Creative Offers Multiply Profits

If you're getting only a sluggish response for a product or service that people genuinely need, wake buyers up by spicing up your offer. I've seen losing propositions become winners with these kinds of changes, which in most cases cost you nothing:

1. Guarantees. With a strong, simple guarantee, you can overcome the doubts of people who have not done business with you before, and calm down worriers who don't act when they can think of too many "what ifs." The guarantee does not have to promise a refund. Someone hiring an exterminator service wants those darned critters out, not their money back. "We guarantee you'll be pest-free for a year, or we'll come back and spray again for no extra charge" is the thing to promise them. Direct-mail professionals tell us that a one-year guarantee sells better, with fewer refund requests, than a thirty-day guarantee, and a lifetime guarantee does even better.
2. Package deals. If you sell office supplies, you might think that folks going back to school know how to select what they need. Perhaps, but why not make things easy for them -- and more profitable for you -- by shrink-wrapping three spiral notebooks, two packets of pens, a pocket calendar and several semi-necessary items together in a Back to School packet? This often persuades people to spend more than they would on separate items.
3. The same principle applies to services, where you can mobilize people who shy away from hourly fees with fixed-price bundles: only $350 for a will and a consultation on estate planning. A name makes your bundle more appealing: $150 for the "Get Organized Special."
4. Premiums. Try rousing sleepy customers with bonuses -- spend more than $100 and receive a free whooziwhatsit, which isn't available any other way. One mail-order company offered a free booklet with any order from that catalog, and received 13 percent more orders from that catalog than previously. Similarly, frequent-buyer programs have now spread far beyond airlines, because they work. If convenience-store patrons have a card to buy nine cups of coffee and get the tenth free, they're more likely to consolidate their coffee buying rather than buying sometimes here and sometimes there.
5. Payment terms. When you let clients know they can spread payments out over two or four months, you'll snag some wavering over the money issue. But this sort of offer doesn't necessarily mean you get your money later. I know speakers and consultants who offered a 2 or 5 percent discount for payment in advance, and received their money a whole year before they would have otherwise!
6. With any new offer, test, test, test! You can't know any other way whether "Buy one, get the second one free" works better or worse than "Buy two and each is half price." Human beings are illogical creatures, and unexpected offers can turn this fact to your advantage.

Extraordinary Media Coverage for Ordinary Businesses

Media folks suffer an eternal hunger for distinctive material. When you supply a creative angle, you are helping the city editor who has to fill up a score of pages every day, the TV producer constantly on the hunt for fun and perky topics, or the column writer desperate for information nuggets. Here's how.

When I was looking for examples of publicity successes, a man named Chuck told me this story. During a visit with his brother, who owned a hardware store, the brother suddenly said, "Wait a minute," ran outside the store and returned a few minutes later breathless. "I saw the meter maid coming, and I don't want downtown shoppers to get parking tickets. So I put money in the expired meters. One of these days a reporter is going to come along and find out what I'm doing."


"Why not today?" Chuck responded, reaching for the phone and calling the city desk of the local paper. Within two hours a reporter and photographer arrived at the hardware story. Later in the week a sizable feature portraying Chuck's brother as a civic-minded store owner appeared in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. Along with appreciative shoppers, the article quoted someone who argued that this renegade meter feeder was depriving the city of much-needed revenue. On the whole, though, it nicely enhanced Chuck's brother's profile in the community.



Here's how a coffee dealer -- an equally ordinary business -- achieved valuable media coverage. In Washington state, Clancy Donlin had launched a fax-on-demand system offering free information by fax about choosing and brewing fine coffee, as a service of his mail-order Coffee of the Month Club. After he mailed his press release to newspapers, the story appeared in 24 papers nationwide and led to Donlin's appearance on "CBS This Morning." Donlin told me that sales for his new company spiked $10,000 higher the month after all this happened.


Years before, I had used a similar strategy to get a media spotlight to shine lucratively on a new firm that would present writing seminars to businesses. Along with our seminar plans, my partner and I created a 900-number that dispensed tips on business writing. Our one-page press release about the "WordRight Lesson Line" got us onto page one of the Wall Street Journal, in its Business Briefs column. This clipping and others like it gave us tremendous credibility when we went looking for clients.


In these three cases, notice that what got each company media attention was not its central business purpose but something tangential and distinctive, something peripheral and unusual that caught reporters' eyes. Yet when the resulting stories appeared, the halo of publicity glimmered on the everyday aspects of each business as well.


Media folks suffer an eternal hunger for distinctive material. When you supply a creative angle, you are helping the city editor who has to fill up a score of pages every day, the TV producer constantly on the hunt for fun and perky topics, or the column writer desperate for information nuggets. Begin reading the papers and listening to the news each day trying to understand what gets coverage and why, and you too will soon wind up in black and white or on the airwaves.