Bounce-backs: the most effective, least used tool

Your existing customers are waiting to be invited back. Sure, you've got POP and large displays in your store, and your staff is excellent at saying "Thank you. Come again."

But "come again" when? And, better yet, why?

Don't assume your customers know that you are open late on Saturdays or that you have a new flavor of cheesecake. Don't assume that they know your most recent delivery included a shipment of the New York Time's latest bestseller.

Invite them back - with a bounce-back coupon.

Bounce-backs are used to increase customer frequency in a couple of ways:

• Invite them to bring a friend (Buy 1, Get 1)
• Invite them to try a new (or latent) product (Let us cater your event - 10% off your next catering)
• Invite them to be first to receive new shipments (Harry Potter arrives Wednesday!)
• Give them a reason to visit you in the morning, in addition to their afternoon visit (1/2 off muffins - with coffee purchase - before 9am)
• Tell them about the new drive through (Now Open!)
• Or give them helpful suggestions ($5 off oil change when you rotate your tires at the same time)

Bounce-backs can be used to drive trial of new or latent products, introduce services, increase ticket average, increase party size, and increase frequency of visit. They're flexible, too. You can stop any offer at any time if you sell out or, best case, when the item catches on and you don't have to promote it any more. Use them today, stop them tomorrow.

Bounce-backs can be personal invitations to your best friends - your current customers.

7 Competencies for Every Local Store Marketer

Whenever I talk to franchise partners, we almost always slip into a discussion of tactics. This is fine because we share ideas and best practices, coming up with new ideas or making old ones better.

It's sometimes difficult, however, to get across the solution to a problem because the franchise partner isn't familiar with some of the basic competencies of retailing in general or food service in particular.

For example, a franchisee of a regional chain added a new cheesecake to his menu but was disappointed in its sales. His analysis: his customers weren't interested. Upon further review, however, it was clear that this person stuck the cheesecake into his dessert case and expected that customers would flock to it. Truth is, they didn't even know it was there.

So this example is for a new product offering, but the following seven skills are critical to making nearly any sustained marketing effort or promotion work. Use them in concert with one another and discover what multiple impressions of the same message can do for trial, frequency, and ticket average.

[Note: The following items are for food service, but the principles are essentially the same for other retailers. Well, except for catering of course.]

Merchandising
Mass sells mass. It's what grocery stores, department stores and general retailers know that food service franchisees don't really grasp. If you want to sell something, prominently display a lot of it.

Email
Advice on email newsletters abounds online, but most of them deal with getting messages read or getting them through spam filters. A local store marketer knows that she needs the message to accomplish a goal and she needs a metric to see if that goal was achieved. "Members Only" offers (for a specific day or daypart) are great at both driving trial and measuring results.

Bounce-backs
One of the most effective, and least used, arrows in your quiver. Give a morning customer a discount for the afternoon. Give an evening customer a discount for the morning. Introduce new products, promote different dayparts, encourage multiple item transactions, increase party size. Best of all, these are people who already like you. Use for frequency and ticket average.

Events
External events are opportunities to take the energy and personality of your store out to a specific target audience. Better than any ad at telling people who you are and what you do, events can be as involved as selling product off-site or as simple as giving out door prizes and coupons.

Sampling
If your product is good, put it in people's mouths. A picture is worth a thousand words, but samples are worth 10,000. Sample at an external event and include a coupon for immediate response and presto, new customers. Sample in-store with a bounce-back and ticket average and frequency of visit should rise.

Catering
If you view catering only as large sales on a path to profitability you're missing half the point. Catering jobs are also marketing opportunities. Generally you sell catering to an existing customer (rarely do they find you from the Yellow Pages), but you serve catering to many more people, many of whom have never tried your product. Take samples, hand out menus, coupon for higher tickets.

Fishbowl
If you don't have a fishbowl to collect business cards, get one. Not only do they help build your email list, but they are also introductions to key job titles (HR, training director), complementary businesses (pharm reps), and hard to get into buildings (corporate headquarters where guerrilla marketing tactics are difficult). Also use them to promote new products.

So, in our cheesecake example, the owner could have done much more:

1. Dedicated a shelf in his dessert case to the new flavor (with signage to highlight his merchandising)
2. Emailed his current customers saying "New! Raspberry Cheesecake!"
3. Provided bounce-backs to his morning customers (giving them a reason to come back at night)
4. Sampled the new flavor in-store and at external events
5. Given a couple of complimentary slices to each catering job
6. Called two names per day from his fishbowl "Hey, you've won a slice of cheesecake. Come on in." (Increasing frequency and, most likely, party size - s/he would likely bring a friend.)

All tactics work better when you use them together. It's why we call it a marketing mix.

Goodwill Ambassador

My aunt and uncle were in town visiting last week. We couldn't decide where to go, so we asked Uncle John. He didn't hesitate - Mary Mac's Tea Room.

Mary Mac's is a bit of an icon here in Atlanta. The food is traditional Southern cooking (many kitchen staff are second, even third, generation Mary Mac's) but the atmosphere leaves a little to be desired (described as an old-folks home by one reviewer). They have specialties that are just like grandma made (fried chicken), but the vegetables are sometimes also made just like grandma did them (cooked with grease for a very long time).

All in all, it's comfort food with some dishes you just crave. Great sweet tea. Homey atmosphere.

So why did a man from New Jersey hop on the chance to visit Mary Mac's (where we had taken him years before when they were in town)? It's a one word answer: Jo.

Jo is a former waitress whose body is getting to the point where waiting tables all day is too hard on the joints. She's worked at Mary Mac's, in one capacity or another, for over 20 years. She's been our waitress there many, many times. We request her every time we're there. She knows our families because we take them to MM every time they're in town.

