Retail Contrarian

Turn Slow Days into Good Sales Days

Try some - or all - of these seven ways to create more quality traffic and sales during slower days:

1. Create an event.  Remember in college when "every day was a good day to throw a party?" Well, maybe you didn't go to the same college I did, but one of the best ways to create traffic is to give people a reason to come to your store.  Don't miss the biggies like Groundhog Day or Valentines Day.  This Friday is the 13th and could be a fun way to kick off Valentines Day.

But after you hit the obvious "Days," create your own.  How about Avoid Spring Cleaning Day, Pitchers and Catchers Reporting to Spring Training Day, or We Love Cupcakes Day?  Heck you can either do Celebrate Thursday Day. The more fun and different the event, the more likely you are to pull people in.

2. Call your customers.  I know this one isn't a favorite of most employees but on slow days the best investment of the staff's time is to get on the phone.  Obviously you want to call your top customers who haven't been in the store for some time.  Think about calling some recent buyers to make sure they're happy with their purchase.  You'll be surprised how often that leads to additional sales.  Of course if you're doing events you call and invite customers to join you.

3. Put an employee near the front door and invite people in to enjoy something to drink and eat or to participate in a special event.  Don't be overly aggressive; wait to make eye contact with a person before inviting him/her into the store.  The key is to have a reason for them to come in (beyond your good-looking face, of course).

4. Keep music playing throughout the day.  On slower days a too quiet store can unnerve some people and cause them not to stay as long than if other customers were in the store.  You might even turn the music up a bit louder than usual so people passing in front of the store hear it.  Just be sure it's not too loud for those customers already in the store.  

5. Don't let the staff congregate in the store.  I recently walked into a store on a weekday afternoon and felt like I needed to walk through a rugby scrum to get to the merchandise I wanted to see. Customers who only have a mild interest in visiting your store will turn away if they see more employees than customers.

6. Ask (or politely tell) your customers to tell their friends and family about store specials or events.  This is the most low-cost, low-tech, highly effective method to increase your traffic.  The power of suggestion is amazing.  The odds of people advocating your store go up considerably when you ask them.

7. And last but not least, maximize the traffic you do have.  Sometimes the traffic really isn't that bad but once we start to think it's a problem we miss opportunities.  Remain positive, keep engaging your customers, and take action to make your week.

So let me ask, what can you do today to make it a Good Sales Day?

Doug Fleener and Matt Norcia

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Your Upcoming Successful Weekend - or Not

Here are five actions you can take to increase the likelihood of having a successful weekend.

1. Offer the customer a free service. Retailers who sell jewelry or handbags can offer to clean the customer's jewelry or handbag while they shop.  Shoe stores can offer to change out the shoelaces in their customer's shoes. Cellphone retailers could offer a mini tune-up on the phone by polishing the display, cleaning the camera lens, and checking for any software update.  And before you discount this idea you might want to talk to Susan who did this last Wednesday and made a $1,000+ sale to one customer!

2. Create impromptu events. Pick a product or product category and offer demonstrations throughout the weekend.  To thank your customer for taking time to participate in the demonstration, enter him/her into a drawing for a free product or gift card.  Not only will this engage customers and increase the possibility of making a sale, but you'll also get contact information to follow-up with them next week.

3. Offer some aggressive weekend-only specials. While I'm not a big fan of competing on price, some weekend specials are great for "priming the pump."  Be sure to highlight that the specials are only good through Sunday.

4. Offer food and drinks. I'm telling you, this works, and one of the reasons it works is because so few people do it.

5. Combine all four into a Customer Appreciation Weekend. Sometimes the best parties are the impromptu "just because" kind. People right now need to feel good and be appreciated, and if anything this will create good Karma!

Here are now five things that you can do to decrease the likelihood of having a successful weekend.

1. Stalk customers as they shop in the store. Remember, if you follow a customer around without adding value it's called stalking, not service.

2. Be too quick to ring a sale and don't offer the customer additional products.  You want to have a high Unit-Per-Transaction (UPT), not a high Undersized-Purchase-Total.

3. Plan on having a so-so weekend.  Plan to succeed.  Positive energy works wonders.

4. Don't work the customer, clerk the customer.  As someone said to me the other day, if you don't know the difference, you're clerking.

5. Do the same thing you've done every weekend this year. That is, of course, unless you've beat your sales target every weekend this year. If that's the case then hit "reply" to tell me what you're doing and I'll share it with your fellow readers.

Good luck, have fun, and make your successful weekend a reality!

