4 Ways to Take Advantage of Slower Sales During COVID-19

Let’s just get it out of the way — coronavirus is still around.

People are still at home and life is not yet back to normal, business-wise.

I’m not going to dwell on COVID-19 in this newsletter. I have a separate daily COVID-19 resource guide specifically for small businesses that I update daily and email directly to all clients and prospects. If you’re reading this, you’re probably getting those emails as well. (If you aren’t, check your spam folder and drag it over to your primary inbox.)

Today, I’m going to focus on being proactive:

How we, as business owners, can be productive RIGHT NOW, as many of us are stuck at home with newfound downtime.

So if you’re in quarantine, staying home to watch the kids, sheltering in place or just experiencing fewer customers right now, I have 4 easy business-boosting things you can do TODAY that will:

• Empower you so that you feel more in control of your business’s wellbeing
• Put your business in a position to hit new highs and be more profitable than ever when this ends
• Strengthen the overall and long-term vitality of your business

Here they are:

1. Analyze your January/February revenue and marketing results for shortfalls.

The beginning of 2020 may seem like a distant, DISTANT memory, but:

I want you to sit down, and look at how your gross sales and new customer numbers fared the first two months of this year.

Try to find any trends. It can help if you’re asking yourself things like:

• What are the commonalities between leads and new customers? Such as zip code, age, or gender?
• Is there a lag in time between when someone becomes a lead and then a customer? How long is it?

If you’re tracking new leads and where they came from (which you absolutely should — more on tracking tactics here), look specifically at:

• Where all of your leads are coming from, then grouping them by shared sources. Which marketing channels performed the best? Did certain campaigns outperform others?
• Which leads are becoming new customers and which are spending the most. Which marketing source are they coming from?

Next, look at January-February 2019. And January-February 2018. And so on and so forth until you feel like you have a decently sized data set to examine.

Did anything change? Did anything get better or worse? Figure out what actions you can drop going forward that were ineffective, and which actions you can repeat and/or strengthen going forward.

Now plan out those marketing activities. Get the designs and campaigns ready to go so that you just need to hit the green light the second this is over and everyone returns to work.

If examining your business to try and figure out where leads (and sales) came from sounds daunting, then I invite you to join us for our FREE Virtual Growth Summit event next week and then re-visit this task afterward.

It starts on Monday at 1pm EDT. We’ll be meeting each day next week for 2 hours of intense but PRACTICAL marketing education.

No jargon, no confusing charts and graphs. We make it seriously easy for business owners to understand the ins and outs of marketing so that you can then effectively manage a campaign, your marketing vendors and/or your marketing team.

Here’s the thing:

I don’t educate small business owners on marketing as way to make money. I do this without strings attached, whether you will become my client or not! (Though most business owners who attend feel so excited after finally grasping so many complicated marketing concepts that they DO become my clients — and often clients for life.)

My goal is to empower YOU. I want you to be able to step into the marketing ring and feel in control and knowledgeable about it — not overwhelmed or confused.

You can sign up here and it’s totally FREE and only 2 hours of your day.

I’ll explain how to track your marketing (even if you’ve never done it before) so that you can easily accomplish the task above.

2. Comb through your website and itemize all the gotta-fix-its

Clicking through your website with a fresh set of eyes is all but impossible when you’re busy with the day-to-day of running your business. Believe me, I get it.

So if you have downtime right now, spend a couple of hours looking at and fully interacting with every single page on your website.

Fill out those forms! Click on all those links!

Make a list of every item that needs to be improved or outright fixed.

Are contact forms not submitting?

Does your website promote an old special offer?

I also recommend whipping out your smartphone and repeating your thorough research on there, since many Americans are making buying decisions via their smartphone.

The list of website blunders that we’re all guilty of at some point can be long, so don’t feel ashamed.

My team wrote a report that can help give you a list of things to look out for. It’s a thorough 16-point checklist you can download and use — and it’s also 100% free.

Once you’ve created a list full of improvements, send that off to your programmer. He or she most likely has some downtime right now and can get them fixed quickly for you.

Or, if you need a new website designer (preferably an affordable one), now’s a good time to hire one especially with plenty of people working remotely these days.

