The Pandemic Proves That the Most Valuable Asset in Your Business Is This … B efore I jump right into this article, let me take one minute to intro-
even with no fans coming to town all season. Even with our dining room closed for months. Our party room hasn’t hosted a single event yet, 14 months later. But we still managed to find a way to grow our business. Why? One thing. From the first day we opened our doors, in fact, for months before we opened our doors , we built our database and then created a relationship with our guests via our weekly email. Our system is simple: We have a birth- day club where we give you a FREE personal pizza valued at up to $14 on your birthday. We have this on all of our marketing and advertising materials to grow its size. When the pandemic began, we all thought this would be 14 days long, so we got on Facebook and I did a live video message. We closed our dining room and turned servers into delivery driv- ers. We never delivered before the virus. We did do a small piece of our business through third-party apps like Grub Hub and Uber Eats, but my approach was to keep the entire team working, and this was a quick way to do it. It was not without headaches, but putting the team out of work wasn’t an option for me. After we did the live video, we then sent the same message to our database that now exceeds 24,000 families and more than 40,000 birthdays. The community rallied around us, and in the first eight weeks after the shutdown, we actually had some of the best weeks in our company history while many restaurants closed their doors. They were 100% dependent upon people being
in an office or traffic to a strip mall. All of this was shut down, and they were in a very tough spot because they had no way to communicate and no list to com- municate to. “Dig the well before you thirst” is a lesson many have learned since March 2020. The most powerful and valu- able asset you can own as an en- trepreneur is your customer list and your prospect list. As a Keap user, you certainly understand this. But don’t forget that you need a great system in place to constantly be filling your list with ideal customers, clients, patients, members, or subscribers. When you go to sell your busi- ness, imagine the difference in value you’ll have if you have a list of every current and former cus- tomer, along with a list of pros- pects. I can assure you that our restaurant was in the 1% category of restaurants in 2020 that were up year over year and have more people working today than we did before the shutdown. One thing made this possible: our ability to communicate on a weekly basis via email, Facebook, and direct mail when we saw a rea- son to reach out.
duce myself. My name is Darin Spindler, and I’m the CMO of Magnetic Marketing (former- ly GKIC), but I’m more like you than a C-level executive. I’ve been a lifelong entrepreneur and have used Keap/Infusionsoft for more than a decade. Many of us “old-timers” recall the $5,000 startup fee. That $5,000 invest- ment was one of the best deci- sions of my entire life. You may also know me as the co-founder of KidsBowlFree.com, where we’ve generated 32 million new customers for our bowl- ing center clients. I’m also the founder of Heartland Pizza Com- pany in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and have a couple other business interests. They all have one com- mon thread: the use of direct-re- sponse marketing I discovered through Dan Kennedy and his Magnetic Marketing approach to advertising and marketing. On March 15, 2020, the world was turned upside down for most of us. Businesses were mandated to close their physical locations. Never in my lifetime would I have believed what has happened over the last 14 months was possible. Still today, many parts of the coun- try are struggling with the virus, the lockdowns, and the effect on brick-and-mortar locations. Over the past year, tens of thou- sands of restaurants have closed their doors forever. But my restau- rant, located near seven hotels, benefited greatly from big events like the Green Bay Packers having 100,000 fans in our city during the season and was up year over year,
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