Developing VIP Clubs that Increase Business

VIP Clubs are the perfect way to build customer loyalty. They make your customers feel valuable with an incentive-based membership club that rewards them for staying in touch with you.

Keywords:

Restaurant, Marketing, VIP Club

Article Body:

"Before you begin marketing through a VIP Club, you need to take a step back and look at your restaurant. Make sure that you are ready for increased business. Don't attempt to market your restaurant unless you have above average food and service. Good marketing can actually put a restaurant that provides poor food and service out of business faster because more people will have a poor dining experience, and the negative word-of-mouth will cause them to fail faster than if they do not market at all," says Brent Davis, Director of Coaching Services for RestaurantMarketingGroup.org (RMG) a company that specializes in helping restaurants to build sound, trackable marketing systems through its easy-to-use software, "How-To" marketing manuals and personalized coaching.

Gathering the Data:
Once you have taken an internal inventory and feel good about the food and service that you provide, it's time to start using and building your database of existing customers. Remember that in most restaurants 30 percent of the customers are bringing in 70 percent of the business. For the sake of our discussion, let's say that Joe's Family Diner has 10,000 customers a month. That's 322 customers each day. Seventy percent of the diner's monthly customers would be 7,000. If the restaurant's VIP Club marketing creates only one more visit per year per customer at an average check of $25, the volume will increase by $175,000 per year or $14,538 a month and that's with only
one extra visit per existing customer per year. You can see why it's important to go after additional customer visits.

"Don't forget that your existing customers are your neighbors. A VIP Club nables you to market within your neighborhood to existing customers. It's permission based and therefore considerably more effective than if you did a
blanket coupon offer to all of your neighbors. These are folks who know and frequent your restaurant; they took the time to fill out a VIP card and have shared personal information with you," says Davis.

"VIP Clubs are a great way to build customer loyalty. Always give a thank you reward bonus for joining the club. We recommend that the offers go out by email or regular mail within 72 hours after signing up. The offer should be
without any strings attached. I like to suggest that the offer be for a dollar amount. A flat $15.00 or $10.00 amount could be enough depending on your guest check average. You could give a FREE, dinner with a $10 or $15 limit. Give them an offer they can use on anything they want. The offer is now valuable and they feel compelled to use it," says Teresa Horn, RMG Marketing Program Development

Specialist.
To enjoy the greatest return on your VIP Club enrollment campaign, you should train your employees so that they understand everything about the VIP Club. Have a contest and give prizes to the employees who sign up the most
customers. Place VIP Club displays and sign-up cards in very high-traffic, highly visible areas. Use pre-printed "Post-It" pad messages and put them on your menus so that your customers and employees will be reminded to fill them out.
Always emphasize the benefits of VIP Club membership. Enter the names and additional information into the computer software program on a daily basis, using a part time employee.

Horn suggests that your VIP Club sign-up cards include the
following information:

Name:
Address:
Birthdates of each family member, so that they can receive a
birthday surprise.
Anniversary:
Email::
Phone: (Optional)

"Carefully select your expiration date. I usually suggest using a three-week expiration date. If it's not used by then, it is usually lost. You want to create a sense of urgency," says Horn.

Processing the data:
Don't wait until you have built a large database. Start marketing to each VIP Club member the minute you get their data. You will find that this information is your most valuable marketing asset.

Creating a database of your customers and immediately communicating to them on a regular basis will increase the frequency of visits to your restaurant. For almost any reason, or sometimes for no reason at all you should send
the customer a postcard or an email with an incentive to bring them into the restaurant again. Remember, the goal is to bring the customers in at least one EXTRA time per year. By sending them a reminder postcard or email around a
holiday or during a local community event will remind them to visit your restaurant. And if they make several EXTRA visits you have exceeded your goal and dramatically increased the sales and profit of your restaurant.

Create a Birthday Club:
What is the most popular holiday for eating out? According to the National Restaurant Association, it's on your birthday. In fact, 55 percent of all Americans eat out on their birthdays. The best news of all is that people have
birthdays 365 days a year, spread out over 12 months. Birthdays are the perfect time to encourage additional business.

"Use the information gathered in your database to send out birthday cards for each VIP customer as you recognize one of the most important days in their lives. Their celebrations might as well happen at your restaurant. Always include a FREE offer such as a FREE dinner for the birthday guest.
Remember that birthday guests rarely party alone; the average size of a birthday group is five individuals," says Horn.

