Amazon Prime Day

Posted July 9, 2015

 

Yay!! It’s Almost Amazon Prime Day!

 

What is it you ask? It is a great opportunity to develop goodwill with your customers. Don’t miss the chance to take advantage of the cultural fanfare there will be about it.

 

What is it really? On Wednesday, July 15, Amazon is declaring their own holiday to celebrate their 20th anniversary. According to the company, Prime Day will include thousands of short “Lightning Deals.” These featured bargains will change as often as every ten minutes. In addition there will be many different “Deals of the Day.” Amazon claims that they are offering more sales on July 15 than on Black Friday only to their Prime members.

 

Some say that they are copying their biggest global rival, Alibaba, who did something similar last year with huge success. It is also an effort to gain favor with their best customers before the competition starts. Both eBay and Walmart are expected to launch similar subscription services soon.

 

Remember when Amazon was still an ugly website that just sold books? They changed and you have to also.

 

What does it mean to you? Plenty! Let’s jump on the wagon and get our piece of the pie! It comes at a great time. You certainly have sale merchandise to get rid of – right?

 

Let’s do it. Plus it means that you can get free publicity for your store! Your local media will be searching for a local angle about this. Give it to them. Just follow our step by step directions!

1. Name it – Your Store Day!
2. Send out an email declaring your store holiday and tell what you are doing. We have put a handy dandy template below that you can use to get started!
3. Emails and Facebook posts every 2 hours with special flash deals – 50% off at least and always include pictures.
4. In store add a new deal every hour – but you are only advertising the ones on all the even hours. For example, 10am advertised special, 11am instore only special, 12pm advertised special, 1pm instore only special…got it.
5. Specify that quantities are limited – so don’t worry about how many you have and just offer your wonderful sale customers another fantastic item as a substitute then.
6. Offer free shipping – or free delivery when they call in to purchase. Be sure to mention that they can call to buy the deals.
7. Schedule extra people for that day!
8. Tell us at www.facebook.com/retailmavens what the name of your day is!!
9. Send out a PR release to all the local papers because they will be looking for a local angle for this! (Remember – your press release is NOT a sale flyer – it’s giving them a local-news angle on why shopping local instead of jumping on Amazon is the way to go!)
   Send it out NOW.
   
   
   • Get in front of your computer and Google how to write a press release so that you have the format right.
   • Set your timer for 15 minutes to bang out the rough draft. We have made it easy for you and gave you tips below.
   • Walk away.
   • Come back and set your timer for 15 minutes more to smooth it out.
   • Then send it to every local paper, news station, radio station, mom’s groups, community organization, and anything else you can think of. Ask all your team and all your friends to share this with everyone they know.

Here is a sample email/post for a deal:

Subject: [Fabulous Brand They’d Recognize]’s most unbelievable [item] – you have 60 minutes to snag it at 75% off. GO! 

We’ve got THREE of these left, so swing in, hop on the site, or pick up the phone and call us at [insert your number so they don’t have to go looking for it!]. When they’re gone or the clock strikes [next hour], they’ll turn back into pumpkins and you’ll be surrounded by a group of mice with no prince, no ball, no gown, and no 75% off [item]. 

Call us for happily ever after! See you again at [time of next email]!

Here is a sample email to alert them to all of it:

Subject: Oh, no they didn’t! 

You know who they’re like, right? Amazon is just like that friend who throws himself a surprise birthday party and gives you a list of what you need to bring and where he’s registered. And, look! He’s so nice. He itemized what your portion of the catering bill will be. Sweet. 

You’ve probably heard about the Amazon Prime Day happening on the 15th. If you’re an Amazon Prime member, they’d like you to pretend it’s Black Friday and buy all their deals and crazy markdowns. If you’re not an Amazon Prime member, they hope you’ll just hang out, pressing your nose to the glass until you finally cave and join up. 

It’s okay! We know that sometimes you just need to order your toilet paper, a Kindle book, headphones, and tap shoes all at the same time and have it in 2 days. And hey, maybe one day you’ll get lucky and your tap shoes will be delivered by drone. 

BUT! 

Amazon may be cool and convenient, but it is NOT local, and it will never know who you are, remember to ask about your sister, or support your community. It just won’t. (But drones. We know! Just stick with us here.)

