Can what you say or write about your product, service, or message really influence a response from your customer? Can you inspire a reaction?

Are you a parent? Maybe you’ve noticed a response from your child that you didn’t see coming, but later realized was a direct response to a marketing message. We’re always being incited to respond, and kids are infamously receptive. No doubt you recognize these attempts on you and your children:

• RT this
• Sugared cereal on child’s level at grocery store
• Buy one, get 1/2 off of the next item
• Sign here for additional warranty (authorizing additional charge)

How Can This Work For You?

This type of marketing has been around since marketing began, but few small businesses take advantage of this tool for add on sales. It’s surprising how often we’re not encouraging a reaction. Not every response from your customer will be a sale, this time, but every attempt you make at a dialog is an investment successful companies know will eventually return positive results. So what responses would you like to encourage?

• Do you want your message to ‘go viral?’
• Do you want comments and feedback?
• Do you want your potential customer to purchase?
• Are you working on a larger sale from a previous customer?
• Are you testing an offer to check the response rate?
• Do you want more customers?

All these questions and many more can be answered by simply asking the uncomfortable. And actually, success often requires taking your comfortable self out of your comfort zone and doing the uncomfortable. In this case, I want you to think about what it is you want your reader, potential client, or previous customer to do, and then go about the business of encouraging that response.

That’s actually as simple as adding text to the bottom of your email campaign, newsletter, blog, or direct mail. You know the average, “contact us today,” message, (which is important because it really needs to be instructed), but how can you specifically target the response you’re after?

First of all, you’ll need to make sure your potential client enjoyed hearing from you. Are you adding tidbits to your regular messages that they enjoy? Is your tone pleasant, and do you offer what your readers are after? Do you offer a free anything? (freebies = good)

Once you’re convinced that your customer is looking forward to hearing from you, it’s reasonably certain that you’re conditioning that response. You must be doing something right. How would you ever know? You’re going to have to ask and use some tracking to see if your investment is yielding favorable results. In my next post I’ll go over some simple ways that you can influence customer response to find out information, add to your client list, and sell your product or service to an otherwise lethargic customer.

Electrify Your Customer Responses