If you are like most gift store retailers, you have many, many customers walking through your doors every day. Are you exploiting the incredible goldmine hidden in their names and email addresses? This information represents thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of dollars in unrealized revenue each year. All you have to do to get this information is ask.

But that’s the quandary, isn’t it? How do you go about asking for such “personal” information from your customers? And what do you do with it once you get it?

To begin with, you must believe that there are only two valid business reasons for a store to gather data from its customers: one, to get them to come back (or come back more often); and two, to get them to increase the average money they spend on every transaction. For each of these, you must offer a strong enticement that takes the customer’s own interest into consideration.

Make it painless
So how do you gather personal information? The best way is to make it painless: simple and quick. Place response cards near the cash register so customers can supply needed information quickly and privately as you ring up the sale. Don’t request more than a first name and email address. That’s all you need. Limiting the amount of information you ask for will encourage signups and you’ll get more response cards filled out this way.

Make sure you and your staff always ask for this information during the checkout process. Instead of merely asking: “Do you want to be on our mailing list?” which is not an attractive enough enticement, be sure to tie it to an attractive offer or promise. “Would you like some email coupons for a future visit?” is a good enticement. So is, “Would you like to receive a free gift certificate near your birthday?”

You’re probably thinking at this point, “But aren’t people wary of receiving junk email?” Today’s educated customer realizes that his or her personal data has value. By sharing it with you, they are making an investment in your store. Your reputation, in their eyes, depends on how well you make their investment pay off.

If a customer expresses reluctance to share information, be sure to stress your store’s strong privacy policy (it’s important to have one if you don’t). Educate the customer about what you’ll do (and not do) with the information gathered. You will send weekly coupons and other treats. You will not sell this information to others or exploit it for any other reasons.

The coupon’s in the email
It’s remarkable how many customers appreciate offers from the businesses they frequent. Gift stores have actually doubled their average sale per customer, just by offering a few dollars off a minimum purchase. These kinds of deals can work for you, too.

You’ll be surprised at how your loyal customers—and even your casual customers—will enjoy hearing from you, if you send them attractive offers. Last-minute holiday promotions, gift offers around birthdays and anniversaries, invitations to craft classes (paired with a coupon) and more, all have their appeal when you combine them with a sales-inducing deal.

Of course, some promotions require additional information about birthdays, personal hobbies, or interest in collectibles. Again, keep it simple. The less you ask for, the more customers will respond. For example, if you ask for the types of merchandise (e.g., candles, jewel boxes, etc.) a person is interested in, use check boxes. Limit your write-ins to birthdays or anniversary dates. Once you have this additional info, you can leverage it using creative promotions.

Other considerations
As you grow your email marketing program, you’ll find that success depends on a combination of many factors including content. As a rule, research shows the best days to send promotional email are Saturdays through Tuesdays; personal subject lines under 35 characters in length will also boost your “open” rates.

Frequency of email is just as important. Once every three to four weeks is best; more often and you’ll become a nuisance, while less often will cause people to forget they ever signed up.

MailerMailer, an email list management company in Rockville, MD, reports that open rates for email from small retail establishments are in the 19-22% range—among the highest of all industries. “Click” rates—those emails that successfully prompt the recipient to print out a coupon or visit a Web site—hover around 6 percent. It’s interesting to note that most people open their email within the first few hours, so even same-day offers are likely to generate a good response.

To further boost your response rate, take the time to create graphical gift certificates or birthday cards that you then paste into your email. Text-based messages are good but emails that catch the eye are far better.

Tracking is critical
Tracking is one of the most important ways to ensure your customer information is working hard for you. As you try different offers and promotions, keep track of the number of responses you get, and what kinds of add-on purchases are generated. Run the same promotions on different days, or adjust the dollar amount of the coupon to see what works best. You can also do split runs, i.e., send one offer to half your list, and a slightly different offer to the other half, to gauge which is more effective.

If you have one, two, or even more offers that are working for you, don’t be afraid to run them multiple times. Keep running them until the response on one or more starts to fall off. When it does, make whatever adjustments are needed to keep customers engaged.

More sophisticated retail operations may want to investigate other practices as well. Contact management software like ACT! and Goldmine allows you to cross-reference names against historic sales records, to see which customers are likely to respond to a specific promotion. Manufacturers of specific product lines or collectibles (e.g., Hummel figurines) may also work with you on a limited-availability promotion.

Finally, you can consider an email service to increase your effectiveness. Professional emailers have proprietary systems designed specifically to deliver legitimate commercial email. By minimizing the effect of firewalls and spam filters, such firms can double the open rates for your offers.

Return on investment
Remember, the data you receive from customers is an investment on their part. It’s a matter of trust. Don’t abuse the data; don’t bury your customers with trivial offers. Do try to target your customer’s interests. If you treat your email list as the gold that it is, and invest in it well, both you and your customer will experience excellent returns.

Jay Siff is CEO of Moving Targets, a Perkasie, PA-based provider of new resident direct marketing programs. The company’s strategic business partner, Loyal Rewards, helps retailers expand their customer base and encourage repeat visits through its unique, email-based business marketing system. Moving Targets and Loyal Rewards have served over 20,000 merchants nationwide. Siff can be reached by emaling him jay@movingtargets.com. For more information, please visit movingtargets.com and loyalrewards.com.

Sidebar 1
A Twofer: Happy Customers and Strong Sales!

It’s called the “norm of reciprocity.” This powerful social phenomenon states that when a person receives an unexpected personal gift or favor, he or she is often compelled to give something in return.

Use this to great advantage in your email offers. Invite female customers to your store and present them with a no-strings-attached giveaway, such as a half dozen long-stemmed, free roses on their birthday. You’ll be amazed, when they come in to receive the free gift, how many will buy items at least as valuable as the cost of those roses.

You’ll have generated a ton of goodwill for your store—and boosted your sales at the same time—a smart and winning twofer!

Most gift retailers don't realize the incredible goldmine hidden right under their noses, in the names and email addresses of customers who walk in the door each day. That information represents thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of dollars in unrealized revenue each year. And all they have to do to get it, is ask.

But that's the quandary, isn't it? How do you go about asking for such "personal" information from your customers? And what do you do with it once you get it?

To begin with, you must believe that there are only two valid business reasons for a store to gather data from its customers: one, to get them to come back (or come back more often); and two, to get them to increase their average purchase. For each of these, you must offer a quid pro quo that deals in the customer's own interest.

You do not gather data to sell to others; you do not exploit the information for any reasons other than those listed above. That's because today's customer realizes that his or her personal data has value. By sharing it with you, they are making an investment in your store. Your reputation, in their eyes, depends on how well you make their investment pay off. (More on that later.)

Make It Painless
So how do you gather personal information? The best way is to make it simple, and make it fast. Have a means for them to supply the information quickly and privately, such as a response card at the cash register. As for the customer's contact information, don't request more than his or her first name and email address. That's all you need. Why not ask for last names? Because a first name all that's necessary to communicate effectively-and you'll get more response cards filled out this way.

When you make your verbal request to participate, be sure to tie it to an attractive offer or promise. "Would you like some email coupons for a future visit?" is a good enticement. So is, "Would you like to receive a free gift certificate near your birthday?"

You're probably thinking at this point, "But aren't people afraid of receiving junk email?" Actually, it's remarkable how many customers appreciate offers from the businesses they frequent. Gift stores have actually doubled their average sale per customer, just by offering a few dollars off a minimum purchase. These kinds of deals can work for you, too!

You'll be surprised at how your loyal customers-and even your casual customers-will enjoy hearing from you, if you send them attractive offers. Last-minute holiday promotions, gift offers around birthdays and anniversaries, invitations to craft classes (paired with a coupon) and more, all have their appeal when you combine them with a sales-inducing deal.

Of course, some promotions require additional information about birthdays, personal hobbies, or interest in collectibles. Again, keep it simple. The less you ask for, the more customers will respond. For example, if you ask for the types of merchandise (e.g., candles, jewel boxes, etc.) a person is interested in, use check boxes. Limit your write-ins to their birthday or anniversary date.

Once you have this additional info, you can leverage it using creative promotions. One of the most powerful promotional techniques involves a social phenomenon called the "reciprocity norm". It states that when a person receives an unexpected personal gift or favor, he or she is often compelled to give something in return. It has been proven in all kinds of situations-even among strangers on the street.

You can use the reciprocity norm to great advantage in your email offers. Suppose you send a no-strings-attached giveaway, such as a half dozen long-stemmed, free roses, to your female customers on their birthday. You'll be amazed, when they come in to receive their free gift, how many will buy items at least as valuable as the cost of those roses. You'll have generated a ton of goodwill for your store-and boosted your sales at the same time.

Other Considerations
As you grow your email program, you'll find that success depends as much on mechanics and deliverability as it does on content. As a rule, research shows the best days to send promotional email are Saturdays through Tuesdays; personal subject lines under 35 characters in length will also boost your "open" rates.

