Features

There is no doubt that running a small business is tougher than ever before. The competition is more fierce and consumers are more savvy than ever before. This means that you, as a small business owner, must pull out all the strings when it comes to effectively marketing your business.

As business owners ourselves, we understand that the average small business owner knows what they need to do to fully market their business, but just don’t have the time or energy to create and implement all the marketing programs they should.  And typically, the marketing programs that are running in their business now are the same ones that were implemented when the business first opened because once the business is launched; the owner is too busy working in their business to work on their business.

That’s why we integrated all the different programs that we have into our marketing systems. It’s everything that a small business owner needs to fully market their business and become successful… But we’ve taken it a step farther by automating all these programs.  It only takes about an hour for a small business owner to completely set up their system, push the start button and let it run on autopilot.

We’ve integrated a loyalty rewards program, a referral program, a reactivation program and combined them with mobile marketing, social media marketing, text message marketing, special occasion marketing, local search and SEO, while building in customer database collection, list segmentation and real-time metrics to provide a great overall marketing solution for every type of small business owners. So go ahead, give us a call and let us show you how we can put YOUR marketing on autopilot!

The lifetime value of a customer can vary depending on the industry, but this is a very, very important concept that you need to understand when you’re making marketing decisions for your business. You should NOT focus on producing a one-time transaction. Instead you must focus on generating long-term repeat customers because that’s where the most profit is made. Customer retention is probably one of the most important, if not THE most important business matter that will make you more money with less effort than anything else you’ve ever tried in your business. That’s why there has been a tremendous focus placed on the use of loyalty programs.

Many leading businesses are finally waking up to the fact that keeping existing customers active is more profitable than the never-ending treadmill of new customer acquisition. As a matter of fact, the Harvard Business School discovered that, “Companies can boost profits by nearly 100%, by retaining just 5% of their customers.” So you can see the huge impact a tiny increase in customer retention can have on your profits.

Since today’s consumer also has more choices and is better informed than in the past, how can you be sure that your customers will keep coming back?  It’s easy – reward them.  There’s an old saying that goes “It feels darn good to be recognized in a place you frequent as a customer, but it feels even better to be rewarded for it.”

There’s no question customers love to participate in rewards programs.  It’s also clear that these programs can enhance profits.  According to recent studies:

• Over 85% of U.S. households participate in at least one reward program.
• Over 49% of consumers will choose a business based on the rewards program they offer.
• 71% of customers estimate a rewards programs would increase their visit rate by an average of 35%.
• Nearly two-thirds of customers (65%) report they would recommend a business more to others if they offered an appealing rewards program.

As you can clearly see, rewards can help you generate more new customers, who come back more often and refer their friends and family… that’s why we use rewards in our loyalty program, but recent studies have also uncovered some other interesting facts about effective loyalty programs:

• The average U.S. household belongs to approximately 12 loyalty programs.
• Loyalty customers spend as much as 33% more than non-loyalty customers per year.
• Loyalty customers visit twice as often as a non-loyalty customer.
• Loyalty customers are more than twice as likely to refer a new customer, with 82% referring at least one person and 42% referring four or more to the loyalty program.
• Loyalty customers are worth 10x the value of a single purchase customer.

Obviously, you can see the value of paying attention to your current customers. There is low or no customer acquisition cost, it helps buffer you from losing them as a customer, and it’s a great way to grow your business, yet less than 3% of small businesses have a customer retention plan.  In other words, adoption of a loyalty program can set you apart from 97% of your competition!

Now does this mean you should stop marketing to get new customers? Absolutely not! Your existing customers will eventually move away, die or stop coming in for reasons beyond your control no matter how loyal they are, so there is always a need to “replace” them with new customers. But ultimately, loyalty is one of the strongest tools to influence customer spending.

There are many reasons every business should invest in a good referral system. Referrals are the most cost-effective form of marketing because they cost very little if anything at all, referrals tend to be better customers, they’re more loyal, they typically spend more and are even more likely to give referrals.

We automate referrals by having three separate referral generating features that helps you capitalize on your member’s relationships to generate a constant flow of new customers which are automatically tracked by the system so you can thank and reward members for referring others to your business. By rewarding this type of behavior, you’re training your members to produce a steady stream of new customers with literally no effort on your part!

Your members:

• Will share their winning ticket by forwarding a referral-specific message to anyone or everyone in their mobile phone’s contact list.
• Will share their winning tickets with their friends on Facebook which grants us access to their Facebook timeline so we can post promotions and offers on your behalf automatically with no additional work or time commitment from them.
• Will be assigned a unique keyword which is text to our shortcode so members can continue to promote your business friends as often as they’d like to gain additional referral gifts. You’ll have your own little army promoting your business and increasing your ROI.