Jo is the definition of customer service. Not that she's super polite (she calls my father-in-law a hillbilly - takes one to know one). It's that she knows what every great hostess knows: it should be a pleasure to serve the guest. Service shouldn't require forced politeness. Service is gracious and done with pleasure. That's how Jo works and the loyalty works for her and the restaurant.

Kudos to the owners for recognizing her role. After many years on the floor, Jo had to give up waiting tables. So the management made her a hostess. When health and family got in the way of a regular schedule, the management made her the official Goodwill Ambassador. Gave her business cards and everything.

What's a Goodwill Ambassador do? Anything she wants. When she came to our table, she gave us each a back-rub as we caught up on what was going on in our lives. We added a child since we'd seen her last, told her all about my hillbilly father-in-law (he and Jo are from the same part of West Virginia), and recounted some of the better stories we had from previous visits with her.

Just so you know: Jo doesn't really remember us. She doesn't have some disease, and her age doesn't affect her memory. It's just that there are so many people like us, people who come back again and again, bringing family and friends each time, that she couldn't possibly remember us all. And other servers have the same loyal following (honest to goodness, there's a Flo that is Jo's alter-ego: true Southern Belle who has been there just as long).

Jo has that rare ability to make you feel welcome, like you've been missed and like she was just about ready to give us a call to see when we'd be in again.

Imagine what that kind of loyalty does to profits. Increased customer frequency. Increased party size. Fierce customer loyalty that breeds the ultimate in marketing: positive word of mouth.

If you're not the Goodwill Ambassador of your store you need to look in the mirror to discover why not. Are you too busy? Too worried about business issues to be truly gracious? Are you one of those people who believes that great products and competitive price are good enough? Do you treat customers like guests in your home, or people with whom to do a business transaction?

I'll leave you to ponder that. Right now, I'm going to go get some fried chicken. I'll tell Jo you said 'hi'.

Christmas vs. Holidays

Last weekend was the busiest shopping day of the year, and many stores still haven't decided on how they will greet their customers.

Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays. Welcome to [our store]. I heard them all last weekend and it always seemed like the person greeting me made it a question, as though I might launch into a tirade for the mortal sin of wishing me well this season.

Do you know any Jews or Muslims who are offended by 'Merry Christmas'? Seen any boycotts of stores by atheists who have nothing better to do but lash out at stores that dare to wish a Happy Hannukah?

Here's my simple solution, for what it's worth. Say whatever you want. The flap in the papers is largely the result of a few people with a lot of time on their hands. The spirit of the holidays (Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, New Year's) is to wish people well. Who cares how they do it?

So Merry Christmas, everybody. I hope you and yours have a safe and happy season, whatever holiday you celebrate.

Periodic Table of the Elements

My high school chemistry teacher, Mr. Davis, used to allow us to keep the periodic table of the elements on our desk during tests and quizzes. His point was that we weren't chemists, didn't use the symbol for lead (Pb) on a daily basis, and the best way to remember all of the abbreviations was through frequent use.

Ever see someone you've met, but can't remember their name? Happens all the time.

Do you ever forget your friends' names? Um, no. The more familiar we are with something the more likely we are to remember it.

Use the above examples to see if you can determine what's wrong with the following statements, real-life excuses from real-life owners:

I've met with the principal of that school. Nothing ever came of it.
We didn't get any response when we ran an ad in that newspaper.
We couponed that office building and got zero response.

The answer: lack of familiarity. The solution: frequency of message.

If you want word of mouth, you need to market in a way that creates word of mouth (read: frequency of message).

When was the last time you talked about a radio ad with your friends?

What the....?

I have reluctantly joined the bloggersphere.

"Bryan, why on earth do you need a blog? Aren't blogs just for radical liberals (redundant?) who are looking to influence activist judges with their wacky notions?"

Because I want to change the world. There, I said it. I want to change the world and a blog is just one more medium to help spread the word that Local Store Marketing is not just an inexpensive way to market a small business, it's the best way.

LSM is the old-fashioned way. I want to change the world by reminding people how marketing used to be done. I want to change the world by showing owners the building blocks to more revenue. New customers is definitely a building block. But what happens if those same customers come in twice as often and spend a $1 more on each visit?

Profitability shouldn't rely on a newspaper ad.

The Daily Grind

Marketing is a process, not a task. Forgetting this will cause you to waste more money on marketing than any ill-conceived media plan. It will be wasteful by neglect.

Consider this: you'd like to lose a few pounds, get in shape. Do you a) work out (really, really hard) one time and wait for the results to follow; b) work out for an entire week, hoping the pounds will burn off; or c) commit to doing physical activity at least 3 times per week over the course of several weeks?

If you simply want to check "lose weight" off of your To Do list, you might choose options a or b. If you really want to lose weight you'll choose option c. You didn't gain those extra pounds all at once, you won't lose them all at once either.

"But I don't have time! My business overwhelms me!"

There are several books, blogs, and articles on time management within a small business to help you overcome the time challenge. Many are wonderful and I'll leave you to them. But the simple truth is this: people rarely "find" the time to do anything they aren't comfortable doing - they have to make the time.

Schedule time for marketing in the same way you schedule inventory, ordering, payroll, and scheduling. Spend time on your business instead of in your business. Plan your efforts, prepare for your time by organizing your materials, and stick to your schedule as you would if you had an appointment with a client. It's that important.

Once you commit the time, prepare materials, and plan your attack, the only obstacle left is to overcome your reluctance. As Nike says "Just Do It."