The holidays are a time for family, festivities and fun. Whether it’s flying out to see Grandma or sending out holiday cards to your old college friends, it’s also a time to acknowledge the important people in your lives. As a small business owner, those important people also include your customers.   

You know perfectly well that a holiday greeting can be an important part of your marketing efforts. It can help generate goodwill, reminding customers that you’re still thinking of them and stand ready to assist them if they need anything.

As the summer finally draws to a close, it’s time for another season to begin. Not fall, exactly: holiday season. In the United States at least, major holidays aren't distributed evenly throughout the year. Between Memorial Day and Labor Day, the calendar is rather sparse, with the 4th of July being the only major holiday.

Once the leaves start turning and the temperatures began to cool, that all changes. From, jack o’ lanterns to turkeys to Christmas trees to Time Square, the calendar seems like a never-ending stream of one holiday after another. With all the festivities going on, it’s easy for entrepreneurs to get sidetracked. Don’t be like the others. Keep your goals in sight and push on.

Yes, it that time of year again, when ghouls and goblins prowl. It’s also the time of year when many companies do big business. Surprisingly, Halloween has risen to become the biggest adult holiday of the year. Temporary Halloween stores are on the rise. Bars, nightclubs and restaurants are cashing in by sponsoring Halloween related events. And it’s not just limited to particular industries. According to the National Retail Federation (NRF), 148 million Americans will take part in some sort of Halloween celebration this year. In 2013, the NRF estimated Halloween spending in the U.S. alone at around $8 billion. The average U.S. consumer is expected to shell out $80 on costumes, candy and decorations.

That’s a lot of trick-or-treating.

Networking has become a bit of a buzzword over the last few years. It’s not just for information technology experts anymore. It's a critical part of the Lifecycle Marketing process.

When we attend a business conference we might talk about networking with colleagues and like-minded entrepreneurs. When we add friends on Facebook or other social media, we’re still networking after a fashion. 

For many small businesses, referrals are the most reliable source of new customers. New contacts lead to new leads, which in turn can lead to new sales opportunities. In essence, gaining referrals is networking for your business.

There are many ways to gain referrals, but they all start with a simple premise: asking. For a business to take advantage of customer referrals, they need to not only ask, but make asking an ingrained habit. Your customer already knows you and likes your product. Why wouldn’t they want they want to share that product with the people they know?

This is the sixth step in our 8-step series on Lifecycle Marketing. In step five, we covered how you can follow up with your customers after a sale. 

You’ve generated leads and carefully nurtured them through the sales process. With your innovative follow-up campaign, you’re well on your way to creating long-term, ‘wowed’ customers. Why not build on it?

A happy customer is already familiar with you and your business, and over time you’ve gotten to know them as well. Surely there are some other products and services your company offers that they could use. Why not let your customers know about them?

In a nutshell, value is what upselling is all about. 

This is the fourth step in our continuing series on Lifecycle Marketing. In our last step, we examined ways to nurture the sales leads you’ve generated.

At some point in time, many of us have had a frustrating experience when we try to order something.  From complicated menus to badly organized sales sheets, some companies almost seem to fight you through the ordering process. 

You want to give them money, why do they have to make it so difficult?

Don’t be one of those companies. If you’ve gone through all the trouble of finding and nurturing potential customers, the last thing you want to do is make it difficult for them to buy what you’re selling. You want purchasing products and services from you to be a pleasant, seamless and most importantly easy process. 

This is the second of an 8-Step series on Lifecycle Marketing

In the first part, we looked at how you can drive traffic to your site. Now that you have their attention, it’s the perfect time to gain some valuable information on potential new customers and draw them a little closer to your circle. At first it might seem tacky to ask for information when delivering up a piece of content, but it really isn’t when you do it right.

Instead of thinking of it like demanding a price for your content, think of it as an opportunity for a potential customer to learn more about you and gain greater access to the content they liked. For example, if they liked your cake recipe, why not have them sign up for your baking company’s newsletter where they can receive several more recipes every month? Since they already have a positive attitude towards your product, you can nurture them towards a sale.

You’ve worked hard to make your business successful. You know you have quality products and services and competitive prices. You know you have customers out there that want what you have to offer. The problem sometimes is finding them . The Internet is a big place, and you’re just one firefly in the night. 

Lifecycle Marketing might be just what you’re looking for. It’s a simple process with a simple goal:  bringing customers in, ‘wowing’them and then letting positive word of mouth some advertising for you. Any customer is good, a happy customer is even better. But the best customer is the one who's telling his friends how great you are.

