January.

For retailers, it’s cold not just outside, but indoors when it comes to moving the stock off the shelves. After the Christmas-buying sprees, most shoppers are back at home cooling their heels while retailers try to entice them back out to buy. The one stand-by many local store owners turn to is holding big sales, and they’re finding that in a tough economy it’s necessary to offer deeper and deeper discounts to get folks back and willing to buy. It’s great to have warm bodies in your store again, but it’s not great if your sale ends up making you no profit due to all that deep discounting.

So what’s the method of success that allows you to get the customers back and still make a profit? Is there a way to get both?

There are several methods you can employ to attract business and still maintain a profit margin. See which one of these (or more than one) will work best in your restaurant, retail store, or service-based business and give it a go.

Know Your Bottom Line, and Sell Just Above

This is the method to use with that inventory that needs to move out the door, not with that great new batch of products that just came in for Spring. Calculate your bottom dollar on these items: how low can you go and still make something, even if it’s a small something? Then make your strategy to sell many of these items, each bringing in that small amount of profit, and you’ll end up with a good amount of profit when all is said and done. Plus you’ll have cleared your store of excess, aging inventory.

Create a Loss-Leader

Grocery stores use the loss-leader method just about every week; their circulars advertise a deal that’s “too good to pass up” for their shoppers. In many cases, the grocery stores are taking a loss on this item, but they know that just getting the customers in the store is worth that small loss. How many times have you gone to the grocery store and bought just one item? Most of us don’t shop for groceries that way, and why not? Because in the process of locating and purchasing the loss-leader item, we’re unable to ignore the displays of other great merchandise – some also discounted, some not – that we have to walk past and around to find our goal. Use the same strategy in your store; advertise a huge discount on a popular item, set up a great display for it, and put it smack in the middle of many other great displays with enticing offers of their own.

Offer Package Deals

Another angle on the loss-leader strategy is to offer package deals and discounts; this method allows you to package your items of choice together, being sure that one of them is a cheaper item for you to purchase, which gives you greater wiggle room for a discount. You can offer a greater discount on a combined package, knowing that your combined investment in all the package items is still well below the discounted package price. You might even use a “buy one of these, get one of these other things” free method to sell a costlier item without a discount while taking the “loss” on your cheaper, freebie item. It’s the same method beauty product companies’ use when they offer a “special gift” with a purchase.

Add Value that Doesn’t Cost You Cash

What can you offer your customers that doesn’t come with any cash cost to you? Look beyond the basic inventory, and think about subscriptions, memberships, special discount or dining clubs, consultations, or other perks that offer a huge incentive for customers thinking about a purchase. The value is still there for the customer, who would otherwise have to pay to get the subscription or membership or consultation; but the value-added item isn’t costing you cash that you can’t afford to lose. Use these value-added items to upsell; offer them as freebies or part of a package, which allows you to give your customers an increased value for the same cost without decreasing your profit margin.

What method sounds best for your business?

Image by Alan Cleaver2000.

Lately, we’ve pinpointed that our search traffic to this blog is heavily weighted towards posts like this holiday-focused one that hands out retail promotion ideas with retail window display ideas coming in a close second. A quick Google search – followed by disbelief and more digging – showed that there simply isn’t a wealth of retail promotion and window display ideas floating around on the web. So, while we’ve got lots of resources in store for you in this new year, I am boldly stealing both inspiration and format from Chris Brogan’s newly launched weekly blog topics program. You’ve got a small business – and you’d like to keep the customers buying. Want some new ideas?

What’s the plan?

I’ll send weekly e-mails with FIVE OR MORE PROMOTION IDEAS for you to implement in your small business or store. In addition, I’ll be including quite a few visual and window display ideas each month as well as some general marketing strategy and sales advice.

Click to learn more about how to get an endless supply of promotional ideas for your small business!

What Types of Ideas?