Frequency of email is just as important. Once every three to four weeks is best; more often and you'll become a nuisance, while less often will cause people to forget they ever signed up.

Mailer Mailer, in its semi-annual study on email marketing effectiveness, reports that open rates for email from small retail establishments are in the 19-22% range-among the highest of all industries. "Click" rates-those emails that successfully prompt the recipient to print out a coupon or visit a Web site-hover around 6%. (It's interesting to note that most people open their email within the first few hours, so even same-day offers are likely to generate a good response.)

To further boost your response rate, take the time to create graphical gift certificates or birthday cards that you then paste into your email. Text-based messages are good…but emails that catch the eye are far better. They also encourage printouts that customers can then bring into the store, and that you can collect for later analysis.

Tracking is Critical
Actually, tracking is one of the most important ways to ensure your customer information is working hard for you. As you try different offers and promotions, keep track of the number of responses you get, and what kinds of add-on purchases are generated. Run the same promotions on different days, or adjust the dollar amount of the coupon to see what works best. You can also do split runs, i.e., send one offer to half your list, and a slightly different offer to the other half, to gauge which is more effective.

If you have one, two, or even more offers that are working for you, don't be afraid to run them multiple times. Keep running them until the response on one or more starts to fall off. When it does, make whatever adjustments are needed to keep customers engaged.

More sophisticated retail operations may want to investigate other practices as well. Contact management software like ACT! and Goldmine allows you to cross-reference names against historic sales records, to see which customers are likely to respond to a specific promotion. Manufacturers of specific product lines or collectibles (e.g., Hummel figurines) may also work with you on a limited-availability promotion.

Finally, you can consider an email service to increase your effectiveness. Professional emailers have proprietary systems designed specifically to deliver legitimate commercial email. By minimizing the effect of firewalls and spam filters, such firms can double the open rates for your offers.

Return On Investment
Remember, the data you receive is an investment on the part of your customer. It's a matter of trust. Establish a formal privacy policy, and tell your customers you don't sell or share personal information. Don't abuse the data…don't bury your customers with trivial offers…and do try to reflect your customer's interests. If you treat your email list as the gold that it is, and invest in it well, both you and your customer will experience excellent returns.

About the Author
JAY SIFF is CEO of Moving Targets (www.movingtargets.com), a Perkasie, Pennsylvania-based provider of new resident direct marketing programs. The company's strategic business partner, Loyal Rewards (www.loyalrewards.com), helps retailers expand their customer base and encourage repeat visits through its unique, email-based business marketing system. Moving Targets and Loyal Rewards have served over 20,000 merchants nationwide. Jay can be reached at 800-926-2451 or jay@movingtargets.com.

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Perkasie, PA (January __, 2008) - Loyal Rewards, a turnkey email marketing service that creates and executes email campaigns to help small businesses generate repeat business, announced today that it has taken additional steps to maximize delivery of merchants' email messages by earning accreditation under Return Path's Sender Score Certified whitelisting program. The certification reduces the risk that messages will be blocked by ISP or corporate spam filters, helping to increase campaign effectiveness.

Loyal Rewards qualified for Sender Score Certified status after undergoing a rigorous evaluation of its email practices, including list maintenance, security, authentication records, inclusion of unsubscribe options on every email, and consumer complaint history. The company will now be monitored to ensure that it continues the standards compliance and low complaint rates necessary to remain in the program.

"We were already whitelisted on major services like AOL so the majority of our emails have been reaching their destinations, but Sender Score Certified will increase our delivery rates even further by identifying Loyal Rewards emails as legitimate to thousands of smaller ISPs and company domains," said Jay Siff, CEO of Loyal Rewards. "With this certification, we essentially have an email delivery seal of approval that can help our clients reach more customers through the email channel."

Loyal Rewards enables retailers to run active, revenue-generating email marketing campaigns without the need to maintain their own email lists, employ a graphic designer or assume mailing responsibilities. The service furnishes a system for the merchant to gather customer email addresses, compiles and maintains the email database, creates professional-quality email gift certificates with the offer of the merchant's choice, and sends the emails on the retailer's behalf for just 4.5 cents per message.

The Sender Score Certified program (www.senderscorecertified.com) provides legitimate email senders a means of increasing their email delivery success, and simultaneously combats spam, by helping ISPs quickly identify and deliver email from a whitelist of reputable senders. The program's whitelist is used by top ISPs like Microsoft and Roadrunner, top filtering solutions from Spam Assassin to IronPort Systems and Barracuda Networks, and thousands of top universities and Fortune 500 companies to simplify email screening and minimize erroneous filtering of wanted email messages.

Some companies have seen delivery improvement rates of as much as 21% after inclusion on the program's whitelist. In some cases, the Sender Score Certified program also minimizes email rendering problems by displaying links and images that would otherwise be suppressed, leading to increased campaign response.

About Loyal Rewards
Loyal Rewards is a turnkey email marketing service that helps smaller companies generate repeat business from existing customers without the time and expense of running an email program in-house. The service handles email list building, list maintenance, and email design and distribution for pennies per message, with a focus on small retail operations such as restaurants, auto repair shops and car washes. Loyal Rewards is a service of Moving Targets, a leading provider of new resident direct marketing programs for small businesses. For more information, visit www.loyalrewards.com or www.movingtargets.com

In case you haven't noticed, the marketing world has undergone an extreme makeover. The traditional means of communicating with customers-newspapers, television, circulars and the like-aren't dead, to be sure. But they're hardly the only games in town anymore.

In the wake of the digital revolution, brand new ways of bonding with customers have arisen. For the first time in perhaps eighty years, grocers once again have the means to forge the kind of personal-even intimate-relationships with their customers that neighborhood mom-and-pop groceries once enjoyed.

You see, the invention of email and the World Wide Web has changed the marketing landscape forever. Borrowing concepts from the direct marketing world and empowering them with an amazing ease of use, these new technologies have made communicating with customers simpler, more immediate, more measurable, and less expensive than ever.

One would think these technological breakthroughs would be immediately embraced by grocers everywhere. Yet it's amazing how many chains still look at television and newspapers as the core of their marketing plans.

You know what? Let them believe that. Why should you follow others who are caught in old-school thinking, when the power of the post-mass marketing age is here?

In the modern world, the best way to get real bang for your marketing buck is to leverage the Internet-especially email-to create one-on-one communications that build loyalty and strategically increase your business. No longer does it take millions of dollars for grocery stores (independents take note!) to keep customers loyal. In fact, in the battle of mass marketing versus targeted, personal communications, the latter clearly has the edge.

So how do you make email work for you, with minimal effort and technical knowhow? Simply by gathering email contact information from your customers, creating an electronic database, then offering specials that meet your particular sales or marketing objectives.

Most merchants don't realize the incredible value to be found right under their noses, in the names and email addresses of people who already spend money with them. That information represents tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars in increased revenue per store. And all you have to do to get it, is ask.

During checkout, have your cashiers ask their customers if they would like to receive periodic emails good for giveaways or "dollar-off" coupons. Chances are they'll say yes; the cashier can then ask them to fill out a card listing their email address. Assure them that their email won't be sold or distributed to any other company (you might even print that fact on the card itself). Before long, you'll have a database of email addresses for some of your best, most responsive customers.

Once you have your list, you or your local store managers can use it to create powerful, actionable offers that satisfy whatever short-term marketing need you may have. Contrary to what most merchants think, people actually want to hear from businesses they frequent. In fact, they are more than willing to respond-if you're willing to offer them something useful in return.

Say, for example, that seafood sales at several of your stores were lower than expected over the weekend, and you have dozens of live lobsters that need to move now. Compose a short email offering a Monday-only, too-good-to-pass-up deal on lobster, and hit "send." Within hours, you'll have people coming in the door for your incredible savings…and you'll have not only removed a headache, but also increased sales on a slow day.

Nicely designed email certificates are another way to reward current, active customers who enjoy your store and need a good reason to stop in. Provide them periodically with deals good for buy-one-get-one-free, exclusive co-op offers in partnership with local merchants, or other attractive specials, and you can generate additional business almost at will.

You can also use your prized email list to achieve other strategic sales goals. Say you're interested in building your carryout meal business. Since most people typically wait until two or three o'clock in the afternoon to decide what they're doing for dinner, what better time to hit them with an email promoting your dinner special for that evening? Well-timed emails such as these can steer business away from local eateries and into your stores instead.

Perhaps the best thing about a "loyal customer" email strategy is that your customer database becomes the vehicle for establishing a measurable and definable ROI. Let the other guys fritter away their money on slow, low-return mass marketing campaigns. Thanks to your state-of-the-art approaches, you'll generate business at a lower cost per customer than anyone in your market areas.

