This is the beginning of my marketing tips of the day.
No I’m not going to give you crappy advice and tell you to give me your email address to get 10 more bad ideas. Or try to sell you the 4000 ways to make a gazillion either (I hate those sites as much as the next person). So I am going to do the apparently unthinkable… I’m going to post a simple, tested marketing tip every day that you can use to improve your marketing. And all you have to do is read and decide if you want to try it.

The Business Card

In “Get the right business card” I discussed the prime real estate on the back of business cards; this blank canvas that can be used for so many things.

The tip is to put something on the back of the card that will make the customer contact you. A coupon is perfect. Come up with what service or product you can give a new customer for free or at a discount, make sure it has value and watch the calls come in.

Benefits

1. Often the business card is hard to track how useful it is. (Especially if you hand out a lot). With a traceable metric like a free product or service given, you will quickly learn how effective your canvassing is when you hand them out.

2. You get in touch with the customer. This is the key issue to get future sales, once the ice has been broken. You have the potential for return business. Providing that the customer got the experience he or she was expecting from the coupon.

3. If you collect the card, you can have the customer give you their contact information on the back of it.

Drawbacks

1. You’ll have to get new business cards - This is an expense, but actually not a very high one considering the return of investment I’ve seen using this technique. You can get 1000 double sided cards printed for just under $70 if you look around a little.

2. There is a cost involved in giving something away for free. However, providing you do a little homework we can beat this cost. The trick is to come up with a product or service offering that is either discounted to break even at worst. Or have something that will yield a high conversion rate to return business.

 3. The customer loses the business card if you collect it. Overcome this by either just stamping it, or better yet replacing it with a new one without the coupon. But maybe something else on the back that will bring them back for more.