Name
Email Address
The waitress then invited them to fill in their name and email address so the restaurant could stay in touch and tell them about upcoming events etc.
What Mike loved about this approach was how simple it was.
No flash graphics, no fancy website with opt in form.
Just a simple bit of paper and a couple of sentences from a waitress.
Mike filled in the piece of paper and a week later heard from the restaurant.
By collecting their name and email address the restaurant is now able to enhance their customers experience by staying in touch and adding value. (And by doing this they will improve their profits with very little effort.)
What I like about Mike's example is that it is a great reminder that there are many simple things we can do in business to quickly improve our marketing results.
And a lot of the time they can be done easily with minimal cost.
In other words we are doing 'simple yet profitable marketing.'
Here's another example:
My good friend and marketing expert Bob Serling has just been showing me the results of some fascinating tests he's been doing with opt in boxes on client's websites.
(An opt in box is where you invite a person to leave their name and email address and is often on the home page of a website.)
Bob has discovered that by tweaking a couple of key ingredients in an opt in box (like its position on the web page, the words in the opt in box or how it looks) he can instantly improve the number of opt in's his clients get by a minimum of 30 per cent.
And for many of his clients this translates into a similar increase in their sales as well.
So it's a highly profitable thing to do.
Best of all the changes to the opt in box can usually be done within a few hours.
Which means it's very simple as well.
(If that's of interest send me an email using the email link later in this column. Give me your website address and I'll let you know whether 'opt in box tweaking' might be worth considering for your website as well.)
Here's another example of simple yet profitable marketing...
A hardware shop put up a big sign in their window that said something like this:
"We guarantee that if you come into our store one of our people will professionally greet and welcome you within 20 seconds. If they don't we will give you $50.00 of hardware of your choice completely free"
A lot of people walking past the store read the sign and went inside to check it out.
They were all welcomed professionally within 20 seconds.
Now once the people were in the shop guess what many did?
That's right they said to themselves, "Well now that I'm here what can I buy that I might need?"
Sales increased dramatically.
This was simple to do and highly profitable.
"Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler."
Albert Einstein
Action Exercise:
Take a few minutes over the next few days and think about your own business.
Ask yourself a question like this one: "What could I do in my own business that would be simple to implement yet potentially highly profitable at the same time?"
Then take action on some of the answers you come up
Graham McGregor is a marketing consultant and the creator of the 396 page 'Unfair Business Advantage Report.' www.theunfairbusinessadvantage.com (This is free and has now been read by business owners from 27 countries.) You can email him at the link above. 
