Tips for Retailers This Holiday Season

It’s the season we’ve all been waiting for! The Holidays.  Everyone has or is in the process of shifting gears and preparing for a successful retail holiday.  Although the numbers are looking postive, unemployment and the recession is still causing nervousness among retailers going into the busiest shopping season.

So how can retailers make sure this holiday is merry and bright? These tips might help.

• Customer service. Customer service. Customer service. – need I say more? We all know a positive or negative customer experience can be detrimental to the success of retailers. Customer service plays a HUGE role in that experience. During shopping season, even more so than any other time, customers will thank you for exceptional service. Maybe you do not offer the cheapest discounts and your competitors beat you in price (this is especially true of smaller retailers competing with large giants). In this case, the customer service level you offer can set you leaps and bounds ahead and is very crucial.

• Add Value When Discounting is not an Option - Simply lowering prices and offering steep discounts sounds simple enough, but is impossible for many people. Instead of offering 50% try adding value in different ways. For example, a hardware store is advertising power tools for women to purchase for the men in their life. Store A is offering the tool at X amount and Store B is offering the tool at a slightly higher cost, but they are giving each customer a piece of wood so their husbands can try it out right away. They are offering free wrapping and will even hold onto the tool until Christmas so that the wife can hide it from her husband.  One may be less expensive, but the other is definitely a higher value.  Try thinking about what makes people’s shopping experience more convenient and time saving, while keeping your costs down. These added details make big differences.

• Show Love to your Current Customers. If you are participating in a customer relationship strategy (which is a must if you aren’t already!) Now is the time to get them extra excited and enticed by what you are offering. People forget easily. They may have had a great experience with you, but because of lack of communication they will forget. Customers are like other relationships: you must communicate! Make your current customers feel special. Reward them for their business. Offer “exclusive promotions” and get them engaged. Gaining repeat business from someone who already trusts and knows your products is much easier than acquiring brand new customers.

Any other tips? I would love to hear them! Happy Shopping!

Word of Mouth Marketing is Built Through Customer Experiences

…And it works both ways: positively or negatively.

Advertising and the way people make purchasing decisions have shifted. This is not new information, yet there are still those clinging to the “way things used to be.” Now more than ever, companies must rely on word of mouth marketing and customer experiences to fuel their brand loyalty.  The modern consumer of today craves brand experiences instead of creative ad campaigns. Digitally and offline, customers want to connect with a brand and once they do, they will talk about it!

In the digital world, everything boils down to the experience. Consumers are interacting and communicating. Brands are being shaped by this interaction.

The statistics speak for themselves:

According to “FEED: The Razorfish Digital Brand Experience Report 2009″, 97% of consumers report having searched for a brand online, 65% of U.S. consumers report a digital experience changing their perception about a brand, 97% report that the experience influenced a purchase and 96% say they may recommend that brand to others.

Whether online or off, customer experiences will continue to be the driving force of purchase decisions and brand loyalty. Talk to you customers… This is the first step in determing the experiences they crave.

Once Your Advertising Has Done its Job, Positive Customer Experience Must Follow Through

The power of a good customer experience is hard to beat. You may have the greatest product in the world, but if your customer did not have a pleasant experience with you, they will look elsewhere.

It is easy to get caught up in the trap of focusing TOO heavily on the “glitz and glam” of advertising and not enough on what your customer actually experiences. Attention getting and effective ad campaigns only work when they are paired with a positive customer experience.  Follow through is critical! Your ads are designed to draw people into your doors, but once they are there it is no longer the responsibility of the advertising.  Now is the chance to really wow your customers and turn them into word of mouth promoters! (The ultimate goal!)

Here are a few quick tips to help you determine your customer experience strategy:

• Go above and beyond: People expect to be happy – word of mouth occurs when those expectations are blown away.
• Communicate with your customers: Invite your customers to give you feedback and take their responses seriously (even if it’s not what you want to hear!)
• Take an objective look: Being in the midst of the business, this is sometimes very difficult to do. If so, hire a team of professionals to assist you in determining what needs to change and tweaks that can be made.

I would love to hear your thoughts about customer experience. What companies are doing a superior job?

Walmart’s Project Impact: Focusing on Customer Experience

I just read an article entitled, Walmart’s Project Impact: A Move to Crush Competition by Sean Gregory.