These days, grocery stores face more competition and greater sales challenges than ever before. But that doesn't mean you can't have the upper hand. They key is to target your most responsive customers, spark genuine interest in what you have to offer, and keep those customers satisfied and looking for new reasons to stop in. By using email wisely, marketing's recent extreme makeover can serve to give your business a facelift as well.

JAY SIFF is CEO of Loyal Rewards (www.loyalrewards.com), a leading customer emailing service. The company's strategic business partner, Moving Targets (www.movingtargets.com), helps merchants market to new residents. Jay can be reached at 800-926-2451 or jay@movingtargets.com.

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Using email marketing to build business

Dear Karen: I'm a small retailer, and I'm thinking of starting an email marketing program to build my repeat business. Is this possible for a small operation like mine?

Answer: Absolutely. If you don't have employees who can handle the job, you can outsource it for as little as a few cents per customer. And it's an excellent way to keep your regulars coming back.

"Email works as well for smaller companies as it does for Borders and Amazon. It keeps your business top-of-mind and helps prevent existing customers from defecting to competitors," says Jay Siff of Moving Targets and Loyal Rewards, two companies that provide business-building tools for small business owners.

The first step is to collect email addresses, and Siff says there's only one way to do it: "Look your customers in the eye and ASK." Say that you periodically send coupons and other offers by email, and ask if they would like to participate. Don't leave forms on the counter (it won't work), and don't request addresses, birthdays or other information.

Then be sure that every email gives customers an incentive for making their next purchase, whether it's 10% off, a $2 savings or buy one/get one free. "People don't want newsletters. They're bombarded with media. They're just looking for value," Siff says.

Sending the emails yourself does take some work. You will need to "spam-score" each message to prevent blockage by spam filters, provide an opt-out method for recipients who want to be removed from your list, be sure you comply with CAN-SPAM regulations, and so on.

If that's too burdensome, email services like Loyal Rewards (www.loyalrewards.com), Blue Hornet (www.bluehornet.com) and Exact Target (www.exacttarget.com) can come to the rescue. Since it's easier to generate repeat business from existing customers than to attract new ones, it's a good investment.

Like garden strawberries in June, the independent grocer's opportunities for success have never been riper. After years of struggle against grocery superstore chains with their slick TV image campaigns and endless promotional budgets, independents once again have the means at their disposal to not only win new customers, but also to keep them coming back year after year.

So what has balanced the marketing scales-or perhaps even tipped them in the favor of the locally owned-and-operated grocery? The advent of new direct marketing tools that enable small businesses to inexpensively forge tailored, one-on-one customer relationships. With the host of new tools now available, neighborhood stores can cost-effectively reach out to potential and existing customers like never before.

The onset of modern technologies such as email, the Internet, and customer database programs have changed the marketing playing field forever. No longer does it take millions of advertising dollars to keep customers brand-loyal. In fact, in the battle of mass marketing versus one-on-one, guerrilla-style relationship building, the guerrillas clearly have an edge.

Finding New Customers
Let's compare how these two disciplines play themselves out in a key sales objective: obtaining new customers. The mass marketing approach ultimately depends on brand switching; that is bombarding people with messages, in hopes that someday they will want to try your store instead. Trouble is, it may take years before these folks have the inclination to make the switch.

Instead, new technologies make it easy to speak one-on-one with consumers who are not tethered by habit and inertia. A great place to look for such prospects is new residents. Most people don't realize that new movers represent a huge market-over 46% of all Americans moved at least once between 1995 and 2000, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures. As people enter a new community, they look for "new favorites"-local businesses that make them feel comfortable and at home. A neighborhood grocery store is the perfect example.

The key to this process is to find such people, then entice them into your store with an offer that is too good to pass up. A well-designed gift certificate sent through the mail for $25 in free groceries fits the bill. And lest you think this is literally "giving away the store", consider this: 87% of businesses who have properly applied this approach have rated it successful.

Building Loyalty
Of course, you have to turn these first-timers into loyal patrons through a great shopping experience. If you do so, you will find you've created brand loyalty where there was none before.

Once you have a customer, you can keep them coming back by fostering an intimate, two-way relationship through the effective use of email. Contrary to what most merchants think, people want to hear from local businesses they enjoy. In fact, they are more than willing to give you their email address-if you're willing to offer them something useful in return.

The next time they come in, have your cashier ask your customers if they would like to receive periodic emails good for giveaways or "dollar-off" coupons. Chances are they'll say yes; the cashier can then ask them to fill out a card listing their email address. This becomes your list of current, active patrons who enjoy your store and plan to return. Provide them periodically with emailed certificates good for buy-one-get-one-free, free dinner from your take-home counter with qualifying purchase, or other attractive offer, and you can generate additional business almost at will.

Be Creative
Your email list can even be used to generate new customers, piggyback on co-op offers, or push new services like cooking classes. Perhaps a local youth group is holding a car wash in your parking lot this Saturday; you can show your civic involvement by supporting the car wash with a "bratwurst and coke" promotion. Email certificates for free samples, along with a variety of cents-off coupons, and you've created a ton of goodwill-and increased business.

Co-op promotions with other locally owned and operated businesses is another good idea. You're only limited by your imagination. By taking advantage of the latest digital and direct response techniques, then combining them with creative promotions that emphasize your community support, you'll have all you need to leverage your new secret weapon-and once again win against your big-name competitors.

About the Author
JAY SIFF is CEO of Moving Targets (www.movingtargets.com), a Perkasie, Pennsylvania-based provider of new resident direct marketing programs. The company's strategic business partner, Loyal Rewards (www.loyalrewards.com), helps retailers expand their customer base and encourage repeat visits through its unique, email-based business marketing system. Moving Targets and Loyal Rewards have served over 20,000 merchants nationwide. Jay can be reached at 800-926-2451 or jay@movingtargets.com.

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It's looking like another challenging year for oil change specialists. Gas prices, while lower in recent months, are on their way back up, dampening people's driving and lengthening oil change intervals. More consumers are predicting less need for automotive maintenance in the coming year, according to industry research. And competition from car dealers and repair shops is up.

It would be easy to batten the hatches and simply hope for the best. But there's no reason why your business can't have a better-than-average year-even great one-if you try some creative promotional ideas.

In any retail business, there are only three ways to build sales: one, increase your customer base; two, increase customer frequency (visits per month or year); and three, increase average revenue per customer visit. Promotions can be used to achieve any of these goals, or all of them. And it's not as difficult as you think to run a successful promotion. You just need to have the right inspiration-and a dose of marketing know-how.

With that in mind, here are some promotional tips that will help overcome today's difficult environment:

1. TAKE YOUR CUSTOMER'S POINT OF VIEW. This advice rises to the top of the list because it's one of the most fundamental, yet most often violated, disciplines of all.

How many times have you seen retail businesses touting "Under New Management"? Who is supposed to be impressed-the customer? All it does is make people think about how bad the place was under the old regime.

When you promote your business, whether in mailers, coupons or other offer, lead with what's in it for your customer-not for you. Don't say, "Buy one, get one free"; instead say, "Get one free with every purchase." People deal in their own self interest. Make sure your offers reflect that fact.

2. MARKET TO YOUR CURRENT CUSTOMERS. Every day scores of people enter your establishment who have already made the decision to buy from you. These are pre-sold, interested customers. Allowing them to exit without gathering the personal information-especially a street or email address-necessary to create and maintain an ongoing relationship is a big mistake.

Gathering the info is actually very easy. All you need is an incentive. It might be a drawing for a free oil change for those who drop their business card in a fishbowl. Or say, "Would you like to have a free gift certificate emailed to you from time to time?"

Once you've built up your mailing list, you can issue any number of powerful promotions to encourage repeat visits or higher sales totals. Your goal is to make these past customers think of you first when their next routine service need comes along. Give them a good reason, and they'll come back again and again.

3. TARGET NEW RESIDENTS. One of the most overlooked sources of new customers are those individuals, couples, or families who are new to your area. The U.S. Census Bureau says that 46% of all Americans moved between 1995 and 2000. A 2005 survey found that 63% of new movers were forced to make changes in their daily routine after they moved. That's a lot of people looking for a new place to get their oil changed.

While "community welcome" services that connect businesses to new residents have existed for years, it's easy to get lost in their hodge-podge of offers. You, on the other hand, can engage in a practice that will take you right to the top of the heap-a personalized letter that contains a tried-and-true, can't-miss gift certificate. Which leads us to Tip #4:

4. GIVE AWAY YOUR PRODUCT. We're not talking about sampling, or a "two for one" come-on. No, this is about giving away the store. The whole enchilada, if you will. No strings attached. A free oil change, air filter, wiper blades or other freebie.

This isn't crazy. It's out-of-the-box, loyalty building, aggressively shrewd marketing. Consider the lifetime value of an oil change customer, i.e., the amount of net profit your shop can expect from an average customer, based on current turnover rates. Typically that figure can run into the hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Isn't such profit worth a free oil change at a net cost of $15?

