May Promotions

 

“How To Get Your Advertising On The Right Track”

 

How do you decide what to do for advertising each month? Do you run reports, analyze the results, continue doing what has worked and discontinue what hasn’t? Do you compare notes with other Miracle-Ear and AHAC store owners? Do you spend time thinking about new headlines, messages, offers and formats? I hope you do some or all of these things. It takes a lot of self-discipline doesn’t it?

Here’s a game you can play to ensure that you’re making the best possible decisions. Close your eyes a pretend that you have a silent partner who has demanded that by the end of 2008 either the company’s sales and profitability have improved dramatically or you’ll be forced to shut it down. You have to be super careful, almost paranoid about every dollar you spend on advertising. Make the right decisions and you get to stay in business. Make the wrong decisions and it’s the end of the line. With that in mind, put together your advertising plan for the remainder of 2008. Read on to find out what my plan would look like.If I owned a Miracle-Ear or AHAC store, based on the results I’ve seen over the past few years, I would rarely do an ad which focuses primarily on a sale price or discount. On the rare occasion that I did do that type of advertising, I would only do pieces with price points of $495, $795 or two for $990. Why? Because they’re the only promotions that seem to drive enough appointments to make it worthwhile. And, I assume you realize that the only way it’s profitable is if consumers, after seeing the presentation, choose to purchase hearing aids that contain better technology than AudioChoice. Why is it necessary to advertise these lower priced hearing aids to the general public in order get enough consumers to book appointments? I have a theory. There’s two part to it.One, I think that consumers who don’t currently wear hearing aids delude themselves into thinking that hearing aids do not or should not cost as much as they do. Two, I think that even though a big percentage of the consumers who end up buying from you have tens of thousands of dollars saved, they have a difficult time justifying the expense of thousands of dollars for hearing aids or anything else that doesn’t bring them instant gratification. It’s not the same as buying a new car, TV, or condo. Bottom line – it takes salesmanship to help them justify the purchase of a hearing aid.Don’t get me wrong. I have no illusion that any price point focused advertising will get you more than .7 to 1.5 appointments per 1000. What these promotions do is appeal to current hearing aid wearers that need to replace what they have. And maybe, first time purchasers who have been putting it off, looking for a good deal. So, doing that type of promotion two or three times a year may work. Another good reason not to do it every month is that it devalues your product. If there’s a deal every month, who’s ever going to pay the regular price. Don’t some of your Consultants have a hard time talking themselves into selling a hearing aid at full price?So that’s my thought on price point advertising. Here’s the rest of the plan in a step by step format:  

 

Main Direct Mail Rotations:

1. Find out how many rental list records I can mail to for each of my stores based on my store zip code footprints.
2. Budget 15% of my projected sales for advertising.
3. Pick two direct mail pieces – one with the main theme being a free VO exam, the other having something else as it’s main theme – like the Field Trial piece.
4. Figure out what the cost per thousand is going to be for those two pieces.
5. Determine how many of each piece I can do each week by dividing the cost per 1000 into the budget for the store.
6. Divide the number of pieces you can do each week into the total records available to determine how many weeks it will take to mail each of the two pieces you’ve chosen every record.
7. At the end of the cycle, choose two more pieces as you did in step #3 and cycle through them.
8. Repeat the process until there are no more new pieces to do, then go back to the first two pieces you did.

 

Special Sale Discount Promotions:

1. Find out when AmplifonUSA is running their $495, $795 or 2 For $990 promotions.
2. Two to three times a year, take advantage of those promotions (and the TV advertising that goes along with them) by budgeting 50% of your marketing dollars in those months to be spent on these promotions.
3. Use the other 50% of your budget to continue with the Main Rotations.

Leads Capture Follow-Up:

1. Capture every lead that your stores are currently coming in contact with. Anyone who calls in or walks-in regardless of whether they set an appointment. Everyone who sets an appointment and doesn’t show or cancels.
2. Put those leads into your marketing funnel (FS Datamine), making sure they they receive follow-up communications including a monthly newsletter.
3. Constantly clean your database, getting rid of unmailable records.
4. Constantly figure out ways to generate new leads, test these methods, implement the ones that work.

Database Marketing:

1. Start using FS Datamine to follow-up on all consumers who buy, don’t buy, wear Miracle-Ear hearing aids on which the warranty is about to expire, become In-Active User, so on and so forth.
2. Send a monthly newsletter to all Miracle-Ear Users, Competitors’Users and Prospects.
3. Constantly clean this database

So there you have it. Scout’s Honor, if I was selling hearing aids, that’s what I would do. Having said that, I would not hesitate to change course as new information presented itself. And, I’d always be looking for new strategies and tactics for generating leads, converting them to appointments, closing sales. Some areas that may hold promise are public relations, your own local website, local TV for lead generation. More on these next time.

Special Announcement

Beginning in April we will be transitioning over to using a new print and mail vendor. This new vendor has much more capacity. They processes over 9 million piece of mail each day. And, there are over 900 employees operating out of two huge plants that are just a few miles apart inHartford, CT. More sophisticated technology will be availabe to us. Here are just a few of the many advantages this move will provide for you:

1. We will now have a new process for drop shipping your mail. We will be drop shipping 95% of all our 3rd Class (Standard) mail from now on at NO Charge to you. With the volume of mail done by the new facility we’re using, they’re trucking mail all over the country each and every day. We’ll be able to take advantage of that and no longer charge you $68/m to drop ship your mail. You can use the savings to increase the number of pieces you do and thereby increase the number of appointments you get from the same investment.
2. We will be adding Planet Codes to all of our mail from now on. Planet codes are basically tracking codes. We will be proactively tracking all our mail and make calls to USPS facilities if and when we see that any of the mail is not moving. We will also have access to a web based system which enables us to pull up maps that show exactly where your mail was last scanned by the Post Office.
3. We will be implementing a new proofing process that should eliminate about 80% of the proofs and time you now spend proofing your FS orders. We will be using a new system that will allow us to review, modify and approve proofs online. We also intend to take it a step further by putting a process in place that will enable you to update and approve your store data either online or via email or fax. Your proofing activities can be limited to reviewing data instead of looking at each and every version of every direct mail piece you order. If you find that you would like to continue to proof each and every version of your mailings, we will make the web proofing system available for you. This will be much more efficient than our current system.

*Postage Increase*

The US Postal Service is raising the cost of postage on May 12th. Our rates will increase approximately 3%. I assume that most if not all of your mailings will be out by May 12th. In the event that you are doing a late mailing in May, your invoice will reflect the 3% increase for any mailing done on May 12th or later.