The ideas will be widely flexible to work in a variety of scenarios – flower shops, coffee shops, clothes boutiques, grocery, restaurants and gift stores. And everything in between. We’ll be doing seasonal ideas a few weeks ahead of the season or date to allow for advanced planning. The ideas will go far beyond discounting and include many ideas to sell at full price, to inspire repeat purchases and to catch new customers. Your creative juices will get a weekly fix – and your store will never look more inspiring to customers!

It’s not free. It’s $27 a month. Think of it as a magazine subscription. Is it for everyone? Definitely not. Is it for someone who wants to keep their business booming and looking fresh and interesting year-round? Is it for someone who could use the creative encouragement and steady dose of fresh ideas? Yep, that’s who this will serve best.

Each mail comes with a lot more than FIVE OR MORE RETAIL PROMOTION IDEAS. It comes with ideas about how to improve your business, ideas on sales, marketing and customer service in general, retail window display and merchandise display ideas as well as lots and lots of modification ideas as well. The first message was just over 900 words long. The second message is nearly 1000. They’ll stay pretty meaty, because that’s what I’m known for – and I always want you to feel like you got far more than value than you paid and always leave with something you feel you can accomplish immediately.

Want to learn more? Check out the weekly Revolutionary Promotion Ideas email.

As we explained in a previous article , the key to locally owned businesses surviving and thriving in a competitive, online marketplace and tight economy is to find and dominate a niche of their own.

Small businesses can’t compete with the advertising dollars and inventory numbers of huge national chains; they can establish themselves by finding a specialty and being the best in it.

You Can’t Please All the People

The toughest part of becoming a successful niche business is realizing that you simply won’t be able to make everybody happy. If you choose to specialize your small business in science fiction, for example, then you won’t gain a following of classic literature lovers. But you will gain science fiction fans. If you choose to specialize your locally owned restaurant in a specific type of cuisine, perhaps Italian, then you’ll lose the people who don’t like pasta. But you’ll have fervent and loyal customers in the pasta lovers.

The Trade Off

For a business to succeed in a specialty or niche, it has to make a trade-off. You trade the complacent, so-so, average customers for the fervent, dedicated, enthusiastic ones. Sounds like a good trade, right? It is, because a few enthusiastic customers will give you more in lifetime value and passionate referrals to their peers than many average customers.

Finding Your Enthusiastic Fans

The first step to identifying those customers you want to find and keep for the life of your business is to clearly define your specialty. What are you offering that’s different, better, or more unique than your competitors? Once you’ve identified your own niche – your special offering – you’re in the right position to find the people who will be interested in what you have to offer.

The second step is just a bit of simple brainstorming: who is going to be the most interested and the most enthusiastic about your specialty, your niche? Don’t focus on the people who might be interested. Focus on the people who will love what you offer. If you’re selling science fiction books, you need to be at the sci-fi gatherings, clubs, and conferences, and partnering up with the local theater when the next sci-fi movie opens. Market yourself to the most passionate people in the particular niche; they, in turn, will market you to the people they know. When you find and convert enthusiastic customers, they do the advertising for you.

Places to Look for your Niche Customers

• Specialized online communities and groups
• Local clubs and meetings
• Conferences
• Meet-up groups
• Fan clubs
• Organizations and associations
• Trade shows

Note: If your “niche” is too big to define and go find in groups like these… then your “niche” isn’t a niche at all – and you need to work harder to find your small business’ niche – a truly narrow scope or specialty that will create a winning formula for your business in a difficult economic time.

Where would your ideal customers hang out? Where do they gather? That’s where you need to be.

Image by Rachel Voorhees.

One easy way locally owned business can get themselves on the map (literally) is by soliciting customer reviews for your business on geographically based review sites. Review sites are usually very large conglomerates with individual mini-sites for each geographic location. Often they’re divided by state or region, and then subdivided by city or township within that region. The bottom line in this uber-web-based world in which we live is simply this: If your business can’t be found through a quick web search – you’re business is going to die.