While this tactic is great for getting new residents in the door, it's even more effective for rewarding steady customers, especially if it comes unannounced. Is there any better way to delight a customer? You want to bet he or she is going to tell ten other people about the unexpected gift they received from your business?

5. DON'T BE THE COUPON KING. Despite all this talk of giveaways and certificates, a word to the wise: sampling, gifting and couponing all work well to promote product trial and increase loyalty-but don't overdo it. If you do, your customers will simply become hooked on deals and wait for the next one to come along. In the meantime your sales and profit opportunities suffer.

Likewise, coupon packs like Valpak and Money Mailer lump you in with scores of other coupons, which only dilutes the uniqueness of any promotion you offer. Better to come up with a fresh, original idea, then deliver it to current and potential customers in a such way that it solves your strategic business needs.

If you need to expand your customer base, encourage your senior citizen customers to refer you to their friends with a 25% off deal, good for both parties. To increase visit frequency, create a "Car Care Club" featuring a discount on every fourth oil change made within a 12-month period. Those are the kinds of promotions that will add significantly to your bottom line.

6. TAKE ADVANTAGE OF CO-OP. If you business is affiliated with a major oil company, include the company's logo or other approved graphics in your promotional materials. Following the company's guidelines can significantly lower your cost by qualifying it for national co-op funds.

7. TRACK EVERY PROMOTION YOU RUN. Unlike big companies with multi-million-dollar promotional budgets, your marketing dollars must provide a direct return on investment. And you can't manage what you can't measure!

Whenever you run a promotion, collect the coupons or certificates. Track where the coupon came from, including zip codes for mailed coupons and the newspaper or magazine in the case of ad-based coupons. It's the only way to know which programs are making you money-and which aren't.

If a promotion is working, keep doing it. Too many retailers make changes too quickly. It's ok to add to an effective campaign, but don't stop a profitable effort until it's no longer generating results.

Finally, guard against attractive promotional pieces that don't sell. Good design alone is never enough. Remember that a quick, handwritten note can easily outperform a slickly produced mailer. As a small business, you have to base your decisions on what will generate a solid return. Demand results from every promotional effort you undertake, and you'll find your money well spent.

About the Author JAY SIFF is CEO of Loyal Rewards (www.loyalrewards.com), a Perkasie, Pennsylvania-based company that helps retailers expand their customer base and encourage repeat visits through its unique, email-based business marketing system. The company's strategic business partner, Moving Targets (www.movingtargets.com), is a provider of new resident direct marketing programs. Loyal Rewards and Moving Targets have served over 20,000 merchants nationwide. Jay can be reached at 800-926-2451 or jay@movingtargets.com.

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While you've been busy running your fixed ops business, working hard to provide good service and maintain strong car counts, something has happened in the sales and marketing world: the "accepted" rules of promoting a business have died. Gone. Kaput. And in their wake, a brand new way of relating to customers has arisen.

Fortunately for you, many of your competitors haven't noticed. But you should. Because while they're still hammering away with the same old, tired-and ultimately ineffective-promotional tactics, you have the opportunity to not follow suit. And in doing so, gain the upper hand in your dealer's all-important parts, service and body repair businesses.

You see, the onset of modern technologies such as email, the Internet, and customer database programs have changed the game forever. Borrowing concepts from the direct marketing world and empowering them with an amazing ease of use, these new technologies have made communicating with customers simpler, more immediate, more measurable, and less expensive than ever.

One would think these breakthroughs would be immediately embraced by car dealers everywhere. Yet it's amazing how many dealerships still look at local television and radio commercials as the "gold standard" for marketing their business.

You know what? Let them believe that. Why should you follow others who are caught in old-school thinking, when the power of the post-mass marketing age is here?

John Wanamaker, the father of modern advertising, once said, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don't know which half." Like Wanamaker, too many small business people believe the effectiveness of marketing campaigns is just one of those things man was not meant to know. Perhaps that was true in Wanamaker's time. But it's certainly not true today!

In the modern world, the best way to get real bang for your marketing buck is to leverage this era's new tools to create one-on-one communications that target your best, most receptive customers and prospects. Capture these lucrative audiences and, once you've done so, give them multiple, valuable reasons to come back. That's how to spend an advertising dollar without wondering where fifty cents of it went.

But there are even more good reasons to embrace today's Internet-based communication channels. Never before have marketing messages been more immediate. Using targeted email sent to your most loyal customers, you can make an offer this morning and literally see cars line up this afternoon. That's direct response. What's more, when implemented correctly there is no such thing as "junk email"-the messages you send are not only welcomed by the recipient, but highly valued.

So how do you make email work for you-with minimal effort and technical knowhow? Simply by gathering email contact information from each customer, creating an electronic database, then offering specials that get those customers back in the door far faster than if you wait for the next appointment to occur.

Most merchants don't realize the incredible value to be found right under their noses, in the names and email addresses of people who already spend money with them. That information represents thousands of dollars in new revenue. And all you have to do to get it, is ask. "Would you like an email every so often for a free gift certificate?" is a good way to make the request at the time of payment. Chances are they'll say yes, after which the cashier can then ask the person to fill out a card listing their email address.

Once you have an accurate list, it's easy to offer last-minute, one-week-only deals, either through offers you send yourself or through an outside email marketing service. Perhaps you offer 50% off the cost of a tire rotation and alignment package. Compose a short email outlining the discount, include a certificate good for the package, and hit "send." Before long, you'll have people coming in once again for a sampling of your friendly, high-quality maintenance.

You can also use your prized email list to achieve other strategic sales goals. Say you're ready to launch a detailing operation and you need to jumpstart a customer base. By emailing your customers who come to you regularly for oil changes, you're tapped into people who know you, who like your service, who are used to stopping in, and who are interested in maintaining their cars. Offer these people membership in a "Complete Car Care Club" featuring two-fer specials every three months on detailing combined with a oil change. Kick it off with a too-good-to-pass-up deal good this Thursday and Friday only, and your detailing business is off and running.

If one of your fixed ops goals is to broaden your customer base, you can even use email to gain new customers from your existing ones. Encourage your senior citizen customers to refer you to their friends with a 25% off repair offer, good for both parties.

Perhaps the best thing about the "loyal customer" strategy is that your customer database becomes the vehicle for establishing a measurable and definable ROI. Let the other guys fritter away their money on slow, low-return mass marketing campaigns. Thanks to your state-of-the-art approaches, you'll know exactly what you're spending. Better still, you'll be able to generate business at a lower cost-per-customer than anyone in your service area.

While it's true that dealership fixed operations face more competition from a greater variety of sources than ever before, it doesn't at all mean that you can't have the upper hand. The key is to target your most receptive audiences, spark genuine interest in what you have to offer, and keep those customers satisfied and looking for new reasons to come back. Mass marketing may be dead-but by embracing new-media strategies, your fixed ops business can remain very, very much alive.

About the Author JAY SIFF is CEO of Loyal Rewards (www.loyalrewards.com), a Perkasie, Pennsylvania-based company that helps retailers expand their customer base and encourage repeat visits through its unique, email-based business marketing system. The company's strategic business partner, Moving Targets (www.movingtargets.com), is a provider of new resident direct marketing programs. Loyal Rewards and Moving Targets have served over 20,000 merchants nationwide. Jay can be reached at 800-926-2451 or jay@movingtargets.com.

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Instead of allocating a certain percentage of revenues to advertising and marketing, some operators are letting the results drive their spending.

Conventional wisdom in the pizza industry calls for stores to earmark 2 to 5% of revenues for advertising and marketing, but for many pizza shops that rule is as passé as a pizza menu without a choice of toppings. Consider the case of Pizzi Café in Conneaut, Ohio, a 55-seat eatery in a town of just 13,000 that draws customers from an hour away.

When owner Pat Griswold bought the business 11 years ago, he started out with a fixed budget spent on radio, TV and newspaper ads. In 2001 he discarded that strategy in favor of a variable budget spent exclusively on direct response programs such as Repeat Rewards loyalty cards, Moving Targets new resident mailings, emails, voice blasts and newsletters. The switch has pushed his monthly marketing expenses to 6 to 10% of revenues. It has also tripled his sales over the last five years.

"If something works, we keep doing it. If it doesn't work, we drop it and move on to something else," Griswold says.

"The return on our monthly newsletters fluctuates from 600 to 1000% based on our costs, Repeat Rewards has brought in over $500,000 on an investment of $26,000 in the last three years, and Moving Targets returns are over 30%. They stay. Newspaper coupons and Valpak mailings return as little as 3%. They go. It's that simple."

Griswold is one of a growing number of pizzeria owners who follow the direct marketing gospel preached by restaurant consultants like Rory Fatt, Bill Marvin, Phyllis Ann Marshall and Bill Main.

While each guru has his or her own specific techniques, all share an aversion to image advertising, a preference for direct response, and a belief in flexible ad budgets dictated by the particular mix of tactics that make the cash registers ring. In this view, budgets should be set not by percentage of revenues but by return on investment.