3. Go through your email marketing and update the text and offers

Email marketing is another terrain that often gets ignored in the thick of running a business.

Take the time to read through the emails your prospects and customers receive and make sure the copy, design, and offers are relevant. Look in whatever software you use to send your emails and see which emails had the best open and click through rates. Then look at which had the worst. Now tweak all of your emails to be more like your winners.

Or, if you don’t have a formal email program in place that automates your email outreach and makes it easy to communicate with all of your customers and prospects at once —

It’s time to get cracking on setting one up!

I’m going to tell you a story, and this happened to me literally just this week…

I visited my chiropractor, and the place was EMPTY. This actually surprised me, because this particular chiropractor is usually super busy, and he isn’t limited to just “cracking backs” — he also offers nutritional assistance and other services you can do while safely practicing social distancing.

I’m a regular here, so I felt comfortable speaking frankly to him. His office manager has been there for 30 years, so she’s familiar with me too. Come to find out, my chiropractor unfortunately had to scale back…

He went from 12 staff to just 2! What a punch in the gut.

I asked his office manager, “Have you guys been emailing your customers to let them know you’re still open and offering these other services?” (understand this – I’ve never ever gotten one email from them so….”

And she says some of them, yes.

So, I’m like…

And then she shows me boxes and boxes of files. She tells me that she’s been working on digitizing their paper files for YEARS.

Their patient database is about 10,000 locals and many more that saw them while vacationing here — yet they only have 773 emails entered into a digital database that makes it easy to send emails. WHATTTTT?!!? The value of those 9000+ past patients just sitting there in paper files, as a marketer that kills me a little bit.

But I get it. This is what happens when you get busy with running a business and doing the thing well that makes your business so successful.

I immediately told him that we would help. But before I tell you the rest of the story – this guy is the BEST and super caring and super smart and always learning the newest cutting edge natural health modalities. AND he gives his patients his cell number so they can let him know how they’re doing and has literally come in on a Sunday countless times to help me and my family.

Some of our staff are a bit slower than usual, because we serve small businesses like this chiropractor, who is suffering and has had to lay people off. So, I told them that someone from my staff would come help them enter these emails for 2 hours a day until it’s done. Hopefully they’ll have it wrapped up by the end of the week, and this business can start emailing patients again and bringing them back in for appointments.

It’s the least I can do right now. I love seeing how the entire small business community has been coming together and helping each other where we can during these challenging times.

I can offer you some help with your email marketing too. You can grab this FREE download that breaks down email marketing easily, even if you don’t know anything about it going in.

You’ll learn:

• An in-depth explanation of what automated email marketing can do for your business if you’re not already using it.
• Popular, easy software options that will make implementation a breeze for your business
• Tried-and-true examples of how other small business owners have used email marketing you can copy

Which brings me to #4:

4. Attend the now FREE Virtual Growth Summit starting March 30th

Okay, I already talked this one up but here’s more information for you…

We’re taking our live Growth Summit online and have made it FREE — probably the only time ever, in light of COVID-19.

We’ve held this event many times in the past but we’ve only delivered it here in person so clients have had to fly into Florida to receive this information.

We normally deliver it to 100 business owners at a time and at this point we have 1097 business owners registered to attend the free event.

I highly recommend you take advantage of this.

I’ll be addressing what you can do right now for your business to keep it going.

It’s 5 days for two hours per day from March 30 – April 3rd, 1-3pm EDT and completely online.

You could learn something at this virtual event that will harness your business and keep it on the rails.

I almost lost my business during the recession of 2008 and I’m going through this with you right now, so I truly know what you are going through during the outbreak. My team and I are here and equipped to help you, no matter where you are.

If you need any help with growing your business right now, do not hesitate to reach out to us at PostcardMania. Call any one of my marketing consultants at 800-628-1804, they are trained to help you navigate through this time and keep your business going.

Or, you can always reach me directly at joy.gendusa@postcardmania.com.

Best,

Joy

P.S: Bookmark our FREE COVID-19 Small Business Response Guide here. We update it every day so it’s an accessible one-stop-shop for small business owners and changes with COVID-19.