Want more sales? Give 'em a taste of what you've got to offer

This blog post comes from Jon Clark President of Palm Tree Promos, a business partner and the nation's leading exper in promotional items. Thanks for the post Jon!

Yesterday, I received a phone call that made me smile because someone actually gets it.  What I'm talking about is a rarely used marketing technique that everyone can use, but most don't.  I'm talking about GREAT marketing that doesn't cost money, except for a little bit of overhead to pay for the salary and the phone call.  McCurdy's Comedy Theatre in Sarasota, FL  goes to great lengths to collect information with everyone who walks through their doors.  In short, they have a customer list.  Even shorter, they use it! 

Self-admittedly I don't do as much as I need to with my customer list (pot 'o gold for those Irish Eyes since it's close to March 17) and this phone call inspired me to think about different ways to use it.  Anyway, one of the items of information McCurdy's collects are birthdates.  As my wife's birthday is March 22, the nice representative from McCurdy's was calling to find out how many of the 20 FREE tickets my wife would like to use for her birthday party at their comedy club.  Imagine that, 20 tickets with a total value of approximately $200 for FREE.  At first I wondered, "why are you giving away $200?", and then it hit me like a ton of bricks.  This is word of mouth meets referral marketing at it's finest.  Number one, they already have a great product and were pretty confident my wife enjoyed her last visit and when my wife thinks about our next Saturday night, comedy at McCurdy's will be one of the choices.  Number two, inviting 19 others to share a birthday party with you is actually 19 referral leads to add to their customer list for future loyal customers.  Those 19 new leads are worth a lot more than $200 over their lifetime, and more than likely will recoup their investment that first night when I end up buying everyone drinks!

Understanding the old saying, it's much less an investment to market to existing clients than to attract new ones, shouldn't we also emulate McCurdy's and use our existing customer list every way possible?  I know I will.