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Grow Your Business In Tough Times With Minimal Expense!
By Ken Varga | July 8, 2008
Here’s another interesting question I received from a subscriber:
How can I grow my business during these tough times at a minimal expense? We are a retail business in a 3 plus years of operation in a newly created concept which has 65 businesses inside a mall-like set-up where it is perceived by the consumer that the mall is an indoor upscale flea market. The mall does not allow garage type items to be sold. All merchandise must be new. The county laws do not allow for the store to be closed in and partitioned separately from one another. Our traffic is mostly Senior citizens.
I have a similar mall concept near me, but they do allow the merchants to have a wall between them, not necessarily a closed in area in the front where a person enters thru a door.
It’s kind of tough to separate yourself from the other merchants.
Here’s an idea for you…
Since everyone wants to belong to a special club, create a special club. Think of a catchy name for it. It could be called, “The Gold Club”, or “Customer Appreciation Club. Spend some time thinking about this. If you can’t come up with another catchy name, use one of these to start with.
You will have to offer something special to them as a member and also give them an incentive to give you their information.
You can create a flyer to hand out which explains the special club. It should include the following information:
We have created a special club, for special customers, who will have an opportunity to save 10% (or whatever you feel you can offer as a discount) during normal days. On the days when we have special Sales, we will notify you first, and offer you the sale discount before anyone else.
Please complete the enclosed form, and please accept this gift from us as a token of our appreciation.
Why are we doing this? Because you are one of our special customers, and we appreciate your patronage. You deserve preferential treatment.
You must offer something of value in order for the customer to want to give their contact information to you. This is very important. Also, make sure that one of the bits of information you gather is their email address.
Save the information you gather in a database program or in any spreadsheet program. If you don’t have a database program or don’t have the money to spend on one at this time, you can use Google’s free spreadsheet program. You can find it at: http://www.google.com/googlespreadsheets/try_out.html
For emailing your customers, there are very inexpensive contact management programs you can use. For instance, I use Constant Contact (www.constantcontact.com), which starts at $15 per month.
Depending on what you are selling, will determine how you verbalize the offer.
Another thing I found very useful when I was selling insurance to seniors, was to purchase a list of the age brackets I wanted to send an offer to from the State Department of Motor Vehicles. Let’s say you want individuals between the ages of 60 thru 70, then you can request the list of only those ages, and also by county.
Let me know how these two ideas work for you.
Topics: Attract More Clients, Grow Sales, Growing your business | No Comments »