How to Attract More Customers

Money magazine recently asked me to answer this question posed by a retailer:  "How can I attract more customers to my retail boutique without spending a lot of money?"

Here's some part of my answer.

“One of the cheapest and often most successful direct ways to boost retail traffic: Send an e-newsletter to past customers.  ‘It's always more effective to market to the person you know,’  says Doug Fleener, president of the Dynamic Experiences Group, a Lexington, Mass. retail consulting firm. ‘This way, you don't need to advertise to the whole local market just to get these shoppers back in the store.’”

Read the rest of my advice, as well that of other experts, here at CNNMoney.com.

Revisiting (and Fixing) the Generic Email Address Issue

Mike Buckley over at Tacony Corporation's Mine Your Own Business blog picked up on my recent entry about the glut of businesses using generic email addresses. In the short time since my original post ran, I've received quite a few communications from retailers asking how to go about getting a unique domain and/or email address for their business. Mike actually offers quite a few good points, and I encourage anybody who's interested to check out his blog entry on the subject. Getting a unique email address is really not as difficult (or expensive) as it may seem. One reader even reminded me that local schools and continuing education efforts can be a great resource, as they often provide gratis set-up of domain, website, and email services for individuals and businesses as a real-world experience for their students. All you need to pay for is the domain registration fee.

On a sadly ironic note, in the days since I posted that entry I saw perhaps the most graphic example of this communication faux pas. As prominently displayed in its advertisement in a local newspaper, a new business had gone through the trouble of getting a vanity phone number (you know the type - 555-LEAK for a plumber, 555-BABY for a maternity store, etc.), and they even had the city officially change the name of the street where they're located to that of the business. And their website was www.theirbusinessname.com. But their email address? You guessed it. businessname@aol.com!

What Does Your Email Address Say About You?

My typical Friday morning routine involves breakfast at a great little spot down the road.  The kind of place that only serves breakfast and lunch, where the waitresses call you Hon and know your regular order by heart.  I usually read the weekly newspaper while I eat, but the last time I went there was no weekly paper to be had.  They hadn't published that week due to staff vacation.  Okay, fair enough.

So I found myself reading the paper placemat.  In addition to a few word games to occupy little ones the placemat features a border of advertisements for local businesses.  Usually these ads are just reprints of business cards, and there's nothing wrong with that.

As I looked at the different ads I took note of how many businesses have websites and email addresses. No website?  Okay, that's forgivable for some businesses.  No email?  Again, somewhat allowable, but it's becoming less excusable.  Let your customer contact you in as many was as possible, and in the way they want.  Most businesses wouldn't dream of placing an ad without their phone number in it.

What I found most confounding is the number of businesses who have a website with their own domain name, but their email uses a generic service provider.  For example, a local pet groomer might display www.petgroomer.com in their ad, but their email address is jdoe@verizon.net.  Or jdoe@aol.com.  Or jdoe@hotmail.net.  Some folks would use petgroomer@whatevertheirprovideris.com, and that's a little better.

My questions is: why not use jdoe@petgroomer.com?  Or info@petgroomer.com?  Or anything@petgroomer.com?  I actually saw an ad for a local company that builds websites, and even they were using a generic email address!  This tells me these businesses are either using the free webspace their internet provider includes or they didn't want to spend a few bucks to have somebody set up an email account using their own domain name.  Either way it makes one question how serious these businesses are about making it easy for their customers to reach them.

Marketing Tips for the Financially Challenged

Fortune Small Business recently asked us what a retailer with a limited budget could do to attract more customers. It’s one thing to get customers into the store but after that you need to keep them coming back. It is vital that retailers get the contact information of as many customers as they can.

"If you don't get your customers' contact information, you'll have to talk to the entire community to talk to them again," Fleener says. "It's always more effective to market to the person you know."

Okay, quoting myself - that’s strange . Check out more of our tips, along with suggestions from other retail experts, at How to bring more customers to your store on CNNMoney.com.

Let it Snow (Money)

A few months ago Doug wrote about a promotion being run by Boston-area retailer Jordan's Furniture which involved a full refund of purchases customers made within a specific timeframe if the Boston Red Sox won the World Series.  Well, we all know what happened with the Sox, and evidently Jordan's has cashed in their insurance policy to make good on their promise.  Everyone wins!

Now, a local jewelry store has implemented a similar promotion.  Springer's Jewelers (with three locations in Maine and New Hampshire) has decreed that if more than six inches of snow falls on Christmas Day at their Portsmouth, NH location (smart move, considering that location probably gets less snowfall than the Maine stores), any and all purchases made and paid in full between November 23rd and December 8th will be refunded, assuming the purchaser has followed the myriad rules and regulations that dictate the promotion.

