Basket Marketing

If you feel like your contact list is running dry, it might be time to explore new avenues of marketing.  Today, I'm specifically going to talk about bringing baskets to businesses in order to connect with their employees.  Why should you do this?  Because you don't know these women yet and they all have friends you also don't know.  If only one person from each business you bring a marketing business to books a party, you're going to have a ton of new contacts from which you can "snowball" your business.
I put my baskets together for virtually nothing.  I buy the basket at Michael's at 70% off (go see if there are still sales at your craft stores) and the rest is just catalogues, samples, gifts, and brochures.Here are my Do's & Don'ts of Basket Marketing.

1. Don't choose a store where you already have friends and/or clients working.  The key to basket marketing is that you want to meet new women.  Your friends and clients can use their referral cards to get your name out at their places of business.  You need new women!
2. Do put your name, phone number, and website on everything.  It doesn't matter what's in your basket, it has to have your name, your phone number, and website on it!  How else is your new client going to know how to get ahold of you?  Download the return address label template from your back office and print off a sheet.  Put a sticker on everything!
3. Do include a catalogue.  Who cares if you never get it back?  You want these women to see everything we have to offer!
4. Do put in samples!  However you want to package them (see below) make sure that these new customers have samples to try.  You never know, someone might bring a hair dryer into work one day so everyone can try them!
5. Don't just put in samples!  You don't want to bring these ladies a basket of only samples and catalogues.  You want them to have a reason to look in the basket.  Include candy, hot cocoa or tea.  Put the candies in inexpensive tulle bags you can get at the dollar store.  Remember that it can be inexpensive without being "cheap."  Here are some suggestions:
        Personalized Tea Bags
        Smarties bearing the tag "Be a SMARTIE, book a party!"
        Reisen candies with the note, "You don't need a REISEN to book a party - any day is good!"
6. Do check back.  There are two reasons you want to check back.  First, you want to connect with your customers and tell them that they're more than just money to you.  Second, you don't want them throwing away your basket.  I don't care how cheap you got that sucker, you want to reuse it as much as possible.

So, those are my rules.  Here's a really good optional tip:  Give your new clients more than one way to get ahold of you.  Of course you have your phone number and website on your tags and catalogues and flyers and samples, but you might want to get one more way for them to find your website - I use a QR code.  That's one of those cool square barcodes you see on movie posters that take you directly to the movie's websites when you scan it with your phone.  If you use QRstuff.com (forgot about that on "free tools day), you can create your own that directs them directly to your website.  Mine goes to the "view all" section of my website.