For the Google spiders:
The Grail is a marketing tool that is customized for the home inspection industry and the good news is that it really works! The benefits of this system are huge, some of which will be evident to you right from the start. Other benefits are subtle and will begin to slowly emerge the more you familiarize yourself with the system and how it operates.
I recommend that you give it a minimum of four months to take effect and provide results for you. This is not a flash-in-the-pan system. To be effective, it will take a little time. This is the system that empowers your friends, clients and Realtors to tell others about you. More details about the Grail can be found at our web site HomeHintseNews.
**Referral Business As Your Anchor **
Without a doubt, the single most important source of client referrals for my inspection business has been “word of mouth advertising” or referrals.
One of the first things a business owner does (or should do) is tell everyone that they meet, what it is that they do for a living. This is an excellent networking tactic and a good start for spreading word of mouth advertising. It works! The problem is that people tend to forget and they have short attention spans! You have to keep going back and repeating all of the steps to continue to obtain referral business in this manner.
By using the Grail Media platform every month, your clients and business contacts are reminded of you and your services. This enables them to refer you to their friends, family and associates who will call you to set appointments - not price shop. In turn, you never forget to keep in touch with your previous clients and contacts because the system does it automatically for you. Now your hard work to obtain new contacts is not wasted and serves to increase the size of your ever-growing referral base.
Let’s face it; we’ve all experienced this first hand. You perform a thorough inspection, the written report is beautiful, carefully crafted and worded, the client really likes you and can’t thank you enough for all the money you saved them using your professional skills and knowledge. You end the inspection by asking your client for referrals if they feel your service was valuable. They are so pleased with you and your service that they do just that! A short while later another client comes your way from this source. Wonderful! Then it dries up. What happened?
The explaination is that typically, people just move on with their lives. Your service has become a distant memory. What a terrible waste of an important referral source. Your past customers already think the world of you! You are the inspector they trust and would refer. You can’t afford to lose contact with them, but you have. Don’t let this happen to you again. That’s what used to happen to me. No longer! Now, my client base remembers my name from memory and gives me unlimited referrals. To put icing on the cake, their referrals are referring clients to me and on and on.
Virtual Presentations To Realtors
What about Realtors? What if you could present yourself as an authority to a base of Realtors every month without having to give a personal presentation? What if you could add to that base incrementally every month? Exponentially? What if it was automatic and you didn’t have to lift a finger to do it? What if Realtors were so impressed with what you are doing that they always had your contact information at their fingertips or better yet, forwarded your information to other Realtors? Do you think they would remember your name? Do you think you would get more business from them? I know you will, it’s happening to me right now!
Of course, what I am talking about is a monthly electronic newsletter. Some people call them eZines. Not just any newsletter though. This newsletter is completely branded with your company image and the content is directly related to the business that you are in.
When you register on the system your profile information automatically embeds into the top and side menu bar of the newsletter (just like mine is over there on the left). Every month your photo, logo, web link and company contact information along with the content that we provide are sent to the subscriber email addresses that you input into the system.
The process is totally automatic! The only action you have to take is to register and upload your subscriber email addresses! We provide the content.
**Imagine The Benefits For Yourself **
When I first began to use the system myself, the initial benefits were quite clear. I use a report writing software package from a prominent company to write home inspection reports; therefore I was able to upload in a matter of seconds, an email list of prior clients and Realtors to my personal newsletter account. A few minutes more and I had provided all of my business contact information, picture and logo to “Brand” the newsletter as my own.
This meant that I was now ready to send a professionally written Newsletter with important and relevant content to over 600 prior customers and over 125 Realtors, all of whom have seen my work before and know me! This is huge! The implications of this are enormous!
Here is the kicker. I only had two email addresses opt out from receiving the newsletter. I couldn’t believe it! Now, just imagine how many word of mouth referrals I get because of the newsletter keeping my name and company in front of clients and Realtors each month.
Keep in mind these were not just any old email addresses. These are people that know me personally. This system enables them to refer me whenever the opportunity presents itself. I have drastically reduced the amount of money that I spend on other forms of advertising. This really is a slam dunk! For less than one dollar per day you get access to the most cost effective marketing platform on the planet which will bring in referral inspections and on top of that, you save money by eliminating other, less effective methods.
This system saves me both time and money. I get almost all of my business by referral now! This system allows me to be continually and perpetually in front of the people with whom I have forged a personal relationship.
Leverage the power of other peoples work so you can free yourself to go about forging personal business relationships and securing more business! Let the marketing tasks be automatic, professional and without you having to lift a finger!
Quote
Jay Conrad Levinson, Author of the best-selling Guerrilla Marketing, has this to say about newsletters:
" One thing on which the experts agree: follow-up is the most important, yet, perhaps, least-used marketing strategy for small business. A promotional newsletter with trade news, customer stories, and new and interesting information about your business is a great way to help establish and improve customer relationships. If a newsletter is not currently in your guerrilla-marketing arsenal, you need to add it right now*!"*
2006 NACHI Convention
See us at booth #509
We look forward to meeting many of you in person at the 2006 NACHI convention at the Wyndham Palace Resort, February 4th through the 8th. Hope to see you there and thank you for your time.
John