Not long ago we posted an article on How To Make Money With Newsletters… Again, it’s become incumbent upon us to share this valuable information and resource with you.  This is one of our most popular and valuable RichCleanerBlog posts of all time.

Enjoy:

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A little background before I begin this rant…

Everyone talks about “marketing” their business. It’s something everyone knows they need to do – but you ask around, and everyone seems to have a different definition of what marketing is.

Some think putting together a pretty, color brochure that says “hey, we’re great!” is marketing. And that group tends to think of marketing as an EXPENSE.  Why?  Because it costs them a lot.

But you know what, when marketing is done right, it doesn’t cost a damn thing – because it MAKES you money.  If you know what you’re doing.

Piranha teaches marketing as arithmetic.  It’s direct response marketing – meant to grab your attention, build trust, create interest, and most importantly generate ACTION.  It is meant to get the reader to take action and reach out to you immediately to book a job.

Everything we teach our members is built around tracking their data.  How do you know a campaign worked? Because you spent $100 and it brought you $500, $1,000, or $10,000 in return.

Our members know their ROI – their return on investment.  If they spend X they get 2X, or 10X, or 50X.

Most business owners do not know how to make their marketing efforts “direct response” and they have no way to track the results, if there are any. (If you want a great report – 7 steps to a successful ad – I’ll put a link at the end of this blog post for you to request it. It helps you improve ANY marketing piece so it’s a money maker for you.)

It’s a shame that so many business owners don’t know how to use marketing properly to build their business. But it’s more of a shame when an “expert” in their industry specifically teaches them to NOT build their business – and this leads me to the marketing moron of the month.

The moron will be left “anonymous” (yes, I do have some mercy, in my big right toe) – we’ll just call him Big M for short.

Big M sent out an article titled “misconceptions about consumer newsletters.”  There were several points made in the article that turned some of our members’ heads.  You see, the Piranha Marketing “Healthy Home” Newsletter is the top performing marketing tool that we sell.  We have company tracking data from hundreds of companies on their monthly ROI from this tool – and the results are incredible, and consistent.

In fact, listen to this short clip from a new member (Ramona) about this:

Click this “play” button to hear a 1 min. audio from Ramona about all the calls she gets on her newsletter:

“I’m floored to say I’ve increased our monthly income $9,000.00-$10,000.00 per month – every month – with the newsletter!”
-Ramona G.
Platinum Carpet Systems

A long-time member John Gartner, also  wrote – “Newsletter is the absolutely best marketing piece we have, between that and our reminder cards it still consistently brings in 72% of our business.”

I usually don’t comment on someone else’s “instruction” – I know they are just trying to sell their own stuff – but when some of the information is blatantly inaccurate, I have to speak up. That is just how I am.

Here are 3 of the “misconceptions” that made my jaw drop.

Misconception #2: Newsletters have to be entertaining.

Big M says that the newsletter doesn’t need to be entertaining, it needs to be professional and TECHNICAL.

Let me remind everyone reading… this is an article for the CARPET CLEANING industry. You may enjoy reading about protectors, truck mounts, and getting cat pee out of wool rugs.  Your clients? Yeah, not so much.

Do you really think a monthly mailing of all the technical aspects of what you do is going to get them to sit down and read it… or instead just toss it in the trash?

What’s interesting about the Piranha newsletter (which is full of helpful tips, facts, and trivia) is that it has SUBSCRIBER CARDS in it, so that if a neighbor wants to get one, or an issue in a doctor’s office interests a patient, you end up growing your list.  It is literally a referral generating system.

Do you think someone would decide to subscribe to a technical newsletter? Is knowing the chemical test between nylon and wool really that fascinating to them?

This is the danger of getting too close to what you do.  The curse of knowledge. You forget what it is that interests the consumers you are targeting.

They don’t call you because they want steam-cleaned carpet using an alkaline traffic lane cleaner on their tough areas.

They call you because they want fresh, clean, healthy carpet in their home.

They are not interested in the FEATURES, they are interested in the BENEFITS.  Joe always likes to say, they don’t want the DRILL, they want the HOLE.