This type of "conditional rebate" promotion is becoming more common among specialty retailers.  Do a Google search for "conditional rebates" and look at the growing number of companies that will sell a retailer insurance to cover the off-chance they have to pay out. It's promotions like these that let specialty retailers differentiate themselves from their Big Box competitors, and, at the very least, encourage visits by new customers.

Just like with Jordan's, Springer's is a specialty retailer with limited locations, doing something to not only drum up business and make sales, but to create a buzz.  Jewelry stores, like furniture stores, are plentiful to the point of over-saturating some markets.  This promotion makes Springer's stand out, gets people talking about them, and drives traffic into the stores.  I'm sure a lot of shoppers who hadn't considered buying their loved ones a piece of fine jewelry or a watch for the holidays will now consider spending a few bucks there, in the off chance Jack Frost delivers on December 25th.

Which is Worse...

We here at the Red Friday Coalition recently received a report from a casualty of a Big Box retailer's November-long tactics to get customers into their stores. It seems that this potential customer found the Big Box's offer of a new High-Definition DVD player too good to pass up. Imagine, a $300 next-generation movie machine for only $199, plus two free movies in the box, three more free movies (customer's choice) at check-out, and five more free movies by mail-in rebate! Even his wife was willing to let him spend the money.

Unfortunately, there was a higher price to be paid in the form of indifferent, poorly prepared and trained store employees. The first challenge was to find the product. Despite there being at least a dozen associates in the electronics department, they all looked, moved, and acted as if they were well-occupied with activities more important than selling. When the customer finally had the chance to inquire about the DVD player, one associate pointed him to a display that turned up empty. Another confidently stated that the store didn't carry that model. The third took the time to find the product and confirm the sale price, but then disappeared after handing the box to the customer and instructing him to pay at the register.

The second challenge was to confirm the offer of three free DVDs. Evidently nobody in the store was aware of the offer despite the ad appearing in that Sunday's circular. The cashier had no knowledge of it, so she called a supervisor. The supervisor was equally flummoxed, and called an associate from the electronics department. The associate called the department supervisor, who finally looked at the circular sitting next to cash register and confirmed the deal.

Nearly ninety minutes after entering the store, the intrepid customer walked out with his new high definition DVD player and free movies. He also left with a new understanding of the old line (often attributed to Jimmy Buffett): "Which is worse, ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care."

A Simple Loyalty Program with a Simple Lesson

Loyalty Lab’s David Rosen has a great example on the Loyalty Dogs Blog of a simple but effective loyalty program for independent retailers. Loyalty Lab is one of the best at creating loyalty programs and other customer management strategies for national retailers.

In the post Keeping It Simple David writes that, “A simple program that achieves a very focused goal is sometimes the best solution for smaller retailers.” I couldn't agree more. Over complicating a loyalty program creates a burden on the staff and the customer alike. Those programs almost always die out.

But this is great advice beyond just loyalty and marketing programs for small retailers. We retailers create a lot of complicated programs for some very unfocused goals. I'd have to admit I've done a few myself.

Keep it simple is great advice no matter what the strategy is or the size of the store.

Welcome Email Opportunities

An article from DM News reports how welcome e-mails are one of the most overlooked sales tools out there for retailers

According to a new report from on-demand business services firm Premiere Global Services and the Email Experience Council only 72% of major online retailers regularly use welcome e-mails.

I would have to think that number is considerably lowers if the customer gives their email at a brick and mortar store. Whether a customer gives their email at time of purchase or to be just added to a mailing list, a welcome email is a great way to establish the relationship and drive customers back into the store.

Bath and Body Works is a great example of what a retailer can do with the right strategy. They began collecting email addresses from customers last January and they now have over 10 million addresses.  In just eight months!  "By November we'll have the largest e-mail file in all of specialty retail," said Brian Beitler, vice president of customer marketing for Bath and Body Works, at a presentation during eTail 2007. 

They value each customer's email address at $18 each.  Multiply the 10 million times $18 and that's a whole lot of incremental sales. Well, if the numbers are correct. To entice customers to give their electronic addresses, Bath and Body Works offers free tubes of lip gloss.  However, they don't give it to the customer in the store. 

The lip gloss offer comes to the customer via email that they have to go back to the store to redeem. And because the store employees see the additional traffic and sales with the coupons they continue to sign people up at a high rate. Awesome.