So this July 15^th, in between getting your headphones for 35 cents and having them pay you to take delivery on those tap shoes, swing in to [STORE NAME]. We’ve declared it 

[STORE NAME] DAY 

Even though we won’t have any drones, we WILL have a new deal every hour, HUGE discounts on our most popular brands and items, and the best part? We’re just down the road, staffed by people who LIVE HERE, TOO, and you don’t even have to wait two days to take your new [items] home. 

Stay tuned to our Facebook page [LINK THAT UP] for more info, and watch for our speed-deal emails on the 15^th – we’ll send out a few so you don’t miss the good stuff (but don’t worry – our emails will go back to their regular weekly format after we party like it was 1999 and Amazon was still an ugly website that just sold books.) 

See you on the 15^th! 

[YOUR NAME AND YOUR STORE’S NAME] 

 

To view the original post visit: http://www.retailmavens.com/amazon-prime-day/ 

10 Small Business Marketing Lessons You Need Regardless of Size

by Heidi Cohen in Small Business

 

How To Market Your Small Business With Limited Resources

Are you certain you’re taking advantage of every aspect of your marketing to get the maximum results possible given your limited resources?

 

Don’t think that this doesn’t apply to your business because it’s larger and has greater resources.

 

The reality is that the more resources you have the more complex your marketing is and the more likely it is that you’re not getting the biggest bang for your marketing buck.

 

Small businesses by their nature must ensure that every aspect of their company supports their revenue generation and growth.

 

10 Small business marketing lessons you need regardless of size

Here are the 10 small business marketing lessons I learned.

  

 

1. Take the time to get to know your customers.

Many owners jump into their business without examining and understanding their target audience.

 

Actionable Small Business Marketing Lesson: Create a marketing persona to get insights into your buyers and their purchase needs. This will save you time and money since you’ll know what your potential buyers are looking for.

 

2. Distinguish your offering from your competition.

Assess what your competitors (and close substitutes) are doing from your customers’ perspective. Then map out where there’s a gap in the offering you can fill.

 

For example, in a sea of sheep wool offerings, Bijou Basin offered yak yarn and blends. It stood out from many different types of sheep yarn.

 

By contrast, Tess Yarns provides color, color and more color. Unlike any other yarn vendor, Tess Yarns organizes their offering not by yarn size or type, but by color.

 

Actionable Small Business Marketing Lesson: Stake out an unserved or underserved segment in your market. Before you start, assess the size of your potential audience to ensure it’s big enough for you to attract sufficient prospects (Bear in mind that you’ll only convert a very small percentage of them.)

To this end, create your small business brand to distinguish your firm.

 

3. Promote your business.

You must get the word out about your business whether it’s via word of mouth or advertising. Marketing is necessary.

 

A leather craftsman named Lanny had a booth where he sold his handmade wares such as high quality belts that he sized to order while you waited. Unfortunately, he had no signage to attract shoppers or helper to handle the sales.

 

Actionable Small Business Marketing Lesson: Publicize your firm using the best methods you can afford to effectively reach your customers. Maximize every business element and interaction by incorporating your message in contextually relevant ways.

Don’t put all of your effort into doing your business to the exclusion of letting people know that it exists. (BTW—Peter Shankman wrote a great post on this: Are You a Shoemaker’s Kid?)

 

4. Choose your location with care.

Think beyond the rental cost since location, location, location matters! Sales depend on being where your audience is.

 

On digital and social media engage and provide content where your target audience spends their time. Also, choose your URL or digital address with care for memorability and ease of spelling.

 

At one point, I worked for a well-known clothing brand whose management chose its retail locations based on the cheapest price. Lower rental prices translated to lower sales.

 

Actionable Small Business Marketing Lesson: Choose to establish your business where people normally spend their time, both in the physical and the online worlds.

 

5. Appreciate that product presentation matters.

Show your product in a setting that makes people want to own it. This is why you need to provide the 5 basic content types including styling.

 

An auctioneer sold wooden thread bobbins with remnants of thread and yarn on them for $0.50 each. These spools were thrown into a box on an out of sight lower shelf.

 

While I wondered if the yarn was knitable, two women wondered how many they could get into their suitcases. When I ask what they intended to use them for, they responded that planned to sell them for $15 a piece as a home décor item. Some markup!