Go out of your way to make the birthday party a special event when a customer redeems his/her certificate. Your restaurant needs to become the "Party Place." Develop definite policies to ensure that it happens¡ªthat the parties are fun and your birthday guest is treated like royalty for
their day. You must create a special party atmosphere. One Northwest seafood chain has a crazy fish hat that the birthday person wears while they take a Polaroid or digital photo of the birthday guest and his/her friends. The photo is then slipped into a cardboard photo holder and becomes a
nice takeaway remembrance of the evening. Of course, the restaurant's name and address is on the card. If you include a "year" sticker, it can become a collectable item.

Celebrate Anniversaries:
Another great marketing campaign can be centered on your VIP customers' anniversaries. Forty-three percent of American couples say they go out to eat to celebrate their wedding anniversaries. If you own a fine dining restaurant,
try to make your guests dining experience special and romantic. Doing "little extras" is what will set your restaurant apart from the competition. Value-added incentives are more important than discounts on anniversaries. You must
make it a "special occasion."

Quick Service Restaurants and Pizza Shops can effectively wish mom and dad a happy anniversary by giving them a great offer for their children's meals that way, Mom doesn't have to cook for the children before she goes out to dine.
This let's the children celebrate the anniversary too.

Advertise Specials or New Menus:
"With a marketing database, you are prepared to communicate with your regular customers. It's a great way to introduce a new menu or a new menu item. Always include some special offer just for VIP members," says Horn.

Many companies have developed a newsletter for VIP members. Others are sending out e-newsletters. This is a great way to say thank you to your frequent customers. It's also a great medium to tell them about new menu items,
new employees, and new recipes. All this helps to make our customers take an interest in your restaurant and keep your restaurant's name in front of your VIP members. Be sure to make the newsletter newsy and fun to read. Always include some sort of incentive for those members to stop by for a
meal. Change your incentive in each newsletter and track the results.

Sponsor Contests:
One restaurateur saw a substantial increase in VIP member visits when she started having a weekly drawing. She sent out a postcard to the VIP members and asked them to bring in the postcards for a FREE offer. When redeemed, the
postcards were entered into a weekly drawing for a free lunch or "Dinner For two". Monthly drawings were also held with prizes such as a digital camera, CD player, clock radio, etc. Grand Prize Drawings held twice a year gave away a
grandfather's clock or a cruise. With every mailer, she reminded her customers of the grand prize drawings.

Additional Celebrations:
Create theme nights to attract your VIP members back to your restaurant. Tie your theme occasions with holidays. For instance, February is National Chocolate Lover's Month. Offer your VIP members a special chocolate dessert promotion for the month of February. One creative Italian restaurant
owner did a VIP promotion for its St. Patrick's Day celebration. He sent out an email invitation saying, "Come party with real Italians on St. Patrick's Day. We'll show you how to celebrate St. Patrick's Day in style." Any holiday will
do. One restaurant celebrated Agatha Christie's Birthday by offering a surprise entree special.

Remember that the number of dollars that a customer is going to spend is limited. To get more than your share, you are frankly going to have to
take them away from your competition Effective marketing will help you get a larger share of your customer's dollars and includes the tools to track
each and every promotion to determine your customer response and return on investment. With good marketing and tracking you will be able to
keep your restaurant in Top OF Mind awareness with your customers.

"It's not your customer's job to remember you. It's your obligation and your responsibility to make sure the customer doesn't forget you! An effective VIP
Club will do just that," says Horn.

Developing A Document Shredding Strategy For Your Business

A comprehensive document destruction policy is an important part of any business, small or large. Protecting customer and employee data is not only common sense, but is also legislated.
Here are a few tips and resources to make the process easier.

Keywords:

document shredding, document destruction, paper shredding

Article Body:

Creating a document shredding strategy is an important aspect of almost every business. Not only are there lots and regulations that require businesses to shred documents, but it is also part of running a trustworthy, excellent business.

Why do business is need to destroy documents?

Practically every business is creating and managing new paper documents every day and the list of documents that legally need to be shredded is constantly growing.

Bills, customer order information, contracts, employee applications, in-house memos, receipts, piles of mail, insurance documents, old tax records, payment records, account records and balance sheets, personnel files and bank records… Practically any document that has a first name last name address, and other information probably needs to be shredded.

What can happen if this information falls into the wrong hands?

Well, aside from forgery, credit card fraud, con schemes, corporate espionage, there is of course the potential for bad publicity, loss of customers, lawsuits and fines.

It is important that all businesses shred or destroy certain sensitive documents. Law enforcement, legal industries, government agencies, banks, health care providers, insurance providers, financial brokers, and real estate are just a few industries where managing paperwork is crucial. Not to mention hospitals, insurers, doctor’s offices, retirement homes, drugstores, legal papers.

