Marketing & Sales

They don’t come in as frequently. Traffic falls. Even though you have a great sales staff, the pressure on the business increases— inventory gets out of date, vendors start to ask for payment, it’s harder to get in new products in a timely manner and in enough quantity to support demand, and customers don’t find what they’re looking for. Your business faces even more financial pressure. Cash is short.

Repeat.

This is a death spiral. The way out is to invest in getting customers in.

So, do you have a plan to make money this year? Does your plan include marketing?

MARKETING PLANNING

Marketing researcher and author Brian Norris defines marketing as a four-step process:

• Analyze and define a qualified universe of potential users or buyers.

• Capture the attention of the intended buyers.

• Make a systematic effort to get the prospects to accept the offer promoted through the marketing effort.

• Convert prospective buyers into actual buyers and retain existing customers through relationship-building, nurturing, benefit enhancements, and improved products and services.

So, who are your customers—current or planned? Where are they? How do you plan to reach them?

• Do you capture basic information— name, address, e-mail, and contact preference?

• How do you plan to get their attention? What will work—and why?

• What systems, plans, and processes are in place to be sure you touch them regularly in a meaningful way?

PLANNING PROCESS

We ask our stores to create annual marketing plans based on their annual revenue plan.

It includes monthly touches via various vehicles targeted at key customers and cost estimates based on the revenue plan so the marketing plan is consistent with and supports the business plan.

It’s not too late for you to do the same. In fact, at an individual store level you could do a rolling six-month plan—as long as you maintain the discipline to spend a percentage of your planned annual revenues on marketing. When your revenue plan changes, so should your supporting marketing plan; when your marketing programs aren’t working, you should try something different.

Here are the basics:

Shoot for one touch/month. You can do

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this through a combination of printed pieces, such as:

• Catalogs—these are expensive vehicles but can leave an important impression. Because they require you inventory the product in the catalog, there are hidden costs.

• Fliers—these can be a very effective mass-market or special-program vehicle. We used them for “Narnia” promotions this past Christmas, and many stores use them as newspaper inserts when their newspaper market will support it.

• Postcards—these are particularly effective for targeted programs like We Miss You, special sales of gift lines, etc.

As your e-mail database gets more complete, you can integrate e-mail marketing into your monthly touches. Just as some people learn best through hearing and others through seeing, some of your customers will respond to e-mail and others will need the physical touch of a printed piece. This is something you’ll need to track and manage.

Leverage e-mail. Remember my Kohl’s example? The company didn’t send a postcard three times in five days; it sent e-mail. Postcards cost money and are hard to time properly given the vagaries of the U.S. Postal Service, so you can’t move as quickly.

On the other hand, you can design an e-mail once and send it to one person or 100,000. They get it a minute after you send it, and your design cost is leveraged over all the recipients. You can easily sign up for an Internet-based e-mailing service that enables you to send e-mail easily to targeted lists at a very reasonable cost.

Position yourself to take advantage of this efficient vehicle as it evolves and matures.

Leverage vendors. Your vendors allocate money to support their featured products. Are you getting your fair share of this money and using it to drive traffic and sales? It can help complement the monies you’ve allocated from your business plan and stretch your dollars.

Sometimes vendor money is available as co-op money for advertising or merchandising, sometimes as a manager’s special product or a show special. Sometimes it’s available to support a mailing or the development of a postcard or e-mail for distribution to your customers.

The vendor challenge in our industry is fairly easily demonstrated in the following example. With one phone call, a vendor can place a product at a very reasonable cost on the front table of every Barnes & Noble or every Borders nationwide with a high level of consistency in the execution (i.e., the book makes it onto the front table as prom-

ised). In the Christian Retail Channel, this requires many phone calls, money paid at various levels, and doesn’t result in complete or consistent execution.

Looked at another way, vendors have money available to support effective execution of programs to be used on things like e-mail graphics, merchandising materials, postcards, and more—if you’re willing and able to work with them and bring in the product to sell-through.

Our vendors make our market; the products they’re highlighting are the ones they’re behind and supporting.

WHY MARKET?

Put simply, no business is so well-established and well-known that it doesn’t need to reach out to its customers. And no business is so small or cash-strapped that it can afford to ignore marketing.

No matter what kind of store you have— large, midsize, or small—and where it’s located—urban, suburban, or rural—you face a mountain of competition that requires you to market effectively, consistently, and with bedrock commitment to the process. It isn’t just the Wal-Mart or Costco down the road that’s competing for your customers’ time, dollars, and loyalty. Scheduling pressures, family concerns, leisure activities, business requirements, health issues, and more all affect consumers’ focus. If you aren’t consistently marketing your store to them, you won’t be top of mind.

CBA just completed a new Professional Christian Retailer Certification module on marketing you’ll find helpful in developing marketing strategies. The program covers evangelism and brand marketing, the importance of customer relationship management (CRM), how to discern the marketing approaches that work best for you in a given situation, and more. Go to www.cbaonline. org and click on “PCR Certification Program” to learn more. AR

Scott Macdonald is president of Lemstone, a Christian-store franchiser and service provider to churches with bookstores. He has more than 25 years of sales, marketing, and management experience with IBM and various software companies. Macdonald’s sales and marketing column appears bimonthly in ASPIRINGRETAIL.

Questions for Scott Macdonald? Please e-mail publications@cbaonline.org.

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