Since it’s 7-10 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to get an existing customer to come back, we understood how important it is to hang onto your existing customers. And with thousands of customers, we knew it was virtually impossible to determine who stopped coming in manually, so we’ve automated and simplified the reactivation process for you.

When we detect that a member hasn’t returned to your business after a pre-set time period, we’ll send out a series of three reminder messages to “chase” down those valuable members and reactivate them automatically. Sending a series of three messages with an irresistible offer to a lost customer may seem aggressive, but wait until you see the results!  It’s like putting a fence around your members to prevent them from escaping.

In order to make our lives easier, new inventions are continually being developed and businesses are forced to keep up with these new technologies if they want to continue to grow in today’s tough economic conditions.

Simply put, a business can no longer simply offer a better product or service at an acceptable price and expect to succeed.  Instead you must now look at your level of customer engagement and find additional ways to interact with your customers.

Most businesses are finding this extremely difficult through traditional marketing channels, but more progressive businesses are shifting their marketing efforts to target mobile consumers for the following reasons.

• 5 times more people own a mobile phone than a computer
• 84% of them use their mobile phones to search for local businesses
• 79% use their mobile phones to aid in shopping
• Over 73% of them want to receive special offers and discounts with their mobile phones
• Nearly 100% of text messages are delivered and 97% of them are read within 5 minutes, and
• Mobile coupons get 10 times the redemption rate of traditional coupons

Clearly, the mobile phone is the most widely used communication device the world has ever known and you need to take full advantage of this opportunity if you want to gain a strong competitive advantage over your competitors. That’s why we use text messaging to connect with your customers. It allows allow you to send coupons, incentives and promotions directly to your customer’s mobile phone.  Your content will have your customer’s 100% full attention.  No other media can make that claim.

As an iGo Marketing customer, you’ll also be able to take advantage of mobile marketing by having your very own business listing which includes your logo, address, click to call, click to view map, business hours, a link to your website, a contact us form and your latest promotions.  We’ll also give customers another chance to share your business with their friends and family through their social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and Pinterest.

Each time you change your promotions; your entire customer list will be notified AUTOMATICALLY by text message and provided a link to your latest offers. Your offers will be seen by more people who want to receive your promotions so you’ll get more customers who return more often when you offer them strategic discounts and incentives. In other words, you’ll drive massive revenue to your bottom line by delivering strategically timed offers right into a consumer’s pocket!

As of today, 92% of U.S. companies now use social media in their marketing efforts.  And according to a recent survey by Marketing Charts, more than 80% of small to mid-sized businesses plan to increase their use of social media in the next year.  That’s not surprising, considering that 87% of them said that social media has helped them either somewhat or a great deal in the past year.  So rather you like it or not, social media is here to stay.

Of all the social media channels out there, we placed our emphasis on Facebook for the following reasons.

• Facebook is used by more than half of all people in North America
• If Facebook were a country, it would be the 3^rd largest in the world
• There are one billion posts per day made on Facebook
• One out of every 5 page views on the internet is on Facebook
• Facebook users have an average age of 38
• Companies gain a 185% lift in Web traffic after achieving 1,000 Facebook likes

We use Facebook to brand your business, produce referrals and create goodwill. Since we’ve integrated the Facebook API, your customers can login to their iGo Marketing account using their Facebook login credentials. Once they have logged in using Facebook, we have access to their account to post notifications and comments directly on their timeline. We’ll AUTOMATICALLY post your coupons, promotions and offers directly to their timeline promoting your business to their Facebook friends on your behalf with no additional work on their part. And since the average Facebook user has 130+ friends, it’s a great place for you to get new customers.

We’ve also integrating the “Like” button where Facebook members can like your business listing and promotions, as well as share them with their friends on Facebook and other social media platforms like Twitter, Pinterest and Google Plus.

The problem with most marketing systems are that they use email or postcards to market to their customer list. There’s nothing in the world that provides a cheaper way to communicate with members than email, so numerous companies come along selling inexpensive “email loyalty programs”.  But they don’t tell you that email open rates are going down across the board and are only around 10-15%, which means that 85-90% of your members will not be reading your emails… or may not be getting your emails at all because of increased delivery issues, spam filters, firewalls and other constantly changing “rules” that are blocking your messages from even getting to your members.

Or, other marketing systems may use postcards which are much more expensive to send, yet deliver inferior results. When was the last time you pulled a post card from your mail and responded to the offer? Most people open their mail over the trash can so they can just pitch your mail piece in the trash without even looking at it.

Our system has an integrated text messaging platform built-in which allows you to send your message directly to your customer’s pocket anytime you’d like. You’ll create special events, coupons and offers that will have customers flocking to your business, have them coming back more often, referring their friends and neighbors and keep them looking for your updated promotions regularly.