So how can a business manage their documents safely and effectively?

A detailed security policy for every type of document your business uses is essential and employees need to know these policies!

For example: What are the shredding requirements for the various document types that your company frequently uses? What are employees allowed to photocopy? Who has access to files with private information?

Signs can be posted in the workplace and next to trash cans and recycling bins were sensitive documents may inadvertently be thrown out, un-shredded.

Also, whoever is overseeing the destruction of documents should closely consult with the company’s IT staff and any other department that works with electronic records and files to ensure safe handling.

Training employees about disposing of sensitive documents and developing a very specific policy about how long to hold and went to discard documents will go a long way. Access to company read records should be controlled and restricted to a small number of individuals and there should be rules relating to records.

And finally, use a certified document destruction company that has a good track record.

For a more information about safe document disposal and list of document shredding services including mobile document shredding services, you can browse our services directory.

Developing a Positive Attitude For Starting And Managing a Successful Business Online!

Everyone thinking of starting a business needs to be prepared to move beyond conventional approaches. One of the most crucial factors in your business success is your ATTITUDE. Developing a positive attitude is your key to be able to reach your goals.

Keywords:

developing a positive attitude,right attitude

Article Body:

“If you fail to prepare, you are preparing to fail”

Everyone thinking of starting a business needs to be prepared to move beyond conventional approaches. One of the most crucial factors in your business success is your ATTITUDE. Developing a positive attitude is your key to be able to reach your goals.

Your knowledge, your skills, your service or product quality, will not help you enough if you don’t have a positive attitude. Many people failed in their business and the major reason of their failures is due to inadequate attitude. This brings me to an old statement "Your Attitude determines your Altitude," pretty much says it all!

Before jumping into online battle, there are several things you will want to consider. What does starting a home Business involve? What should you expect? And, are you suited to this lifestyle? As with any employment decision, the proper time and research should be spent to make sure you're on the right track.

To make sure you are in the right way, you should own certain markers’ qualities that will help you on your path to success. Some of these qualities may be a part of your personality, but it is always worth making the effort to learn or improve upon skills that you need to use.

The main factor that affects everything in your life is your attitude.

What are attitudes?

Attitudes are internal characters of the heart and thoughts. They are the hidden intentions which will eventually serve as the basis for our actions.

Your attitude can affect everything you do in your life. Generally, if your attitude is bad and the desire just isn't there, you are burned out. If Your Attitude is bad you won't get very high. If your attitude is good, then your chances for success are great.

If you have a bad attitude the negativity will show in everything you do. No matter what you are doing, your results will be poor and your business will do poor. You CAN reach your goals, whatever they happen to be, if only you develope a positive attitude.

Developing a Positive Attitude

"Your attitude will determine your altitude."

If you have a bad attitude, you can change it if you WANT to. A bad attitude is immediately passed on to your customers and that's the quickest way to scare someone off. There are a lot of people who have great latent, but their attitude is the disqualifier of their life.

If you have a positive attitude and constantly strive to give your best effort, eventually you will overcome your immediate problems and find you are ready for greater challenges.

- Avoid spending time with negative people. Avoid spending time with people who make you anxious, or make you feel unhappy. These are the types of people that will drain your energy. A good thing for you to do instead is to hang out with great, positive people that suit your style. Their attitudes will be contagious.

- Learn to be self-confident. Be nice to everyone. That doesn’t mean letting other people taking advantage of you.

- Help people to get what they want and you will get what you want.

- Be a problem-solver, and you will build your credibility and reputation as someone who gets things done.

Wyess said. “A good attitude makes you feel better. Others see this and judge you by that. People want to work in an upbeat environment, and attitudes play an important role in shaping the work environment.”

You need to be self disciplined. “Discipline is a mark of a leader. “

Always do your best, use self-control, be self-disciplined and think before you act. All of the energy and self-belief in the world will not help you, if you cannot be self-disciplined in completing tasks.

- Schedule everything, schedule all of your tasks inside ACT. Without a schedule, everything ends up in a chaotic mess of random activity. But scheduling is not enough if you don’t work with your schedule.

- Organize your work. You can't be efficient unless you're organised. You don't have to be firm about it, but you must have some system for organising your work. Any system is better than no system, but whatever system you choose, it should organize your tasks in a doable program.

- Learn to manage your time efficiently. Make your workday more effective to grow your business. Take control of your life. Use the best used techniques in the art of goal setting, planning, organizing, prioritizing and delegation.

It’s a good idea if you spend 15 minutes per day planning; controlling time robbers; organising paperwork; and delegating effectively.

