were!
Many business owners knew their customers by face, but they missed out on lots of opportunities to market and make contact with these customers when business was slow or they were overstocked. Are you working your database?
There are so many wonderful ways business owners are using technology every day for their digital marketing, as well as point-of-sale (POS) and bookkeeping.
Last week I met Cherie. Cherie owns a relaxed cafe in the holiday haven of Forrester’s Beach, NSW, and she let me record a short video of a customer paying for their meal using Square.
In many industries, no two jobs are the same, making estimating job costs and resources tough. Job tracking is one of the best ways to develop an accurate budget and avoid blow outs.
But this can be hard work. Are the latest job costing and tracking functions in MYOB AccountRight, QuickBooks Online and Xero making life easier?
Want to learn how you can really manage late payers? Simply by reconciling more regularly, you can use a “real time” snapshot of your cash flow in your accounting software, rather than relying on your bank balance.
‘Social proof’ is testimonials, reviews and feedback of others, that vouches for the product or service we’re thinking of buying. Social proof backs up the fact that what we’re considering buying is what it says it is.
Come see some social proof about EzyLearn by meeting some students from the past few weeks — you just might have a lot in common with them.
IF YOU’RE RECEIVING the job alerts everyday — indeed, you may even have applied for some jobs already — but you’re still not getting called up for interview, then the following questions of doubt may be brewing:
Good quality can be cheap and poor quality may be the most expensive
OFTEN IN LIFE we’re told that if something seems too good to be true then it probably is. Along the same lines as this is the expression that you get what you pay for. Indeed, I’ve commonly used the phrase: “Pay peanuts and you’ll get monkeys” but naturally, there are exceptions to this and plenty of cases where low cost can simply mean low cost – without meaning that quality or value has been compromised.
ONLINE TRAINING IS one of the most convenient ways for busy people to study. While some people take to it naturally, for others the flexibility and freedom it affords itself is a learning curve.
The key to successful online training, however, is family support and we’ve noticed that many students for our Xero & MYOB Courses are parents who are stretched for time.
MYOB has recently changed their website and in particular their pages for the free trial software.
We’ve updated the FREE MYOB Trial (within our MYOB courses) so look for the link when you access your MYOB courses and use the free trial software to practice what you learn in the video tutorials and training workbooks.
While we’re on the topic of free MYOB software, did you know that we provide free training course samples for most of our online courses?
