Grassroots Marketing at Home and Abroad

ProStores eCommerce storefront Smart Madness has nearly 3,500 friends on Facebook. It’s a good representation of how they’ve become one of the world’s biggest suppliers of parts and accessories for the smart car. It’s also the basis of their marketing drive, not only at home but on the road.

“Over the past year, we’ve heavily increased our presence in global Facebook communities, so our brand awareness can be reached outside our own country," says co-owner Rachel Mills.  "Our international sales have jumped close to 75 percent.”

Smart Madness has also launched an online forum/community bulletin board of nearly 2,500 members. Given the smart car’s niche, loyal following, it’s makes sense that Smart Madness has used community to build its own clientele.

Her advice about driving traffic: “Social media. Social media. Social media.”  On the local side, Smart Madness also sponsors and hosts smart car events. “It’s all about grass roots efforts and getting involved in the community.  Think guerrilla marketing, but not so harsh,” Rachel adds with a smile.

Your Google AdWords Budget

We’ve talked to many merchants about how they manage their advertising budgets, especially when it comes to Google Adwords.

Jon Kurtz of Dog is Good had especially good, concrete advice, especially during high-volume selling seasons.

“On average, every visitor we get is worth $2-3,” says Jon.  During busier times, like the holidays, our conversion rate is twice as much, so no matter how someone is getting to the web store, every visit is worth $4-5. 

“If Google AdWords  sends me 300 visitors, it will cost me $50, but it will get me $1000 worth of sales.  Without having to determine the exact numbers, I know investing in the pay-per-click marketing profitable.”

It just goes to show you that it pays to track your analytics.  Because Dog is Good’s staff closely monitors its data, it can actually ascribe a quantifiable sales amount to each visitor and then determine an effective advertising strategy.

My Favorite eCommerce Tool: Megaventory

Todd Walbridge of Tuxedo Tshirts Online carries a large inventory that crosses multiple channels, from wholesale to online.  To manage it all, he uses a program called Megaventory.  

"If an order comes in, we better have the product in stock," says Todd.  "We have five or six channels drawing from the same inventory, so Megaventory is a great fit.  It's a good system that prompts us with alert levels if we're running out of stuff."  

Todd is a stickler for having everything he offers in stock and makeing sure his customers get the product they pay for, on time.  "I’ll even pay for overnight shipping to get my customer the product.  The customer wouldn’t even notice a blip – the stuff just arrives on time."

Megaventory also allows users to manage orders and returns across multiple platforms, send purchase orders to suppliers, and issue documents for shipping and invoicing goods.  In addition, it creates customizable inventory reports.

You can try it for free for 15 days.  Plans then begin at $29 a month.

Expand Your Inventory: Drop Ship With Doba

Jenny McLain started a ProStores web store Gifts and Fine Art in 2007 to help her artist mother Malenda Trick sell her work.  When she realized that few people were buying art during the economic recession, she decided to expand her inventory to include more gifts.  But she didn't have much room in her home to store the extra products.

That brought her to Doba, the service that helps merchants source drop ship products.  Since she signed up with them in 2010, all Jenny has to do is look through Doba's online catalog, click on the items she wants to carry, and then upload them to her web store.  When customers order something, the wholesaler ships the item directly - no fuss, no muss.  

Doba helped turn her business around.  "Without Doba, I probably would have closed the store," says Jenny.

Because Doba carries more than a million goods, Jenny recommends careful selections.  "I do a lot of window shopping at retail stores and keep an eye on design magazines.  I then look for unique products that people can't find in local stores."  She undercuts her competition by a small margin so that customers shop with her.    

It's been two years since Jenny started with Doba, the service now accounts for 85 percent of Gifts and Fine Arts' sales.

 

Your Best eCommerce Advice: Tuxedo T-shirts Online

Todd Walbridge has run a successful eCommerce storefront Tuxedo T-Shirts Online selling a niche product - novelty T-shirts - for the last five years.  In our continuing series "Your Best eCommerce Advice," we ask top merchants to share the best practices that got them to where they are.  Todd is a strong believer in customer service and inventory specialization.  

1.  Don’t try to be WalMart or Amazon.  If you try to be all things to everybody you’ll end up being nothing to nobody.

2.  Customer service first.

3.  Ship as fast as you can.  People are so shocked by fast shipping that they’ll post comments, not about your product, but about how fast they got their product.  

 

Cultivating Word of Mouth Marketing

Todd Walbridge of Tuxedo T-shirts Online is a self-proclaimed customer service freak.  That’s because he believes in the power of word-of-mouth marketing.

To grow his store's clientele, Todd abides by the age-old philosophy “The customer is always right.”  “The most successful large online stores have grown to their size with that mentality,” he says.  “We ship ungodly fast because that gets people talking.  We take care of the customer first even if the bottom line doesn’t make sense for that one sale.  It will at the end of the month because that customer will come back and become a repeat customer and tell his friends.” 

On the flip side, offering stellar customer service also helps him avoid negative word of mouth.  “Word of mouth can be your best and worst enemy on the Internet," he explains.  "You get a few people mad at you and it can spread like wildfire through Yelp, Facebook and Twitter.  One bad blog or review can take you down.”

Merchants, though, can't always know if someone has published a negative opinion.  Todd monitors his reputation by using GoogleAlerts, which tells him how many times his name appears online.  “It gives us an idea about how our customers are feeling.  If someone says something bad, we can do damage control by reaching out to them.  If we've done something wrong, we can fix it.  The most dangerous customers are the ones that don’t complain to you because they instead complain to their family and friends.” 