Use Geo-Based Review Sites to Grow Your Business

What’s great about these websites is that they allow brand-new customers to find you – and want to try your business out – when they may have known nothing about you before. These new customers are online searching for your type of business in your area; if you’ve set up your profile and garnered some reviews on any of these sites, they’re likely to run across your business. Suddenly they not only know you exist, what you do, and where you’re located, they also get to find out what your customers think about you by reading the reviews.

So how do you get into this action? It’s pretty simple.

Step 1: Focus on the major review sites.

The most important local review site is the home of the “red pin” – Google Places, formerly known as Google Local. Other review sites include the following:

• Yelp.com
• Local.Yahoo.com
• CitySearch.com
• InsiderPages.com
• CitysBest.com

There are more, but if you get set up on at least a few of these major websites, your information will get picked up by the other sites as well.

Step 2: “Claim” your business and/or set up your profile.

Once you’re at the website, search for your business. You may find it already listed; if so, you’ll see an option to claim the business or add updated information. Fill in all the information you can: physical address, phone number, email address, Internet information (email, website, blog, Facebook, Twitter), store hours, specialties, owner’s name, history. Some sites will give you more room than others. Some will also allow you to post pictures; I highly recommend that you post a few photos of the outside of the store, inside of the store and a sampling of available products.

If you don’t find your business, you’ll simply have to start the profile or information from scratch. Follow the same principle as above by including as much information as possible on each site. Remember, the more information you have, the more you will show up in search results and the easier it will be for people to find you.

Step 3: Ask for reviews.

The most important part of a business profile on one of these review sites is, of course, the customer reviews. So start asking for reviews. When your best customers come in to your business, make it a point to personally ask them to go online and submit a brief review to ONE of the review sites. Don’t ask them to submit reviews to more than one; that’s simply too much and too complicated, and most customers (even the ones who love you) won’t respond. All you have to do is say something like, “We’ve just set up our profile at CitySearch.com, and we’re trying to get some reviews up. If you have a moment when you get home, would you mind sharing about your experiences here? You’re one of our best customers, and we’d really appreciate new customers getting a chance to hear from you.”

Then hand each customer a card with the information printed on it, so they won’t forget when they get back home.

That’s it! The whole process is simple and can really make a huge difference in helping new customers find you, so get it started now and see what results you’re getting in a few months.

Image: dbking.

A customer loyalty program, sometimes known as a rewards program, gives your small business an easy way to reward your customers for doing what you want them to do: coming back and giving you repeat business. You already have a base of loyal customers, and creating a customer loyalty program helps you strengthen those relationships. For newer customers, or those who are still deciding how much they like you, a loyalty program can be just the right incentive to keep you front of mind and keep them coming back to your brick-and-mortar store.

Need convincing that customer loyalty is critical to your business? Try reading these posts on customer loyalty and the value of customer retention.

Elements of a Customer Loyalty Program

Implementing a customer loyalty program is a pretty simple matter. You need to make it easy for people to sign up, preferably in several ways: a short form to fill out when they’re shopping or checking out in the store, an easy form to fill out online via your Facebook page, blog, and/or website. (You can do it in conjunction with growing your e-mail list – we explain step by step how to do this here.) Once people sign up, you need to have a system for keeping track of those in your loyalty program; you want a single place with all the information on each customer who has opted in. That way, when you do special mailings or offers, you have your mailing list right there.

The third element of a successful customer loyalty program is the rewards that customers can “earn” by continuing to give you repeat business. Rewards programs can be simple, and are usually very low cost to the business, but they need to be measurable and tangible. Your customers need a tangible reason to opt in to the loyalty program, and you need a measurable way to see what you’re investing in the loyalty program and what kind of return you’re getting on it.

Types of Customer Loyalty Programs

Points system: this is what airlines and credit card companies use. In simplest terms, a point is awarded for every dollar spent, though the ratio may vary (1 point for every 1.50 dollars, for example). When a customer accrues a certain number of points, they can be redeemed for a product or service offered by the company or, often, by a partner company.

