5 Ways to Use Permission Marketing As A Usborne Books and More Consultant
1 ASK PERMISSION: The first part of permission marketing is to, of course, ask permission. So as an Usborne Books & More consultant, the first step in the marketing process would be to ask the potential client if you can share some information with him/her. Whether the contact is a potential customer, hostess or new team member, starting the conversation off with a simple “may I share some more information with you” is a great way to build a trusting and loyal relationship with your client. This initial prompt for permission message should include 3 parts: 1) May I share some information with you? 2) A call-to-action: a desirable action you want your client to take i.e. liking your social media page or filling out a customer contact form like the one pictured below.
3) An incentive for responding to the call-to-action. This could be anything from a link to free educational material (like the free games and coloring sheets available on Kane Miller’s website), free shipping on their first order or a chance to win a free book.
2 CREATE A CUSTOMER (and/or hostess) CYCLE: Once you have your customer base narrowed down to those that responded to your call-to-action, you can spend your time and resources on creating long-term, profitable relationships with those individuals.
To get the greatest benefit from your responses, you need to implement a five-step cycle for creating and keeping customers. The initial conversation helped you narrow down your strangers to those that are interested in learning more about your business and products; these are the people you want to become friends with. To create a friendship, you will need to get to know the contact on a personal level: Why might they be interested in our books? How can you, the consultant, best fulfill their needs? What are the ages and interests of the children they are shopping for? Any extra bit of information that makes your communications with the contact more personal will only making your customer/consultant relationship stronger. Once your contact becomes a friend, move on to creating a customer by placing an order or offering to put together a list of recommendations. This part of the cycle can also represent your hostesses contacts whom you will be solidifying this part of the cycle with by booking an event. Once you have a customer and/or hostess, the next step is to make him/her a loyal customer and/or hostess. Follow-up is one of the keys to a successful Usborne Books & More business and it is vital for this part of the cycle. You MUST keep in contact with your customer/hostess even after the order is placed. Follow up with tracking information, ask how they like their new books, offer an incentive for leaving a book review on your website and always ask how you can help them further. Then follow-up with that person every month or two and ask if you can help them with getting some new books on their shelf. Time is precious and when you take the time to show your customers how much their business means to you, they’re far more likely to shop with you again in the future. Which leads us to the final part of the cycle: former customers. As final as the term “former customers” may sound, permission marketing teaches us that former customers are a key asset in building your business. It costs so much more to market new customers and build the relationships you have already built with past customers so instead of spending all of your time and resources looking for new customer leads, keep track of your former customers and reach out to them every six months or so. You don’t have to wait for a past customer or hostess to contact you about shopping again or hosting another party; take the leap and contact them. Using this five-step cycle to creating strong, loyal customers and using the permission marketing techniques above will launch your literacy campaign to new heights!
3 UTILIZE PERMISSION LEVELS WHEN DIRECT SELLING: According to Seth Godin, there are 5 levels of permission marketing. Each of these levels can be used when creating your permission marketing plan for your Usborne Books & More business. Here’s how:
Let’s start with level 5, the lowest level of permission, the situational level. The situational level is simply the level of permission in which situational opportunities arise for you to make new contacts (i.e. You see a post on Facebook that someone is having a baby so you reach out and ask if they would like to learn more about hosting a “Build a Bookshelf Baby Shower.”) This level of permission is the lowest because there is no security in knowing when these kind of opportunities will arise but when they do arise, they could lead to a potentially lucrative opportunity for your business so always be on the look out!
Level 4 is the brand trust level. Lucky for us, Usborne Books & More is an incredible company and our products are phenomenal so there’s not a lot of work for us consultants as far as building the brand trust level. One way to utilize this permission level is to ask customers if they would mind leaving a review with pictures or even a video review of their books on your website (Remember to offer an incentive — 15% off their next order would be a good one to use here!). You can then use the excitement your customer feels while reviewing his/her new books to open a hosting or recruiting conversation as well as use the reviews for building brand trust with contacts who aren’t as familiar with our products.
Level 3 is the personal relationship level. At this level of permission, you are using your personal relationships and the faith your contact has in you as an individual to create customers. Say your just shy of reaching your HOC goal for the month and you need to put together a quick party that you can rely on succeeding. This is a time when you might turn to the personal relationship level of permission. Call up that friend that you know will come through for you and let them know not only how it will benefit her to host a party but how much it will help you, her friend, out. This level of permission ranked 3rd because it is valuable in that those close friends will almost always come through for you but limited in that you you will need more contacts than just your circle of friends to keep your business growing.
Level 2, the points level, is a level of permission we use often as Usborne Books & More consultants. At this level, we ask the contact permission to send her more information and in exchange she will earn either points which she can use towards earning a reward (point liability model) or points that will earn her entries into a giveaway (point chance model). This level of permission is a great way to book your calendar and to get orders placed when trying to reach your monthly goals. A couple of ideas would be to offer your contacts a free book if they choose to host a party on a certain booking date or an entry into a monthly free book giveaway for every $10 they spend.
Finally, level 1, the intravenous level, is the highest level of permission. With this level of permission, the customer gives you, the consultant, permission to make buying decisions on their behalf. An example of using this level of permission in your Usborne Books & More business would be to have customers who do not have the time to shop give you a budget along with information about the children their shopping for and you choose the books for them. You could also offer a monthly book box where for a certain price your customer receives a box of x amount of books in the mail each month, chosen by you. Another form of the this level of permission is the purchase-on-approval model and this model simply states that the customer gets a description of what items you have selected for her and she has the opportunity to opt out of that order.
4 SHARE YOUR PERMISSION MARKETING TECHNIQUES WITH YOUR HOSTESS: We all know that hostess coaching is a vital part of being a consultant and how well we do it can greatly impact the success of the party (and our commission). That being said, sharing the permission marketing strategies we’ve discussed in steps 1–3 with your hostess is a great way to take your hostess coaching to the next level. There are several points that you could tie into your hostess coaching routine but the biggest part of permission marketing that should be considered is the very first point: ask permission. Tell your hostess to ask permission through individual, personalized messages rather than sending out mass, generic invitations. Their guests are far more likely to respond and the conversation will open the door to sharing more information about the products which will almost always lead to higher party sales.
5 FREQUENCY: The final part of permission marketing that you should use in your business is to focus on frequency. While an unseasoned consultant may make the mistake of focusing on reach over frequency (reaching 100 people with a brilliant ad once vs. reaching 25 people four times each), the fact is that frequency is ultimately far more beneficial than reach. That one brilliant post that reach 100 people may have been misunderstood by some, some consumers likely missed it all together and many consumers who did see it just that one time, will likely soon forget the information. For this reason, using your resources to build up the frequency of advertising and other forms of outreach is far more lucrative for your business because, even though the consumer pool may be smaller, a greater number of those consumers will understand, see and remember your ad. So next time you start to sit down and spend 30 minutes sending incentives to a new list of potential leads, consider using some of that time to reach back out to those that you reached out to a month ago that did not respond. They may have had too much going on at the time or simply forgot to respond. Another point is to frequently update your website or social media page. If you have a social media page and only post on it once a month, the likelihood that your fans are noticing those random posts are slim to none. But when you post great material frequently, your fans will be more likely to see your post on their news feed and react to it. On his blog, Seth Godwin says “real permission works like this: if you stop showing up, people complain, they ask where you went.” If you stopped reaching out to your customers, posting on your social media page or working on bookings, would your followers notice? If not, you’re probably not marketing your Usborne Books & More frequently enough and changing that can make all the difference when building your business.