 

Actionable Small Business Marketing Lesson: Invest time and resources in presenting your product to attract the optimal price. You must balance the cost of your time and resources to improve your product presentation with the net increase in price. Don’t spend more than you’ll recoup in profits.

 

6. Use packaging to distinguish your offering.

Astute yarn vendors like Miss Babs monitor which patterns are popular with knitters on Ravelry, a knitting, crocheting, and spinning social media community.

 

Based on these trends, Miss Babs creates coordinated multi-color packages of pre-measured yarn that sell at a premium for the amount of yardage. Buyers are willing to pay a bit extra rather than buying larger amounts of each color.

 

Actionable Small Business Marketing Lesson: Take advantage of current trends to create more tailored offerings for which your audience will pay more. This has broad applicability for small businesses seeking to exploit opportunities such as larger quantities and home delivery.

Not sure what your audience wants? Ask them.

 

7. Underestimate customers’ desire for quality at your peril.

All else being equal customers seek superior products. In fact, many customers will pay extra to get better products.

 

With products that include an element of craftsmanship like specially produced or dyed yarn, customers choose to pay more and perceive the investment to be worth it. As a result, you make higher margins.

 

For example, no knitter wants to invest time in making an item only to have the color bleed onto their hands and clothes.

 

Actionable Small Business Marketing Lesson: Provide customers with the best quality product you can afford to keep them coming back for more.

At the Sheep and Wool Festival, knitters rush to shop at the top quality vendors and wait in long lines to purchase.

 

8. Low price always attracts buyers.

There were several examples of vendors offering bargain basement prices for odd lots of mass produced yarn. They continually attracted lines of buyers.

 

Understand that once you start competing on price, it’s a slippery slope that only leads in one direction (and that’s down.)

 

Actionable Small Business Marketing Lesson: Leverage opportunities to provide more custom, quality products where you can charge a higher price.

Have a sales bin or rack where you offer older or last season’s product at a greatly discounted price. It’s a great way to move excess inventory for your cost.

 

9. Build personal relationships.

There’s truth to the adage: people buy from people.

 

I bought a hank of fine white lace wool from Wales to make a wedding shawl because Polly, the owner, and I spent time talking about her country. She then showed me the difference in the various weights of yarn and how it knit up into shawls. I was sold.

 

Actionable Small Business Marketing Lesson: Invest your time in interacting and engaging with your prospects and customers. It will come back to you in repeat business and word of mouth reviews.

 

10. Don’t do everything yourself.

Most business owners and executives need help, especially in today’s world of vanishing support staff. Consider the value of your time and lost business if you do everything yourself. You’ll be like the leather craftsman mentioned above.

 

Actionable Small Business Marketing Lesson: Determine what tasks you can give to someone else. If you don’t have the resources to invest in hiring people, get creative about how you pay and use your time.

 

Determine if there’s some way you can exchange services or use your time to create more sales. Still need help, try your family and friends.

 

 

The bottom line: Check every element of your marketing to ensure that it’s pulling its weight in terms of yielding the highest return possible. Use these 10 small business marketing tips as a checklist.

 

What other small business marketing lessons are needed regardless of size

 

To view the original article please visit: http://heidicohen.com/small-business-marketing-lessons-you-need/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed&utm_reader=feedly

Combating Internet Pricing - A Survival Guide

Many retailers today worry about the effect of the internet on their brick-and-mortar business.  Many feel that customers will buy from the internet long before they buy from the store, mostly because of pricing and convenience.  This has been made worse by the practice of “showrooming” which happens when customers come to the store, look at a product they want, note the UPC or vendor’s style number, and then go online and find it for less than what you offer.

In fact, one of the larger online retailers who shall remain nameless became famous last year for offering a 5 percent discount to customers if they went into a local store, scanned the UPC code and bought the product online.  That was a brutally competitive move.

So how do you survive while such tactics are practiced?  What makes customers willing to buy in your store instead of buying online?  Here are some tips that we have seen work, from retail stores that are successfully beating the online merchants.