For small businesses: this system is simple in theory but can get a little complex to keep track of without an electronic system. Be sure you have an accurate way to track the points earned by your customers and to track when those points are used for rewards. You’ll also need to set up a rewards scale with specific prizes or options for certain amounts of points.

Discount system: many retail businesses use a discount system for loyalty programs. This works well for both retail shops and restaurants. For every purchase or for every dollar amount spent (could be $10 or $20 or whatever level you choose to set), the customer receives a credit. Once the customer has earned a certain number of credits, he gets a discount, perhaps a dollar amount or percent amount off on their next purchase.

For small businesses: this system is easy to implement and track. Generally, businesses use a punch card type system and customers simply show their card when it is full to receive their discount. Another bonus of this system is that the reward actually brings in even more business.

Freebie system: similar to the discount system, the freebie system is often used by cafes and coffee shops. When a customer makes a sufficient number of purchases or spends X amount of dollars, she gets a freebie. A coffee shop might offer one free coffee drink for every ten cups of coffee purchased, or a free pound of coffee for every ten pounds of coffee purchased.

For small businesses: this system is also easy to implement and track using a punch card set-up, and customers love the idea of getting something for free. It’s also easy for small businesses to track the amount of money they’ll invest for each customer, and it’s usually minimal. Retail shops can always offer freebies too, and it’s a good way to get rid of excess inventory.

Image by Easa Shamih.

Collecting customer information is one of the best forms of marketing you have. It gives you the ability to get in touch with people who have already been to your brick-and-mortar store, who have experienced your services or products, who have, essentially, already begun building a relationship with you. And best of all? It’s free. You may pay out a little bit if you send postcards or a paper newsletter or flyer, but the cost is minimal compared to paying for a radio or newspaper ad. And if you start moving your customer interactions online, you can use this customer information to stay in contact with your customers and prospect list via email without any postage or printing cost. (More on e-mail marketing ideas.)

So what stops local business owners from regularly collecting customer information?

• They don’t think about it.
• They don’t want to be pushy.
• They don’t know how.

Start Thinking About It
If I offered you a way to get targeted marketing messages to your best customers for free, wouldn’t you be interested? That’s what collecting customer information is all about it. “Not thinking about it” is just a poor excuse, so here’s your free reminder to start thinking about and take advantage of a great marketing strategy. You don’t have to be pushy to ask if people want to be on your Preferred Customer List. You just ask, politely, and give them a quick and easy way to sign up. If you get a “No” in response, you don’t have to push it.

How to Collect the Information

• Step 1: Make it quick and easy.

Have a simple form handy, make lots and lots of copies, and leave it out in your retail space. Don’t make the form long; in fact, the shorter the better. Ask for the customer’s name, email address, and (perhaps) phone number or mailing address. The name and email address are the essentials, and you can just stick with those and get great results.

• Step 2: Make it beneficial for the customer.

Give your list a name – the Preferred Customer List or something along those lines – and give customers a clear, concise reason why they should join it. “For exclusive offers.” “For special discounts.” “For members-only events.”

• Step 3: Train your employees.

Create a short script and train every single employee to go through that script. It can be very short, and very simple: “Sir or Ma’am, would you like to sign up for our Preferred Customer List? We just need your email address, and you’ll get access to exclusive offers just for our Preferred Customers.” Teach your employees to have the form and a pen ready, and hold it out to the customer while they are asking the question. This small physical gesture makes it almost instinctive for the customer to reach forward. And no, employees shouldn’t be pushy either. If a customer declines, all that is needed is a polite response: “Well, maybe next time! Thanks for shopping with us!”

• Step 4: Be an Example.

Let your employees see you going through that script whenever you ring out a customer, answer a question, or call a customer about a special order. The script can easily be followed over the phone; you or your employee will just need to take the information verbally and write it down.

• Step 5: Be True to Your Word

If you’ve offered exclusive deals or special events, follow through. A weekly email is best, but at the least follow up with a monthly email offering a special deal, coupon, or event. Make sure the folks on your mailing list understand that it’s exclusive; that’s the value for them.