From Wholesale to Retail

With the economy such as it is, many merchants have had to reinvent their sales models to take advantage of new and changing markets.  Most of them say that opening an eCommerce storefront was what gave them that edge to prosper in a challenging environment.   

Tuxedo T-shirts Online and Dog is Good do most of their business wholesale.  Todd Walbridge of Tuxedo T-Shirts Online has a screen printing business.  Jon and Gila Kurtz and J. Nichole Smith of Dog is Good sell humorous products that celebrate the dog-human relationship.  In the late 2000s, each business opened their first eCommerce storefront.  Since then, the move has helped them improve their profits despite a Recession. 

“I’m thankful we did it,” says Todd.  “After the downturn, our business dropped off 30 percent because we were dealing mostly with businesses.  Now that we’re going directly to consumers, I picked up that 30 percent again.”

 

 

Dog is Good’s eCommerce storefront now accounts for more than 10 percent of the company’s revenue.  "Our web store may be a small percentage of our business, but it brings us a good-sized profit margin,” explains Jon.  “For something that costs us, say, $5.50 to make, we can sell it wholesale for $10 and retail it for $20.” 

Once businesses open an eCommerce storefront, their multi-channel selling possibilities open up even more, as markets today increasingly incorporate mobile platform selling, sales on social media sites, and other sophisticated online eCommerce tools.

Sell One Thing and Sell it Well

ProStores merchant Todd Walbridge has a screen printing business and sells humorous T-shirts online.  He carries tuxedo T-shirts, security T-shirts and T-shirts that raise money to fight multiple sclerosis, but instead of selling them all on one web store, he has three separate sites--Tux-Tees.com, security-tshirts.com and MSTshirts.com.

Todd learned from experience.  “In the beginning, I was trying to be a mini-Amazon.  I thought I’d appeal to a lot of people with a lot of different products.  Then I realized that I was never going to be Amazon, and I started focusing on niches.”

Having niche products on discrete web stores allows Todd to avoid having to compete with superstores.  He can instead focus on specific SEO keywords, attracting shoppers further along in their buying process.  “Because you’re so niche, you get more searches,” explains Todd.  “That’s what the Internet is about."

You might recall that the same thing happened to Dealzer owner Albert Farajian.  He opened his online store with 25,000 products.  When in the the first month he sold just two products, one being a hydroponic gardening system, he realized that he was better off focusing his inventory.  

“The best thing to do is start with a niche web storefront," he says.  "If it gets popular, then you can start expanding.”   

 

eCommerce Marketing in 2012

Now that 2012 is upon us, many eCommerce merchants are using the New Year to revamp their online marketing.  With the Internet continually evolving, they know that last year's techniques may not always work in the new selling environment.  The marketing trends this year point towards mobile devices, video content, and social media sites.

Practical eCommerce has listed five great tips for the New Year in a recent post.  Read the blog's 5 Effective Online Marketing Tactics for 2012 and you'll learn more about using:

1. Text Marketing

2. Mobile Optimized Merchandising

3. Subscriptions

4. Trigger Emails

5. Video Content 

Happy Selling in 2012!

Increase December Profits with Post-Holiday Promotions

Christmas and Hannukah are finally here, the orders are out, and it’s time to take a deep breath and relax, right?  Well, enjoy that well-deserved break, but once the weekend's over, it’s time to get your post-holiday sales going. 

Many shoppers like to cash in on deals after the holidays, so take advantage of those potential profits with the following tips:

1.  Run post-holiday promotions as soon as possible.  On Black Friday, featured merchant Dog is Good ran four different specials starting as soon as midnight.  "We offered a special and then changed it at 6am, and continued this throughout the day, just as department stores do," says owner Jon Kurtz.  "At times, we just lowered the cost of a product and kept that price up all day."  

2.  Use email and social media marketing to advertise sales and hot clearance items.  For instance, Dog is Good posted their promotions on Facebook and Constant Contact, which drove a considerable amount of traffic that day.  

3.  A lot of retail and web stores hold post-holiday sales, so you may have some competition.  Offer free shipping to make sure customers shop with you.

4.  Offer a flexible post-holiday return policy so customers and gift recipients feel confident doing business with you again.  You won’t lose any of your holiday profit if you offer exchanges and store credit. 

5.  Many people look for deals on accessories for top-selling products, electronics, and other big-ticket items they received as gifts, so keep up with post-holiday sales trends.  

6. Be savvy about hot products.  Put popular, hard-to-get gift products on sale to attract people who may have not gotten the top items on their wish list but received cash gifts.  Inform shoppers who wanted to buy out-of-stock items before the holidays when you’ve replenished your inventory.  Get rid of your low inventory items by displaying an inventory count, like “only three left in stock,” so people feel they need to purchase right away to get the discount.

7.  Give deep discounts for products that you don’t think will sell into the New Year.

8.  Whenever you hold a sale or promotion, always display the regular price and the sale price so people see that they’re getting a good deal.  Shoppers are more likely to purchase when they know they’re saving money. 

9.  Track shoppers with abandoned shopping carts and offer them a special offer, like free shipping or a certain percentage discount, to entice them to purchase their items after the holidays.

10.  Fine-tune your post-holiday SEO.  Use keywords like “post holiday sale,” “half off” or “after holiday discount” so bargain shoppers can find you.

Happy New Year and Happy Selling!