Shopping is STILL fun!  Through all the years that I have been in retail, the death of the brick-and-mortar store has been announced several times.  I remember when the catalogue business grew substantially, and there was great concern that no one would go to the stores anymore.  That has never happened, and even though it can be great to shop online, it will never compete with the social   Customers still love to go to the store, to feel the merchandise, to interact with friends and store associates, and enjoy the entire experience.  You don’t get that when you are all alone in your room.  So the first thing I would recommend is to make sure that your store is a fun place to shop.  Remember, when you open the doors, it’s “retail theater” and the party should be going on right then.  The more fun it is to visit your store, the more the customer relates to and has a great experience with your staff, the more they will visit and the more they will buy.  Keep it fun by having lots of great events, cool contests, and make your store the ‘place to be.’ 
interaction and fun of shopping at a retail store.

On top of that, make sure your sales people are offering incredible customer service.  Make sure they understand the basics of selling, of caring for and offering help to your customers.  The better the customer service, the more likely the customer will feel compelled to buy from you, right there on the spot, rather than waiting for an internet company to ship them.

Better Merchandising  Along the same lines, one of the things that helps defeat showrooming is to have great merchandising that makes the product even more desirable.  If your merchandising shows the product well, you can create instant demand for it.  And the best part about instant demand is that customers want that product now, not 2-4 weeks from now.  Entice your customers with great displays that show off the product, show how it is used, how much fun it is to have, and your customer is more likely to buy it right then and there.

The Best of The Best  Remember, one of the reasons that people go to boutiques (on top of great service) is that those boutiques have scoured the market to find the best of the best.  Sure, if you know the brand you like, you can go to their website and buy there, but what if you want to mix and match brands (to get the best of the best) and you need to know how to combine products from different brands for one solution?  For example, as you put together the nursery, you may find a changing table from Vendor A, that works really great with shelving units from Vendor B, but the bedding from Vendors C and D.  That’s hard to do on the internet.

Prepare your argument  The main advantage that brick-and-mortar retailers have over online merchants is that the product is right there, right now.  It can be a gamble to buy the product online because it could be backordered, or they could ship incorrectly.  Dealing with returns with online merchants can be a major hassle.  So when you find someone who is in your store and they appear to be showrooming, we suggest you play offense, not defense.  Tell them the above two things, but also remind them that you are a local merchant, adding dollars to their local economy, hiring local people, and the best thing they can do for themselves and their local economy is to support local business.   At the same time, you can put the product in their hands and tell them “You can have this right now, right this second, or you can go home and order it and have it a few weeks from now.  Which is better?”  We have seen this work very effectively.  As such, it would be worthwhile to spend a little time on this topic at your next staff meeting (you do have staff meetings, right?).  Talk about these strategies and get your staff ready to combat showrooming with better service, better merchandising, and better selling.

Promote Like Crazy!  One more thing that will help defeat lowball internet pricing is to make sure that you are actively promoting your store.  This means broadcasting your message on all the important channels - Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, etc. - and in those posts you should be showing how relevant and important your store is.  Talk about how you are watching the latest trends, how you are bringing in the most relevant merchandise, how you are ensuring that your customers always have the best of the best.  Remember, nowadays with the massive explosion of online outlets for promotion, your biggest challenge is mindshare.  You want to make sure your customers think about you when you talk about the products that you sell.  The more you can outflow (including email and all the websites mentioned above), the more likely people will think of you and your store, and come in when they need those items.

Sure, lower prices online can be difficult to overcome.  Still, the internet is not that different from any other store that offers low pricing.  Somehow though, since it’s the internet (which has the apparency of being “huge”), retailers seem to think it is harder to compete against this segment.  The truth is that if you apply the basics to your business, control your inventory well, and utilize the above strategies as best you can, you’ll keep the register ringing.

About the Author:

Dan Jablons, President of Retail Smart Guys worked in retail while attending the Ohio State University, where he graduated with a B.S. in marketing and production. He has worked with retailers such as Walmart, Target, JC Penney, American Apparel, Betsey Johnson, Donna Karan, Jimmy Choo, Charles David, Diesel, Oakley, Tumi, Hollywood Bowl, and many others. As a consultant for Retail Smart Guys, Dan brings many years of retail experience to stores of any size to improve their operations, revitalize their marketing, and maximize their profits.  For more information, email Dan at dan@retailsmartguys.com or call 818-720-2585.