"Three or four points might work in a small marketplace, but it won't even put a ripple in the water in Houston or Chicago. You may have to spend more to cut through the advertising clutter," says Joel Cohen, principal of the North Carolina-based Cohen Restaurant Marketing Group.

"The question should be what it's going to take to move the sales needle," Cohen maintains. "The only way to know if you're succeeding is to measure the net results of everything you do" by subtracting the raw costs of each promotion including food expenses from the total dollars collected.

Andy Dell, owner of Rino D's Pizza & Wings in suburban Phoenix, learned that lesson the hard way. Dell says he made "thousands and thousands of dollars of mistakes" before adopting a more scientific approach to tracking his marketing hits and misses, including keeping detailed weekly records and coding each campaign for identification purposes.

Once he started this meticulous analysis process, Dell realized that the $3,000 he was spending on marketing every month was not sufficient. By trial and error, he determined that his "magic number" for making the phones in his takeout/delivery establishment ring was $3,600- at the time representing 10% of his gross sales.

The investment has grown his business to the point where that same $3,600 now takes only a 7% bite, validating his decision to adopt the do-what-works formula.

"I have major competition on all sides, and I discovered that if I didn't do some kind of marketing in a given week, I lost momentum going into the next week or the week after that because my competition was always out there," Dell says. "For me, staying in the public eye every week and measuring my returns without worrying about how much of my budget is going into advertising has made a major difference."

The precise recipe for achieving results varies from store to store and market to market.

One of Dell's most successful tools, for example, is an email loyalty marketing service called Loyal Rewards that sends email offers to his existing customer base. Personal letters, lazy postcards, new resident mailings, door hangers, and menus and magnets enclosed in his pizza boxes also work well. Newspaper coupons are typically a bust.

Other operators have almost the opposite experience.

"We were doing an in-house email campaign that didn't get a good response so we dropped it, along with programs like Repeat Rewards that were too expensive for the returns," said Ralph Del Priore, owner of The Dough Company in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. "What works best for us are postcard offers and newsletters that we send to the 23,000 people in our direct mail database, so we use direct mail almost weekly."

The key, operators say, is to experiment. Griswold, the Ohio pizza shop owner, was once advised to try two new tactics per month. One of the new tools he added to his marketing mix by following that advice was Peel-A-Deal fundraiser cards with peel-off coupons on the back. One of those he tried and dismissed was inserting a flyer in his local Chamber of Commerce newsletter.

"Over the years, it's become clear to me that you need a combination of tactics to win the local store marketing battle. If two things work, then do both. If four things work, use all four. Setting an arbitrary limit on your budget doesn't make sense unless you're a franchise or a large operation that has to operate under a standard system," says Jay Siff, who conceived and runs both the Moving Targets and Loyal Rewards programs.

"If you can track it and it makes you money, you do it forever. Then you find something else to do in conjunction," he adds. "It may not be important for a McDonald's or a Pizza Hut, but it's critical for a small independent pizza shop where every dollar counts."

Experts, however, do issue one warning: even the best-performing marketing campaign will be for naught if the restaurant experience is poor.

"I advise some of my clients to put a portion of their ad budget into server training, because if people respond to an offer and they don't get the service they expect, those advertising dollars are wasted," says Joel Cohen. "At the end of the day, it's the experience in the restaurant that counts."

Rena Wish Cohen is a freelance writer based in Chicago.

The weekend of December 10, 2005 could have been a terrible one for business at The Village Tavern…but it wasn't.

North Wales, the suburb 25 miles north of Philadelphia where this cozy bistro is located, had suffered through nine inches of snow the prior week. More snow was forecast for the weekend and John Modestine, co-owner of The Village Tavern along with his wife Theresa, decided it was time to take action.

"We emailed a 'Snow Day' certificate to our customer list, good that weekend only for a free entrée with purchase of a second at regular price," said Modestine. "The email went out on Friday and by that evening, guests were already showing up with certificates in hand. Twenty-six parties in all redeemed their coupons, totaling over $1,000 in extra sales. It turned our whole weekend around."

Ten years ago this kind of success story wouldn't have been possible. But the advent of the Internet-coupled with a healthy dose of marketing savvy-has given small businesses a power to build sales they could have only dreamed about in the past.

Direct marketing, of course, has been around since Benjamin Franklin was postmaster general. But the Internet has given direct marketing a whole new spin. Now, merchants and other local businesses can leverage the lightning speed and ultra-low cost of email to reward their loyal customers with promotional offers that add sales and encourage repeat visits.

You're probably thinking, "But people resent receiving junk email," right? Actually, you'd be pleasantly surprised to find just how much customers appreciate offers from the businesses they frequent. Al Robson, owner of a Nancy's Pizza franchise outside Chicago, says people highly value the coupons he sends out regularly.

"I have 550 customers on my mailing list, and we have one offer active all the time," he notes. "Every other Tuesday around 10 AM, people can expect an email from us. It's gotten to the point now that if my customers don't receive their coupon, I hear about it. 'I was waiting for it!' they'll tell me."

The other stumbling block many business owners have about promotions is the fear that their clientele will get hooked on coupons or certificates. A fair enough concern. But if used strategically, offers won't reduce your profit-they'll increase sales per visit, as well as increase the frequency with which people visit your establishment.

Nancy Satterlee, owner of Lifestyles: The Gallery, a diversified art, gifts, housewares and furniture store in Valparaiso, Indiana, has used email coupons to significantly increase her average sale. "Before we began couponing, people spent roughly $12 per visit at our store. Our goal was to double that total, so we issued coupons good for $7 off any sale of $25 or more. The result was that our average sale jumped to $45-people came in with their coupon, but spent far more than the minimum," she states.

Truth is, if people don't have a specific reason to come see you, they won't. Sometimes they already have their own reason-a night away from the stove, for example, or the need to buy a candle or bracelet for a birthday gift. But why not give them a reason they weren't expecting…and one they are thankful to receive?

Perhaps now you're beginning to see the rationale for using email to strengthen your business. If so, there's only one way to begin: by gathering the email addresses of people who enter your establishment. Most merchants don't realize the incredible value to be found right under their noses, in the names and addresses of people who already spend money in their store. That information represents thousands of dollars in new revenue. And all you have to do to get it, is ask.

At The Village Tavern, Modestine places attractive cards at each dining table touting free gift certificates to patrons who fill out a personal information form. Servers are paid a bonus of 50¢ for each card they collect from their customers. At Lifestyles: The Gallery, cashiers ask each customer at checkout, "Would you like some email coupons for a future visit?"

Once someone fills out your form, quickly respond with a certificate or other offer. That way you'll demonstrate your commitment to following through on your initial promise. After that, continue to reward them with valuable deals that also achieve your marketing goals.

Most businesses find that simple schemes work best. "My most productive offer is $5 off a check of $40. I consistently get a 7% to 8% return rate on that deal, and it keeps my good customers coming back," says Modestine. "Sometimes I'll tie it to a special event such as the Notre Dame/Penn State game, or the opening of our patio for the summer. Once we did a 'Halfway to St. Patrick's Day' theme. But the deal is always the same."

Offers should be simple, but a dose of creativity always helps. At Nancy's Pizza, store owner Robson marked the 2006 income tax filing deadline with a coupon good for 20.06% off every order. "We find people appreciate a bit of humor. For Cinco de Mayo, we had a special on our taco pizza. A gimmick helps bring in the business," he observes.

Retailers can also do one-off specials that add a personal touch, like emailing a $15-off gift certificate for a person's birthday. What businesses shouldn't do, however, is compromise the customer's trust. "One of the most common questions I get when I ask people for their email address is whether their name will be sold on a mailing list," Satterlee says. "I assure them it won't-and eight out of ten people respond by giving me their address."

Most of all, it's important to be open-minded about the potential of email to transform your business. "I used to think, 'We don't do that kind of stuff here,'" reports Modestine, a 30-year veteran of the restaurant industry. "But I've found that email generates traffic better than anything we've tried in the past." Whether it's a snow storm or a simple desire to spice up a slow month, email direct marketing is a tool you can bank on.

About the Author JAY SIFF is CEO of Loyal Rewards (www.loyalrewards.com), a Perkasie, Pennsylvania-based company that helps retailers expand their customer base and encourage repeat visits through its unique, email-based business marketing system. The company's strategic business partner, Moving Targets (www.movingtargets.com), is a provider of new resident direct marketing programs. Loyal Rewards and Moving Targets have served over 20,000 merchants nationwide. Jay can be reached at 800-926-2451 or jay@movingtargets.com.

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Despite the seismic shifts that have hit the toy and gift business in recent years, many small, independent retailers don't realize the strong position in which they find themselves today.

Don't believe it? It's true. Because for the first time in perhaps eighty years, local merchants once again have the opportunity to forge personal-even intimate-relationships with their customers.