Work on relationship building.

The relationship is very important because it enables your business to develop, and enables you to learn and benefit in many ways. You make time for other things in your life every day, and your work on your relationship should be no different. You need to reserve time each day to get your relationship recharged.

The right relationship is everything. If people don't like you, you're not going to be successful with them. Remember, people won't go along with you if they can't get along with you. If people don't like you or trust you or understand you, their not going to buy from you, no matter how much you know about business.

Building relationship online may be somewhat more difficult compared to meeting a customer in person in offline business, you can accomplish this if you think of your potential clients in each step you make when building your business.

Learn to do these things for your own peace of mind. Not only your business can benefit; but every aspect of your life can benefit when you take responsibility and take control.

Developing the Secretarial Role - Managers

Secretarial and administrative staff can only develop and add value to the business for the future, if their peers, the organization's culture and their immediate managers create the right opportunities for them to do so.

Keywords:

Developing the Secretarial Role

Article Body:

Secretarial and administrative staff can only develop and add value to the business for the future, if their peers, the organization's culture and their immediate managers create the right opportunities for them to do so. So here are the top ten tips for Managers:

1. Talk to them! By involving, including, empowering and trusting your secretary, she will become more proactive and motivated.

2. Share your expertise and knowledge. This way she will have a greater understanding of your work, your pressures and your objectives, and so be able to contribute more to the team.

3. Ask for her thoughts on the working practices that just aren't working efficiently: her experience and knowledge will probably save you hours of your valuable time.

4. Introduce her to your clients and colleagues. The more they are known and seen to be part of your team, the fewer routine requests and tasks you will have to handle.

6. Don't ask people to contact "your secretary" in correspondence. Use their full name! This will build relationships and trust - with your clients and with your secretary.

5. Consider your work objectives: what could they help you with?

9. Find out which areas of your own role your secretary would like to become more involved with. Work with her on these, and aim to delegate at least two new tasks a year.

7. Ask your peers how they work with their secretaries: you might be surprised at the range of responsibilities of other people's secretaries.

8. Buy her a subscription to one of the professional secretarial magazines as an "anniversary" present or simply as a thank you.

10. If you can't work efficiently with your secretary consider your options: do nothing, or develop them. Doing nothing is the easy option. Developing your secretary needs your commitment, your time and your energy: the rewards are well worth the investment.

Choosing Your Niche Market - Developing Laser Focus

As the old joke goes, the best thing about the Web is that you can do virtually anything, the worst thing about the Web is that you can do virtually anything.

Keywords:

entrepreneurship, start up, online business, e-business

Article Body:

One of the keys to being a successful Internet Entrepreneur is choosing a niche. One of the challenges of the World Wide Web is its expansive reach and versatile nature. As the old joke goes, the best thing about the Web is that you can do virtually anything, the worst thing about the Web is that you can do virtually anything.

Pick a starting point that you're interested in and stick with it until you are successful or you have established that you idea is not as profitable as you originally thought.

Okay, when you begin to market, where do you start? You know you don't want to compete with some of the large companies on the Net. However there are great opportunities for small and nimble operators.

Analyze what you are selling or what you want to sell. It should be in an area that you know a lot about or want of learn about. It may have wide appeal, but think of those it appeals to most. For example, does your product appeal to musicians? That's a pretty wide market. Narrow it down. Who is most likely to be interested, singers or instrumentalists? From there you might want or need to narrow it even further. For example, your product might appeal to musicians of a certain age, or musicians who favor a certain kind of music or even a particular singer.

After narrowing it down as far as you can, think of appropriate keywords. Check with Google to see how many sites come up using these keywords. Next use a site that tracks keyword usage (such as Word Tracker or Overture) to see if there are plenty of users looking for that information. If there are enough potential customers and the competition is low, you may have found your niche.

After you have chosen your niche, try to use it in your Website title. This can help your Website ranking. Another tool for choosing a niche is to study the competition and find out how to make your site unique.

Choosing a niche will help your Website stand out. Find one with plenty of potential customers and little competition and you have a very good chance of watching your business grow.

Developing your own business opportunities.

In the world of business, generating trade opportunities is really about nurturing trade relationships. The era of a worker spending twenty-five to 30 years with a single company are now gone, and the most important way to keep all your business options open is by nurturing these relationships.