In our 8 part series on Lifecycle marketing, we’ll be looking at what it takes to attract customers. We’ll examine some of the new ways businesses are attracting leads, and the steps you can take to follow up on them. Later on, we’ll talk about ways to make your site more user-friendly by adding E-commerce tools and an effective lead management strategy, enabling you to convert site visitors into sales.  

There’s something about the holidays that make us nostalgic for “the good old days.” Maybe it’s those classic films like It’s a Wonderful Life, where everyone in Bedford Falls knows George Bailey over at the Bailey Building & Loan. Yep, good old George, who probably learned about customer service when he worked in the town drug store as a kid. No doubt he used to give out a wink and a grin along with that extra cherry he tossed on top of his customer’s ice cream soda.

Now, thanks to technology, customers have more choices than ever before. You can set your business apart from the others by demonstrating excellent old-fashioned customer service. One way to do that is by using email marketing during the holiday season, and in the Infusionsoft Marketplace, there is a campaign just for this purpose.

In football, coaches often talk to their teams about staying strong in the 4th quarter. For the coaches and players, the end of September marks the beginning of the heart of their season.

For many entrepreneurs, it means the start of a new fiscal quarter, often the final quarter of a business’ calendar year. And just like a football team, you’ll want to stay at your best to close out the season. If you haven’t already, it’s a good time to reflect on the challenges and opportunities available over the next few months. Many save such reflections for the end of the year, but there’s nothing to be gained by waiting for today’s news to become yesterday’s history.

Lifecycle Marketing is a valuable approach to marketing that has replaced many of the traditional methods. It’s based around two very simple ideas. The first is that it’s often easier to generate more revenue from existing customers than from finding new ones. Secondly, taking care of existing customers costs less than searching for new prospects.

Over the course of our series on Lifecycle Marketing, we’ve taken a look at how it can help your business. The Lifecycle has 8 simple steps: 

• Attracting Traffic.  Customers won’t buy from you if they don’t know you’re there. You need to do more than just advertise. Give them a reason to come through your doors, real or virtual, by creating great content. 

In Step 7 of our ongoing series on Lifecycle Marketing, we’re talking about expanding your marketing reach by gathering testimonials from satisfied customers. In our previous step, we looked at ways to increase the value of your existing customers by upselling. 

Word of mouth is more than just advertising that money can’t buy. In many cases, it’s more effective. According to a recent Forrester Research report, 70 percent of US online adults place high value on brand or product recommendations from friends and family. The report goes on to say that nearly half of them trust online reviews written by customers, but only about 10 percent feel the same way about company sponsored advertising. 

It only makes sense. For example, if we’re trying to decide whether to see a film in the theatres, are we going to listen to a longtime friend or rely on a critic we’ve never met?

This is the fifth step in our continuing series on Lifecycle Marketing. Previously we focused on ways you can convert lead into sales.

As anyone who’s been in business for any length of time knows, making a sale is only the first part of the equation. How you follow-up can go a long way in determining whether you’ve made a short-term sale or created a loyal customer that will stay with you for the long-haul. 

At a minimum, your product should meet their expectations and be delivered in a timely manner. A well planned follow up after the sale can help you go beyond those expectations and truly ‘wow’them. 

A follow-up doesn’t have to be just an email or a phone call. You can use all the channels at your disposal to reinforce all the points you’ve made during the build-up to the sale and continue to build trust.  

This is the third in an eight-step series about lifecycle marketing. Previously, we looked at how to attract traffic to your website and the various tools you can use to generate valuable sales leads. 

Now that you have the attention of your potential customers, it’s time to nurture them towards a sale.

It’s all about following up on potential leads. Since everyone is different, there are as many possible ways to follow up a lead as there are customers. There are no limits to your creativity here. That’s why it’s so important to not only generate leads, but to generate quality leads. The more you know about a potential customer, the more you can tailor your follow-up efforts to their situation.

This is the first of an 8 part series on Lifestyle Marketing. 

With a little patience and technical know-how, it’s fairly easy to build a website. The Internet is full of handy guides on it. If you don’t have the time to learn, the Internet is also full of people and companies eager to do the work for you. But now that you’ve gone to the trouble of building your site, is it doing what it needs to do to bring traffic in, or it is just sitting there in a sea of similar sites?

You need a reason for people to come to your site. 

Marketing expert Andrew Davis believes he has a way to do just that. By creating valuable content on your site, you establish a brand and you can use that brand to sell your products.  He cites Sesame Street and Disney as examples. By creating memorable stories and engaging characters such as Mickey Mouse and Elmo, both companies were able to leverage their content to sell millions of dollars in products.