Let's look at how this return to personal customer relationships has taken place. In the Mass Marketing Age, which really hit its stride with the invention of radio and TV broadcasting in the mid-20th century, advertisers pursued faceless, one-way interaction with consumers. In fact, advertising messages were measured in what ad agencies called CPM, or cost per thousand (the Roman numeral M denoting thousands). The more gross advertising messages you could generate for a given dollar investment, the more effective your marketing.

Broad, shallow and slick-those were the watchwords of mass media advertising. Then in the late 1980's came the bombshell: the digital revolution. And marketing was never the same again.

The onset of modern technologies such as email, the Internet, and customer database programs changed the marketing playing field forever. Borrowing concepts from the direct marketing world and empowering them with an amazing ease of use, these new technologies have made it communicating with customers simpler, more immediate, more measurable, and less expensive than ever before.

For the independent toy and gift merchants who weathered the retail storm of the last 15 years, this maturation has opened incredible new opportunities. By leveraging these new tools, it's possible to not only capture local customers with exquisite efficiency, but also cement a retail relationship that is nearly impossible for mass marketers to break.

Let's compare how these two disciplines play themselves out in a key sales objective: obtaining new customers. The mass marketing approach ultimately depends on brand switching; that is, bombarding people who frequent your competition with messages, in hopes that someday they will want to try your store instead.

Trouble is, it may take years before these folks have the inclination to make the switch. The Post-Mass Marketer would ask, why waste marketing dollars in a scattershot effort to pry customers away from the other guy? Persuading a customer to switch from a business he or she has frequented over a long period of time is a difficult, costly, low ROI proposition.

Instead, new technologies make it easy to speak one-on-one with consumers who are not tethered by habit and inertia. In the United States today, large numbers of people relocate for many different reasons. "New movers"-people who are relocating from one geographical area to another-are a goldmine of market potential.

Research shows that new movers are 80% more likely to try new products and businesses during the first weeks and months following their relocation. In fact, the U.S. Postal Service has identified a "hyperspending" phase following a move, during which new residents spend $7,100 on everything from refrigerators to takeout meals.

As Post-Mass Marketers, local toy and gift retailers realize they have the opportunity to create a relationship with these new residents. They can leverage their strengths-unique products, individualized customer service, and a genuine concern for the development of their customers' children-to become a true "friend" amid the local retail scene.

To initiate this relationship, the key is to offer a "too-good-to-pass-up" offer: a gift certificate for free merchandise. Not a discount…not a "buy one, get one free" deal…but a true giveaway, paired with a personalized letter that welcomes the recipient to the community and outlines the store's location and services.

A huge percentage of prospects respond to such an offer. Make sure that the customer's first experience with your store is warm, welcoming and professional, and chances are excellent you will have won yourself a loyal, long-term patron.

Bringing in a new customer, however, is just one weapon in today's Post-Mass Marketing arsenal. To make new resident gift certificates worth their cost, you need to keep customers coming back. You can do this by gathering email contact information from each customer, creating an electronic database, then offering specials that get those customers to return far faster than if you wait for the next birthday or holiday buying season.

Once you know who your customers are and how to reach them, it's relatively easy to offer last minute or limited-time specials that generate visits. Let's say it's summertime and you're having a slow month. Perhaps you arrange a special story hour featuring a popular new book for the children of your best customers. Combine this event with a 50% discount on the book series you'll be reading from.

To promote the event, compose a short email that includes a certificate good for the discount. Hit "send" and soon you'll have families in your door, ready to take home a book from the latest hit series.

Perhaps the best thing about these "new mover" and "loyal customer" strategies is that your customer database becomes the vehicle for establishing a measurable and definable return on investment. Thanks to your state-of-the-art approaches, you'll not only know exactly what you're spending, but also you'll generate business at a lower cost-per-customer than anyone in your business area.

Small, independent toy stores are in a very special position today to recapture an age when customers knew their store owners by name, and loyally patronized them year after year. To achieve this goal, merchants must target the right prospect, spark genuine interest in the store's products and, once gained, keep those new customers coming back. The age of wide and shallow marketing is dead-but by embracing Post-Mass Marketing strategies, personal customer relationships can be very, very much alive.

About the Author JAY SIFF is CEO of Loyal Rewards (www.loyalrewards.com), a Perkasie, Pennsylvania-based company that helps retailers expand their customer base and encourage repeat visits through its unique, email-based business marketing system. The company's strategic business partner, Moving Targets (www.movingtargets.com), is a provider of new resident direct marketing programs. Loyal Rewards and Moving Targets have served over 20,000 merchants nationwide. Jay can be reached at 800-926-2451 or jay@movingtargets.com.

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Bill Consolo is a guy who isn't satisfied with the status quo. As president of Chief's Manufacturing and Equipment Company, a Cleveland-based provider of no-touch car wash systems and componentry, Consolo constantly looks for ways to help his customers improve their quality of service. Consolo also operates the Chief's Auto Wash adjacent to his factory-a venture he's equally keen to keep vital and fresh.

"The key to long term success is to always be expanding your customer base," he says. "The way I figure it, if we can attract 100 new customers per month, I believe we can make 100 of them loyal customers."

In today's media-obsessed world, many small business owners assume that TV and radio advertising is the golden ticket to name recognition, trial patronage and long-term sales success. But Consolo, and many other savvy car wash owners like him, have found that direct marketing-specifically, strategically-planned online and conventional mail programs-have ROIs that far exceed more glamorous, and less productive, alternatives.

A key part of Consolo's direct mail regimen is the use of Moving Targets (www.movingtargets.com). Based in Perkasie, Pennsylvania, Moving Targets specializes in direct marketing programs aimed at new residents. The company helps retail businesses find these newcomers and convert them to customers through a two-step process: first, Moving Targets uses proprietary research techniques to generate highly efficient mailing lists of new residents; second, it writes and mails customized letters on the retailer's behalf that welcome the person to the community. Enclosed with the letter is a gift certificate for a free sample-in Consolo's case, a free car wash.

"Moving Targets gave us the opportunity to do two things," Consolo says. "The first was the ability to advertise only to those people moving into our market area. The second thing was to target those people directly and personally. In today's fast paced world, people don't have the time to go through an envelope containing dozens of coupons. They are far more likely to open up an envelope addressed to them. When they find out it's for a free car wash, it's a no-brainer."

Jay Siff, president of Moving Targets, states that research backs up the notion that new movers are one of the most lucrative ways for merchants to gain new customers-and that a free service is the best way to bring in those prospects.

"The U.S. Postal Service has studied the buying habits of people who are new to a community. In the first 24 months after a move, an estimated 80% of new residents will try new products and services from local businesses," he says. "In fact, 80% of new residents will also redeem gift certificates from local merchants. There's no question that newcomers are more open-minded. They haven't formed loyalties yet to the businesses in their neighborhood. Whichever business gets to them first is likely to be the one they stay with."

Consolo has found that his current new resident outreach far outperforms the other marketing tools he has used. "We've tried all forms of advertising over the years. Cable TV and newspapers are difficult to measure. We tried Val-Pak, JB Dollar Stretcher and Welcome Wagon. The best return we ever got from these was 2-3%. With Moving Targets we obtain a 15% return."

Bill Proestler, another Moving Targets user and president/owner of Five Star Car Wash, says that the continuing influx of people to his community of Fairfield, California, northeast of San Francisco, has made it essential for him to reach out to new residents. "We've sent mail to new movers on a regular basis almost since we opened our doors in 1997," he says. "It's a key component of our overall marketing efforts."

Bringing in new customers, however, is just one method of using mailing programs to expand and leverage a user base. With the advent of email, car washes have a powerful new tool to change customer habits, promote specific services, increase business goodwill and more-and perhaps most importantly, to begin achieving such worthy aims within one afternoon.

Email has an immediacy and intimacy direct mail doesn't, say the experts. As a local merchant, you can use these characteristics to your advantage to keep sales up and encourage fast action.

Say, for example, your city just went through a heavy snowstorm and is just beginning to dig out. Getting the family car washed isn't a high priority at that point-unless you send out an email that includes an "After-Blizzard Special" certificate good for 25% off an exterior wash. Or perhaps you're turning away business on Fridays or Saturdays, but Mondays are slow. Send a Monday discount certificate via email to your customers, and you'll pick up traffic that day of the week-without hurting your weekend sales.

Siff, whose company also offers an email marketing service called Loyal Rewards (www.loyalrewards.com), says it's important to give people, including new movers, reasons to return after a good experience at your car wash.

"Most car washes wait passively for a customer to return. They're missing the boat. The more effectively you market to your patrons, the move often they'll come back," he states. "People instinctively agree with the message that a cleaner car is not only more enjoyable, it also lasts longer. You can encourage that kind of frequent patronage through emails containing useful certificates."

