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newsletternewsletter 291
Retail Stress (According to Careerbuilder.com) Retail Stress (According to CareerBuilder.com) Standing shoulder to shoulder with medical doctors, firefighters and stockbrokers, working in retail sales has been identified as one of the nation's high-stress occupations. How To Advertise for Free CRE and RPE (Cash Register Express and Restaurant Pro Express) can be used to keep track of your mailing list and email list. You can use CRE or RPE to email to all of your customers. Make sure that you get the email address of all your customers and all those who enter your store. Make sure that your cashiers obtain email information. You can make a simple handout encouraging those who enter your store to give you their email addresses. Give those who give you an email address some type of significant incentive. For example, email an incentive coupon to your customer. That will insure that the email address is correct. Perhaps offer 20% off on any December purchase. Give away a free beverage, 50% off a meal, free French fries, free tie, free screw driver...whatever. Give away something significant so that you get a valid email address and you get your customer to walk back into your store. Once you have a list of customers, start sending out a weekly, biweekly, or monthly newsletter to your customers. The newsletter can be informational, or it can describe new items, or offer some significant discounts on specific items. I try not to sell anything within our pcAmerica Newsletter and make the newsletter educational. It works best for our customers. However, lots of our customers offer weekly and monthly discounts on products and get a substantial number of repeat customers coming into their stores. Free IPOD + FREE Dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steak House So, you’re using CRE and RPE to track, accumulate, and send out your emails. How do you get your customers to read your emails? You can offer all of your customers a FREE IPOD (or FREE Dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steak House). Now, let’s say you accumulated an email list of 500 customers. My best guess is that if you did indeed offer all of your customers a FREE IPOD just for coming into your store, only 50% of your customers would come in to take advantage of your offer. Or, perhaps 75% of your customers would take advantage of your offer. Your response would be far less than 100%. When you send out your emails, you are working with percentages. No matter what you say or offer, 25% or so of your recipients won’t remember seeing your email. It is quite likely that 90% of your customers will remember receiving your emails. Probably only half will actually read your email. However, most of your customers will recognize your company name and will think of your retail store or restaurant when making buying (or eating) decisions. That’s the main benefit of having some sort of periodic email plan. What you say within your newsletter depends on your personality and how you view your customers. If you own a hardware store, you may want to give your customers some fix up advice. If you own a restaurant, you may want to highlight your employees. Make your employees famous. Place their pictures inside your newsletter. Highlighting your employees make your customers feel more comfortable, and is greatly appreciated by your employees. ...and you can offer special discounts to newsletter readers. I am not sure that I would want to offer a FREE IPOD to all of your customers, but special sales and discounts always work. You want people to expect and look forward to receiving your newsletter. Even with a FREE IPOD offer, 25% of your customers won’t take advantage of your offer. Find out how people respond. Don’t be afraid to make outrageous offers. See how they work. What if you own a restaurant and offer 50% off on a meal to all of your customers who bring in your email or email coupon? You should probably indicate the 50% off applies to food, but not beverages. You should also limit the coupon to a particular day of the week or period of time. Perhaps make the coupon good through December 2008. My best guess is that if you send out 500 emails, 50 of your customers will use the 50% off offer. You need to try various offers and see how they work. You don’t want a line of customers coming into your store or restaurant with 50% off coupons. On the other hand, you don’t want to make an offer or give a discount that is so puny that no one takes advantage of it. If Tuesday is your slowest day, offer a 25% off coupon that can be used on Tuesdays only. Emails work. Sending out emails is FREE (more or less). Sending Out Emails. How To Get Started.
The cost of sending out emails is FREE; however, your internet service provider may have limits on the number of emails that you can send out for free. Constant Contact is a very popular email marketing resource that many pcAmerica customers are using. Constant Contact let’s anyone compose attractive looking emails through their professional looking email templates. You can import your email list into Constant Contact and send out all of your emails through its service. The price of the service including templates is $15 per month for up to 500 emails or $30 per month for up to 2,500 emails. It’s a great service. The price for all this exposure is far less than a newspaper ad or mailing. Try the 60 day free trial. I urge you to at least look at the Constant Contact web site at: http://www.constantcontact.com/index.jsp Another resource for sending out emails is 1and1.com. 1and1.com charges $1 per 1,000 emails. New pcAmerica Tech Support Resource pcAmerica has an updated FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) resource available at: If you aren’t currently backing up your database, take a look at the maintenance section located under FAQ. |
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