Walmart is beginning a new strategy to increase positive customer experience in their stores. An exerpt from the article is below:

So what does a Project Impact store look like? One recent weekday afternoon I toured a brand new, 210,000-sq.-ft. Walmart in West Deptford, N.J., with Lance De La Rosa, the company’s Northeast general manager. “We’ve listened to our customers, and they want an easier shopping experience,” says De La Rosa. “We’ve brightened up the stores and opened things up to make it more navigable.” One of the most noticeable changes is that Project Impact stores reshape Action Alley, the aisles where promotional items were pulled off the shelves and prominently displayed for shoppers. Those stacks both crowded the aisles and cut off sight lines. Now, the aisles are all clear, and you can see most sections of the store from any vantage point. For example, standing on the corner intersection of the auto-care and crafts areas, you can look straight ahead and see where shoes, pet care, groceries, the pharmacy and other areas are located. And the discount price tags are still at eye level, so the value message doesn’t get lost. 

“They are like roads,” De La Rosa says proudly. “And look around, the customers are using them. We’ve already gotten feedback about the wider, more breathable aisles. Our shoppers love them.”

Read the full article here.

Lesson to retailers: Your actual products and prices are only a slice of the pie! Your customers want an experience from you! What experience are you giving them? Ask for customer feedback and be sure your experience is matching your other marketing messages.

Social Media is Killing Business

I just read an article in Ad Age Digital that inspired me to write this blog post. The article entitled “Why I Hate Social Media” by Matt Jones struck a chord with me for many reasons and I absolutely agree with his premise.

To summarize the article, Matt is explaining how marketers are taking their same, old, stale ideas and translating them into social media. He says, “Let’s get really radical and stop trying to keep marketing 1.0 thinking alive with Web 2.0 media.” He is very clear that he is not discounting the social web or the transformative power the technology holds. He claims that there are brands who are utilizing these tools for the betterment of their consumers and companies, but at the same time, there are those brands that totally miss the mark on authenticity and the proverbial “point” of social media. All this brings him to the conclusion that instead of intensifying their mundane messages, companies should focus on creating better stories. The line I love the most is “Most people are still looking for real things: experiences, connections, value, stories, emotions.”

Cartoon by Geek and Poke

That line is what I want to talk about.

It is so easy to get caught up in what’s new and right now [social media] that many other important marketing aspects are left to the wayside. How often have you heard someone complain that Comcast gives better service on Twitter than they do in “real life.” In my opinion, then what’s the point? You can create a tantalizing message via social media, but if you can’t follow through with TRUE value and experiences, then it is completely useless. By true value, I am referring to what a customer actually receives when connecting with your brand. Businesses that are in a B to C environment especially need to put effort into the experiences and authentic emotional connections with their customers. When this happens, your customers will become your biggest fan and advertise for you through their positive recommendations and word of mouth!! This is the ultimately goal.

So the question remains, how does your brand create those stories…stories that engage, connect, and create emotional impact?

I don’t think anyone says it better than Seth Godin. Seth wrote an article for ODE Magazine, entitled “How to Tell a Great Story.” I have included it below:

A great story is true. Not necessarily because it’s factual, but because it’s consistent and authentic. Consumers are too good at sniffing out inconsistencies for a marketer to get away with a story that’s just slapped on.

Great stories make a promise. They promise fun, safety or a shortcut. The promise needs to be bold and audacious. It’s either exceptional or it’s not worth listening to.

Great stories are trusted. Trust is the scarcest resource we’ve got left. No one trusts anyone. People don’t trust the beautiful women ordering vodka at the corner bar (they’re getting paid by the liquor company). People don’t trust the spokespeople on commercials (who exactly is Rula Lenska?). And they certainly don’t trust the companies that make pharmaceuticals (Vioxx, apparently, can kill you). As a result, no marketer succeeds in telling a story unless he has earned the credibility to tell that story.

Great stories are subtle. Surprisingly, the fewer details a marketer spells out, the more powerful the story becomes. Talented marketers understand that allowing people to draw their own conclusions is far more effective than announcing the punch line.

Great stories happen fast. First impressions are far more powerful than we give them credit for. Great stories don’t always need eight-page colour brochures or a face-to-face meeting. Either you are ready to listen or you aren’t.

Great stories don’t appeal to logic, but they often appeal to our senses. Pheromones aren’t a myth. People decide if they like someone after just a sniff.

Great stories are rarely aimed at everyone. Average people are good at ignoring you. Average people have too many different points of view about life and average people are by and large satisfied. If you need to water down your story to appeal to everyone, it will appeal to no one. The most effective stories match the world view of a tiny audience—and then that tiny audience spreads the story.

Great stories don’t contradict themselves. If your restaurant is in the right location but had the wrong menu, you lose. If your art gallery carries the right artists but your staff is made up of rejects from a used car lot, you lose. Consumers are clever and they’ll see through your deceit at once.

Most of all, great stories agree with our world view. The best stories don’t teach people anything new. Instead, the best stories agree with what the audience already believes and makes the members of the audience feel smart and secure when reminded how right they were in the first place.

Social Media is an excellent avenue for getting your story out, but just make sure you have the “real stuff” to back it up.