Keywords:

business opportunities ideas

Article Body:

In the world of business, developing trade opportunities is really about nurturing trade relationships. The days of a worker spending 20 to 35 years with one company are long gone, and the most important way to keep all your business opportunities wide open is by nurturing these relationships. In some ways, this complicates the world of making truly sound business decisions. If you have strong business relationships, there will no doubt be the odd phone call or email with a new business proposition on the other end. Some of these propositions will be fantastic while others will be gone before the finished idea even reaches your brain. Some will permit you to test them out while you maintain your current work position while others will demand your full time focus.

If you are going to get far ahead in this world, you are going to have to be receptive to new options that come across your desk, as well as being receptive to those who have a desire to convey them to you. Beware though if you have quite a lot of money at the get-go you might see many more business proposals which might be thinly veiled pleas for financial aid for someone elses doorway rather than your own.

Learning to discern between outstanding business opportunities and business relationships is mighty difficult though. Sometimes the relationship between the parties gets in the way of sound decisions. If a business relationship is sound and the idea initially appears good, the temptation is to jump right in without looking past a shallow level. This strategy may backfire unless the opportunity is quite foolproof. And when someone does come up with a foolproof business opportunity the rest of the world will know about it too. Until then, we are all still out there swimming with sharks and hoping for the best.

Business ideas can often pop up in the strangest of places. These are the thoughts and concepts that materialize during family outings, holiday soirees, and of course, seminars that are more useful as a cure for insomnia than anything else. It takes not just a bright mind but a bit of bravery to leave the proverbial door open for continued discussion. There are few things more distressing than driving home from a social event wishing that you had gotten someones contact details because you felt they seemed really onto something, and you wanted in. If you could have only been a little braver you might have snatched up his contact details, let your mind ponder their idea for a while, and then called with your own proposition a short while later. But you did not, and another million dollar opportunity went home early, along with the inventor.

It is a shark infested world out there, and everyone is looking so hard for success that they arent remembering to look for the friendly face of those who can help them. Sometimes the best key to developing your own winning business plan is to simply continue to listen to others.

Developing a Business Plan!

There are many important steps to consider when developing a business plan for your company, but the first step is to fully understand the main uses of a business-plan. The four main uses of a business-plan are as follows:

Keywords:

business plan,

Article Body:

There are many important steps to consider when developing a business plan for your company, but the first step is to fully understand the main uses of a business-plan. The four main uses of a business-plan are as follows:

• A Business Plan is a written document that you can use in your search for external financing.
• A Business Plan is a tactical planning and management tool for your business.
• A Business Plan is a document showing the capacity of your team to control and manage all the aspects of the company.
• A Business Plan brings you new ideas to refine your project by checking and estimating the induced hypothesis.

The necessity of Business Plans

The drafting or update of your business-plan is essential to the good management of your company. It can be used when searching for a business partner, for obtaining external financing, and for defining some stages of the development of your company, such as:

• The creation of your company.
• The launching of a new product.
• The establishment in a new market.
• The transfer, buy-out, or the structural development of your company.

Should you call in a consultant or write the Business Plan by yourself?

You should be the main (if not single) author of your business-plan, because the Business Plan is, so to speak, your own "baby", it is a reflection of your personality; it is by this means that your investors will discover the person with whom they collaborate.

But your project may be too important and you may want to call in a consultant for help and consultation. Even so, you should stay in control of its development!

Tips for developing a quality business-plan.

1. To be credible, a business-plan must be coherent and each parameter in the Business Plan must be based on facts.

2. There are many methods to build Business Plans, but very few can help you correctly carry out reliable financial projections based on a preliminary commercial engineering and market study.

Indeed, one frequent mistake when building Business Plan's is to first define the target in terms of market share, and then try to "find" the number of customers necessary to fill these objectives! This process should be reversed.

3. In addition, one essential point in a Business Plan is to define concrete policies and measures. This definition aims to gain a reasonable number of customers, based on a sufficient knowledge of the market. The quantitative estimate of this gain must be calculated on realistic monthly and annual increase rates. A well-founded pricing policy then makes it possible to estimate the sales turnover in the years ahead.

The calculation of the costs of the planned actions in your Business Plan are essential and make overall financial projections possible. In short, financial forecasts – including those related to the financing of the project – must be elaborated from the basic elements of the project. They should be proceeded by a commercial engineering study which projects a realistic estimate of sales.

4. In a Business Plan, the marketing plans as well as the financial forecasts require a basic understanding of how these important elements are calculated. You can use good software – some of which is free – to faciliate the development of your Business Plan.

5. The last point and certainly not the least significant: A Business Plan is never ended "once and for all". A regular follow-up and comparison between the theoretical Business Plan and the reality of its execution are essential. You can then modify your Business Plan and adapt it to improve performance and achieve your goals.