Car wash operators can also use email to encourage word-of-mouth, says Consolo. "When you find a good service, whatever it is, you tell at least 10 friends, family members, and co-workers. When you start doing the math, it turns out that 1,200 new customers over the course of a year has the potential to get you exposure to 12,000 more customers annually." Siff adds that an added incentive always helps. Sending an email message that announces a free wash for every two new customers the recipient brings to you, for example, demonstrates the friendly, relational aspect of your business.

So how do you build a strong list of email addresses? The answer lies in your existing customer base. Most merchants, it seems, simply don't know how to leverage the incredible potential tied up in their current customers.

Siff recommends training your cashiers, as part of their duties, to routinely ask each of your current customers, "Would you like some free gift certificates for a future visit?" Chances are the answer will be "yes", in which case your cashier asks the person to fill out a card listing his or her name and email address.

Now you have your list. Be sure to follow up quickly with a nicely designed certificate good for a discount, to demonstrate your good intentions to follow through with your offer.

One of the best reasons mailing programs work, notes Proestler of Five Star Car Wash, is that the owner/manager retains total control over the integrity of his or her business communications. "I don't participate in coupon book operations where my business is packaged with twenty or thirty others. I also don't let promoters go out and hang door tags without my supervision. It's important to me that my customers hear directly from me, in a format I manage. It's more professional and it's simply good business," he says.

Asking your current customers for their email address also ensures that your messages are welcome, since you've been given implicit permission to contact them. By using this valuable marketing channel strategically, you can expand your customer base, forge positive relationships and increase sales, all at a cost far less than what the "glamour boys" on TV spend.

CRAIG ASTLER is a freelance writer specializing in marketing and business topics.

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If you can't measure the results, you might as well kiss the money goodbye.

Mark Hurley is a firm believer in knowing how his marketing dollars are performing. The 10-year Hungry Howie's Pizza franchisee in New Baltimore, Michigan, can tell you which of the two new mover programs he has used brings more people in the door, which coupon mailing service keeps his ovens busier, and how much traffic is generated by advertising on local Kroger receipts compared to the neighborhood paper.

Hurley's ability to separate the marketing wheat from the chaff stems from his use of promotional strategies that deliver measurable results. Let's face it: if you can't track the success of a program, you can't know if it's worth your money the next time around. That's why there's a resurgence in direct response marketing. Numbers talk.

When you run a local radio commercial, TV spot or corporate branding ad, you have no way of knowing how many pizzas you sell as a result. When you ask the customer to bring in a certificate for a free pizza or a mailer for a birthday special, you can measure the effectiveness by the number of people who hand in the letter or card. It's that simple.

If you have a computer system capable of documenting the returns for comparison and customer tracking purposes, so much the better. But even without sophisticated data analysis, you can tell the difference between a hit and a miss simply by eyeballing the pile of returned coupons (for example). Here are some guidelines to get you started.

1 - Always make an offer
Whether you use a postcard, letter, ad or email, you need an offer that requires direct action by the customer. It can be anything from two large pizzas for $9.95 to free breadsticks, and it doesn't even have to be a discount. Suggestive selling with your everyday pricing works, too, as long as there's a coupon to be redeemed.

Even a radio or TV spot can be measured if you say something like "Mention this ad and we'll give you a free pizza cutter." You will never know how many people actually heard or saw the ad, but you'll know how many responded.

2 - Use unique identifiers
"Almost anything is trackable if it has a unique offer or code," says Jay Siff, CEO of Moving Targets, a Pennsylvania-based provider of new resident direct marketing programs for pizzerias and other small businesses. "As long as you can identify where it came from, you can determine how well it pulled."

In the case of Moving Targets, the get-a-free-pizza gift certificate sent to new community residents is a one-of-a-kind piece that is instantly identifiable without any coding required. If you're running the same special in several newspapers, code the coupons so that you can trace the source. And so on.

3 - Create excitement
Fresh ideas sometimes help boost redemption rates. For Mothers Day, independent 180-seat operator Georgio's Pizza in Pensacola, Florida, offered $10 off the check as well as family snapshots taken at the table. For Fathers Day, in a spoof on the Dad's gift cliché, the offer was $15 off plus a tie. Both incentives were sent to the 500 customers in Georgio's email database via Loyal Rewards, an email loyalty marketing service.

"Those offers drew 55 people for Mothers Day weekend and 70 for Fathers Day, and we increased our sales over the previous year even with the discounts," says Georgio's president Carl Hixon III. "I try to make the specials for my regular customers really enticing, and it pays off."

4 - Track via POS
If you have a POS system that is capable of tracking coupons or other offers, you can capture precise response data and then compare the results of different pricing, packages, publications or programs. For shops that run dozens of promotions, this is the only way to distinguish between good, better and best returns.

"Most pizzerias are in the delivery business, but how many drivers come back with a coupon? If they don't, simply counting the redeemed coupons doesn't give you an accurate picture of response," says Tom Bronson, CEO of Texas-based DiamondTouch, which specializes in pizza POS systems. "If you can instead identify that coupon in the POS system at order time, you can see precisely how each program performs."

5 - Mine your database
Another advantage to computerizing your response data is the ability to track customer purchasing behavior for followup marketing. With this information, for example, you can send "lazy customer" incentive mailings to people who haven't ordered in 30, 60 or 90 days. These reminder cards should include offers that can in turn be tracked.

"We've been seeing a 35% return on lazy customer mailings and twice that rate on offers to frequent customers," says Jennifer Wiebe, marketing manager for Vancouver-based POS vendor SpeedLine, which runs a database marketing program called SpeedMail in conjunction with California-based direct marketer Mailmark. "You should never forget to market to your existing customers."

6 - Crunch the numbers
By knowing the precise response to a given marketing program, you can make an intelligent decision about whether to run it again. On the most basic level, you can see that a program cost X to run and produced Y in sales. There's no guessing game like there is with a TV spot or a pre-movie commercial in your local Cineplex, where you never know how many impressions translate into sales.

Then compare the results of each initiative and decide what goes and what stays based on the numbers. If you want to get more scientific, you can also calculate the lifetime value of a customer - that is, the total profit on all purchases the customer makes as long as they remain a customer based on your average sale, average number of repeat visits in one year and typical relationship length - to help determine how much to spend overall.

7 - Discard poor performers
This is where the rubber meets the road. Hungry Howie's Hurley, for example, stopped using ValPak coupon mailings when he realized that ADVO was yielding a better return. Likewise, he prefers Moving Targets over another new-mover program because he gets over an 80% return on Moving Targets mailings, sees many redeemers turn into repeat customers, and has the added benefit of certificates with names and addresses that can be harvested.

As management consultant Peter Drucker once said, "Other than marketing and innovation, everything else is just an expense." The question is how to choose from the dozens of strategies competing for a slice of your advertising pie.

If you use direct response methods, the choice is easy. All you have to do is count.

Rena Wish Cohen is a freelance writer based in Chicago.

While you've been busy running your auto repair business, working hard to provide good service and reverse declining car counts, something has happened out there in the non-automotive world: the "accepted" rules of marketing have died. Gone. Kaput. And in their wake, a brand new promotional ballgame has arisen.

Fortunately for you, your competitors haven't noticed. But you should. Because while they're still hammering away with the same old, tired-and ultimately ineffective-advertising tactics, you have the opportunity to not follow suit. And in doing so, gain the upper hand in this hotly competitive marketplace.

You see, the onset of modern technologies such as email, the Internet, and customer database programs have changed the marketing game forever. Borrowing concepts from the direct marketing world and empowering them with an amazing ease of use, these new technologies have made communicating with customers simpler, more immediate, more measurable, and less expensive than ever.

One would think these breakthroughs would be immediately embraced by businesses everywhere. Yet it's amazing how many auto repair shops-independents and chains alike-still look at cheesy local television and radio commercials as the "gold standard" for marketing their business.

You know what? Let them believe that. Why should you follow others who are caught in old-school thinking, when the power of the post-mass marketing age is here?

John Wanamaker, the father of modern advertising, once said, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don't know which half." Like Wanamaker, too many small business owners believe the effectiveness of marketing campaigns is just one of those things man was not meant to know. Perhaps that was true in Wanamaker's time. But it's certainly not true today!

In the modern world, the best way to get real bang for your marketing buck is to leverage this era's new tools to create immediate and one-on-one communications that target your best, most receptive customers and prospects. Capture these lucrative audiences and, once you've brought them to your door, give them a reason to come back. That's how to spend an advertising dollar without wondering where fifty cents of it went.

As an example, let's compare two methods of obtaining new customers: mass media marketing versus targeted direct mail. The mass media strategy ultimately depends on brand switching; that is, bombarding people who frequent your competition with messages, in hopes that someday they will want to try your operation instead.

Trouble is, it may take years before these folks have the inclination to make the switch from one brand to another. Why waste marketing dollars in a scattershot effort to pry loyal customers away from the other guy? Persuading a consumer to switch from a business he or she has frequented over a long period of time is a difficult, costly, low ROI proposition.