Your newsletter is a relationship-building tool, and just as you would bore them to death talking “shop” every time you see them, you do the same if you talk a lot of shop in the mail every month.

Here’s a comment from another member Pat Kaldahl:

“I get a lot of feedback from our clients on how much they love reading the
newsletter. I wouldn’t want to bore them with a bunch of technical stuff
they don’t care about. The only technical thing I need them to know is how
to dial my phone number when they need me!

As for ROI, the first month we sent the newsletter out, we doubled the
previous months gross from 15,000 to 30,000. Our clients really look forward to the newsletter each month and we ALWAYS have a special offer for the month and they love it!” – Pat

Here’s the next misguided misconception from Big M:

Misconception #3: Newsletters should be sent monthly.

In this part of his article, Big M says when you mail monthly clients begin to ignore you so quarterly is better.

Yeah – if I got a technical newsletter every month, I’d get bored and stop reading it also.

When it’s entertaining, people read it. And when they have an event they need to clean the home for, or you give them an offer on a service they need, that monthly “hello, I’m here for you” leads to a call and a job.

Big M also says mailing monthly is expensive, so quarterly is better.  Well, if you know for a fact the newsletter is bringing in new jobs every time it is sent out – why in the world would you limit your cash creation to quarterly when you could be doing 3 times that?

It makes no sense at all to choose to intentionally make LESS revenue from a marketing strategy, unless, your newsletter is not direct response and so you have no idea if the newsletter is bringing you a single job.

If you have no tracking – you don’t know squat.  It’s like playing basketball with the scoreboard covered up, you don’t know if you are winning or not.

That is not the way to run a business – blindfolded.  Which leads me to the final misconception that shocked me – and explained to me how he could believe the other two he wrote about.

Misconception #5: Newsletters are intended to make the phone ring.

Big M tops it off with this one – that your newsletter, a marketing piece, is NOT intended to make the phone ring.

Hold the phones! LITERALLY! I guess if THE GOAL of sending the newsletter out was to NOT GET CALLS – then everyone sending every other newsletter out there (except Piranha’s) would be a SUCCESS!

We got ZERO calls this month – the newsletter was a SUCCESS!!!

(Is this insane or what???)

I suppose the next article on sales strategies will suggest that a nicely dressed technician should just stand outside the window and smile politely to the homeowners.  If you just look good, and professional, that’s enough.  The sales will eventually come. (If you pray really, really hard.)

No wonder he recommends quarterly, not monthly. If I was sending out a piece intended to create not a single phone call to use my services, I would literally be tearing up money and tossing it out the window.  And if I did that quarterly, instead of monthly, I’d be tearing up less dollars, so I guess I’d be saving money. (Huh???)

This kind of advice is what I’d expect from the government if it decided to take over all business in America – a plan that wastes a lot of money and generates no results at all.

This is why Big M gets the title of Marketing Moron of the Month – because this is perhaps one of the worst pieces of advice I have ever seen by someone writing about business building in our industry.

If you are sending out marketing campaigns expecting to NOT get any results, then shame on you.

If you want to throw away money on something, then at least do something good and productive with it and donate it.  In fact, give it to www.kiva.org, which gives money to poor entrepreneurs who actually want to create real results with their business.

If someone is telling you a marketing piece is just supposed to make you look good and build your brand – you need to run as far away from that “expert” as you can.

Marketing is meant to communicate what you have to someone who needs it, and to get them to give you a call, and for you to give them a great client experience that they happily pay you for.

Marketing done right is not an expense, it is an INVESTMENT.  Every dollar in produces multiples out.  And if your marketing isn’t doing that for you, then you need to give us a call.

Thanks for letting me rant.

-    Lisa

P.S. If you do not have a client newsletter that is bringing you in revenue every single month, then you need to sign up for ours.   Click here to check out Piranha Marketing’s Healthy Home (direct response) Money-Making Newsletter.  We create it for you, all you need to do is plug in your name, do a little bit of customization, and out the door it goes to work at bringing you jobs.

P.P.S. As promised, here’s the page where you can get Joe’s 7 Steps to Successful Ad.