• Step 6: Get Feedback

Over time, your list will grow and you’ll have customers you get to know well. Use your list to get feedback on everything from your products to your store appearance to the kind of deals or events they would really like to see. Your customer list can quickly become a very valuable, informal method of market research; and the market is your ideal customer, so you know the information is good. (Here is a cool idea on WHAT to send to your e-mail list once you create it.)

The holidays are the perfect time to start collecting customer information, so get to it. Create that form and start asking. You’ll have a great way to follow up with all those new customers you get shopping for holiday specials.

Image by bulliver.

Want to add a little holiday cheer to your 2010 holiday marketing? Try these 10 holiday marketing ideas to pump up the sales volume and spread a little holiday cheer all at the same time!

1. Customize your website and/or Facebook page with holiday decorations. It’s fairly easy to make (or find) a holiday graphic that you can customize for your business Facebook page or website, and it creates a festive spirit right there on the Internet, which is where more and more sales are happening (read this article to learn how long it takes for online marketing efforts to “move the needle”). So don’t save the holiday decor just for the brick-and-mortar storefront. Spread the spirit to your online space as well.

2. Have a holiday photo contest. You can theme the contest to fit in with your business, your products, and your services, or you can just keep it generic. Have people submit their photos via your Facebook page and simply “tag” your business page in the photo. You can have a contest for the “Cutest Family Christmas Picture” or “Best Santa Impersonator Photo” or anything holiday-themed. Play it up both in your store and online marketing, and provide a great prize for the winner.

3. Give holiday favors away with every purchase. Think simple and cheap here. A holiday favor can be very inexpensive, something as simple as pen with your logo on it, a holiday pin or sticker, or a individually wrapped chocolate. For the investment of a few pennies per purchase, you get to make a great impression with every customer who makes a purchase.

4. Offer holiday treats throughout the Christmas shopping season. Keep a fresh pot of coffee, a big urn of apple cider, and some holiday cookies out on a table, as a complimentary holiday treat for all your customers. It doesn’t matter if you’re a retail gift shop, an office, or a service-based business; sweet treats are welcome anytime, anywhere. And people who know they can get a cup of hot apple cider on a chilly day will return, and linger while they sip it.

5. Create a “12 Days of Your Product” package. This great marketing idea, from SmallBizTrends.com, gives you an easy, fun, and festive way to introduce customers to more of your products and services. Put together a 12-day package, starting small and building up, and sell it as a holiday special.

6. Send a special holiday e-card to your customer email list. Send it early – well before the actual holiday – and include a special coupon or discount as your way of saying thanks to your loyal customers.

7. Have a tree-trimming day in your brick-and-mortar store. Turn up the Christmas music, hang out signs, invite the public to participate, and have lots of sweet treats handy. Offer special “tree-trimming day only” sales, specials, and discounts.

8. Participate in your community’s holiday events. Is there a parade, a bazaar, a charity fundraiser, a night of carol singing and hot cocoa? Get out there and be part of it. Sponsor something, contribute something, provide some supplies and simply take part in person. Being an active part of your community is one of the best marketing moves you can make anytime of year.

9. Give away your holiday decorations (or some of them). Invest in a big, beautiful holiday wreath or centerpiece; then announce that, at the end of the season, one lucky customer will get to take it home to use in their own decor next year! Offer every customer the chance to enter to win that beautiful decoration; make it easy with slips of paper and a decorated box to put them in. All you need to collect are names and phone numbers (or email addresses). At the end of the season, have a little party, draw and announce the winner, and make even the post-holiday work a reason for celebration.

10. Simplify the holiday gift-buying process for your customers. Offer something like free gift-wrapping, free delivery, or an exceptionally lenient return policy for purchases. Anything you can do to make this time of the year simpler and less stressful for your customers will make it more likely that they spend their money in your store, and remember you when the new year rolls around.

P.S. Here is a post from 2006 on seasonal e-mail marketing ideas that I thought you’d also like.

Image by Howard Dickins.