The best part is, it’s as easy as filling in a simple form and pushing send. Or if you’re too busy, we can handle it. Just simply tell us what type of offer you’d like to run, the expiration date, restrictions and when you’d like for us to send it out… and consider it done. Then just sit back and watch your business thrive and your revenues increase dramatically.

Also, since your wealth is in your list, one of the things that we do is list segmentation which allows you to send different offers with different restrictions or even different messages to each one of the segments of your list. You might find that certain members only come in at lunch, or only at breakfast or only in the evening. This allows you to focus with laser-like precision and cut out any of the waste in your marketing and market to those customers differently.

And for most business owners who’ve been doing any marketing know, it’s typically very, very hard to determine what marketing message or offer was actually working and what wasn’t. But that’s a huge benefit for our customers since we can measure everything that you’re doing and totally focus on the things that are working to get you more customers and make you more money.

It’s been proven that members will better respond to your marketing when there’s a clear reason “why” you’re sending them a promotion. It could be a thank you for the referral, their birthday, anniversary or other special occasions. We’ve taken special occasions proven to get the best response and put this marketing on autopilot for you!

Now you don’t have to “remember” your member’s birthdays or anniversaries… We do it for you so nobody slips through the cracks! Your members will be impressed that you took time to remember the special occasions in their lives and they’ll reward you for it by spending more money in your business!

Birthday Clubs have been the hottest trend for increasing sales and loyalty over the last year.  You can almost guarantee extra business each and every week.  No one ever complains when wished “Happy Birthday”. In today’s fast paced, competitive and impersonal world, it’s one of the few things left that leave a lasting impression on someone. It is a serious revenue and profit booster, and could even be the difference between surviving and guaranteeing your business’s success.

While printed directory formats still exist, businesses and organizations are veering away from them to leverage the hyper-connectivity that is happening in the digital world. More and more people looking for information, for whatever purpose, are turning to the Internet for ease of use and a wide array of options. The Internet has changed how business is done with the emergence of electronic commerce. E-commerce is an all-embracing term that includes online shopping, virtual stores and malls, B2B and B2C transactions, supply chain and logistics automation, online payment systems, online banking and all ways that make doing business faster and easier with the click of a button or a mouse.

The rapid shift to online business directories to enhance local search for Small businesses is not merely a product of intuition. Hard facts support the need for Small businesses to use business directories to promote their businesses. Unlike traditional advertising through mass media and print, business directories and other online marketing ideas are can cost less and focus more on a targeted audience.

In a comprehensive study conducted by comScore, compelling figures and findings point to the rationale of business directories. The comScore undertaking was spearheaded by thought leaders in the local-search industry. With massive data and insightful analysis over a span of five years, the study used survey results to monitor customer online behavior and concluded that:

• Almost 70 percent of Internet searches are done on a search engine. Local search continues to expand with an exponential growth of 144 percent from 2007-2012.
• The need for fast information by people who are always on the go has significantly increased mobile local search. Local business search through social networks saw a three-fold increase since 2008.
• Local listings are the most trusted sites for the local search for small businesses

When we ask small business owners, “What’s the most expensive thing in your business” most say the equipment or staff. But in reality, it’s your customer list. Because when it comes to getting a good return on investment from your marketing dollars, research has shown that it’s 7-10 times more expensive to attract a new customer than it is to keep an existing customer.

And when you consider that the average business spends between $50 to $100 bringing a new customer in the door (including advertising, promotion, markdowns, discounts and staff expenses), it seems that marketing to your existing customers should be your top priority. That’s why it’s imperative that every business build a database of customers that can be marketed to and resold to over and over again to maximize profits.

Studies have also shown that having an up-to-date and working customer database can easily increase the value of your business by 50% or more. Think about that. If you are selling your business without records of who your customers are, what their buying habits are and without any kind of assurance that they will visit the business after it is sold, how much do you think a potential buyer will be willing to pay?

On the other hand, consider if you have an up-to-date database of your customers who drive 80% of your business, who are part of an ongoing rewards program and who have proven to be loyal customers of your business. How much more do you think a potential buyer would be willing to pay?

Did you know your Google Places rankings are affected by the number of customer reviews you have? And with the recent changes in Google’s algorithm, customer reviews are playing a larger role than ever before in search engine rankings.  That’s why we’ve automated reputation management which is designed to give your business an unfair advantage when it comes to ranking high and attracting new customers.

Not only are reviews playing a larger role in your business’ rankings, they’re also playing a larger role in a consumer’s decision on where to shop. If you have poor reviews, then your business will suffer because of it. The problem is that it takes a happy customer 14 steps to leave a positive review.

But, what if we could shorten that process down to 3 steps… do you think this would help? You know it would! That’s why our reputation management programs is so powerful. We’ll survey your customers, get positive reviews from the most satisfied customers and syndicate them to some of the most popular review sites to ensure your online reputation will never be tarnished.