On the other hand, there is a vast pool of consumers who are not tethered by habit and inertia to their auto repair provider. In the United States today, large numbers of people relocate for many different reasons. "New movers"-people who are relocating from one geographical area to another-are a goldmine of market potential.

Research shows that new movers are 80% more likely to try out new products and businesses during the weeks and months following their relocation. In fact, the U.S. Postal Service has identified a "hyperspending" phase following a move, during which new residents spend $7,100 on average for everything from refrigerators to takeout meals.

During this period, they are also looking for merchants who can provide the products and services they are going to need over the long term. Including, most notably, auto repair.

In her 1999 book Making the Big Move, noted career and relocation transition expert Cathy Goodwin outlined the importance of approaching new residents during the first few months following their move. This is a key period, one that occurs before the new residents have fully assimilated into their new neighborhood and established the habit of taking their business to your competition.

To bring in these new prospects, the key is to offer a "too-good-to-pass-up" offer: a gift certificate offering a free premium service. Not a discount…not a "buy one, get one free" deal…but a true giveaway, paired with a personalized letter that welcomes the recipient to your community and outlines your company's location and services.

A huge percentage of prospects respond to such offers. Make sure that their first experience with your operation is warm, welcoming and professional, and chances are excellent you will have won yourself a loyal, long-term customer.

Bringing in a new customer, however, is just one weapon in today's target marketing arsenal. To make gift certificates worth their cost, you need to keep customers coming back. You can do this by gathering email contact information from each customer, creating an electronic database, then offering specials that get those customers back in the door far faster than if you wait for the next appointment to occur.

Once you know who your customers are and how to reach them, it's relatively easy to offer last-minute, one-week-only deals that will perk up car counts during slow weeks. Perhaps you offer 50% off the cost of a tire rotation and alignment service package. Compose a short email outlining the discount, include a certificate good for the package, and hit "send." Before long, you'll have your best customers coming in once again for a sampling of your friendly, high-quality service.

Perhaps the best thing about these "new mover" and "loyal customer" strategies is that your customer database becomes the vehicle for establishing a measurable and definable ROI. Let the other guys fritter away their money on nebulous mass marketing campaigns. Thanks to your state-of-the-art approaches, you'll know exactly what you're spending. Better still, you'll be able to generate business at a lower cost-per-customer than anyone in your service area.

While it's true that the auto repair field is challenged with declining car counts and less frequent service appointments, it is by no means an epitaph for the industry. Starbucks, the wonder story of coffee retailing, has reshaped its category in an era when coffee consumption has actually decreased. It is, in fact, possible to thrive in a shrinking market.

To do so, savvy business owners must target sympathetic audiences, spark genuine interest in their company's product or service, and keep those customers coming back for more. Don't be a lemming. Mass marketing is dead-but by embracing new-media strategies, your business can remain very, very much alive.

About the Author
JAY SIFF is a principal of Moving Targets (www.movingtargets.com), a Perkasie, Pennsylvania-based provider of new resident direct marketing programs for small business. Moving Targets has successfully introduced more than 26 million families to over 20,000 merchants nationwide, offering more than $517,000,000 in free products and services. Jay can be reached at 800-926-2451 or jay@movingtargets.com.

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Local pharmacies have a special place in traditional American society. Neighborhood pharmacists provide expert medical advice, inexpensive prescription drugs, and add to a greater sense of community in residential areas. But, in recent years, the neighborhood drugstore has been under attack by the rise of national pharmacy chains, which have gobbled up market share in areas across the country. In 2003, Congressman Anthony Weiner, NY, filed a detailed report that investigated the proliferation of chain pharmacies in New York neighborhoods. The report found that, on average, chain pharmacies not only charge more for prescription drugs but offer a lower level of quality customer service, with only 58% of pharmacy customers rating their experience satisfactory (compared to 88% of community pharmacy customers).

Despite the obvious differences in quality of service between neighborhood drugstores and chain pharmacies, many local pharmacists have found their businesses struggling to stay alive in an expanding sea of big-name drugstores. In order to preserve both their businesses and the role that these businesses play in their communities, local pharmacists must implement smart marketing campaigns targeting specific customers and should take the initiative to further integrate themselves into their surrounding communities.

Local Marketing and New Mover Programs
Most neighborhood pharmacists do not have any way to compete with the advertising budgets of large chain stores. Trying to “out-advertise” chain stores is and will always be an exercise in futility. Thus, local pharmacists should play to their strengths in order to promote their store and its services. Neighborhood pharmacies offer a sense of community that large chain stores will never be able to provide. And, in order to emphasize that sense of community, local pharmacists should make every attempt to get involved in neighborhood organizations.

Become a sponsor of the local Little League baseball team. Form a cross promotion plan with another local business. Get involved with and contribute to local churches, synagogues, and mosques. When you associate your business with the things that mean most to your neighbors—family, their neighborhood, and community—you raise the standing of your business and help to position your pharmacy as a contributing member of the community in the minds of your customers.

In recent years, large corporations have taken a page out of the book of local entrepreneurs, and have begun to sponsor community groups and events as a way to generate positive publicity and drive up sales. However, large corporations will never be able to take as much of an interest in a specific community as the entrepreneurs who live and work in that community. With that in mind, local pharmacists should take steps to develop creative and innovative ways to combat the local promotional activities undertaken by corporate competitors.

Maybe your big chain competitor’s cost/benefit analysis has identified local marketing as an activity that could help trigger sales growth within a community, and has thus begun to sponsor the local high school football team. While many entrepreneurs’ initial reaction would be to throw up their hands in despair, smart business owners know there is always a way to take a marketing plan to the next level. As a way to show your support for the local team, publicize an offer within the community that pledges to discount specific items based on the margin of the local team’s victory over their competitors. Did your team beat their opponents by 21 points? Well then pledge to discount specific items, beverages for example, by 21% the following day. Creative marketing plans will help to show that, regardless of your competitors’ corporate publicity campaigns, it is your locally-owned business that truly takes interest in the community, its events, and its members.

In addition to grassroots community involvement, local pharmacists should reach out to specific segments in their community in order to expand their customer base. One such customer segment is new movers. New movers are individuals who have recently arrived in a new town or city and are unfamiliar with the area and its local businesses. These individuals can often be disoriented with their new surroundings, and are frequently more adventurous about trying new things than long-time residents. Additionally, new movers typically establish routines within the first few months of arriving in a new location. By approaching these individuals before they have settled into their daily pattern, entrepreneurs can greatly increase the chance that their business will become part of the new mover’s daily routine.

Approaching new movers and capturing their attention can be as simple as sending out a welcome letter. Picture this:

You’ve just arrived to a new town and you’re trying to get accustomed to your new environment—locating the nearest grocery store, establishing a checking account, etc. You open your mailbox and find a letter from a nearby pharmacy, welcoming you and your family to the neighborhood. Inside the letter is a gift certificate for $20 off your next prescription medicine purchase, and a business card with the pharmacist’s name, telephone number, and business address. You make a mental note to switch your prescriptions over to your new address, and put the pharmacist’s business card up on your refrigerator for future reference.

This type of “hook” allows you to capture the attention of new movers and increases the chance that they will become frequent customers at your store. By presenting a “no strings-attached” offer for a discount on a prescription drug purchase, you are convincing new residents to switch their prescriptions over to your pharmacy. Oftentimes once an individual has switched his prescription over to a particular pharmacy he will continue to frequent that pharmacy simply out of habit—thus becoming a valued repeat customer for an initial investment cost of just $20.

Inviting Customers Back with Loyal Rewards
Another way neighborhood pharmacists can increase awareness about their stores and encourage repeat business is to establish a Loyal Rewards program. When customers visit your pharmacy, ask them to provide their email address so that your business can contact them with special offers or seasonal discounts. Explain that you and your employees consider yourselves part of the neighborhood, and would like to have a method through which you can notify your valued customers of special deals and discounts at your business. Collect email addresses from regular and walk-in customers, and use these addresses to build up a customer database.

Next, think about your customers’ needs during specific times of the year. Is Mother’s Day coming up? Email your customers a special offer for wrapping paper or greeting cards. Valentine’s Day just around the corner? Offer your customers a discount on specialty chocolate boxes or scented candles. The point is to think creatively, anticipate your customers’ needs, and then reach out to the individuals you have already established a relationship with. Research shows that repeat customers tend to spend more than first-time customers; use a Loyal Rewards program to ensure that first-time customers will almost always become repeat consumers.

Competing with large chain drugstores may seem like an uphill battle, but neighborhood pharmacists should realize that they provide a crucially important service to American families and neighborhoods. For decades, local pharmacists have provided trusted, reliable advice regarding prescription drugs to communities all over the US. Your community and neighbors want your business to survive. All you have to do is reach out to them.

Jay Siff is the CEO and Founder of Moving Targets™ and Loyal Rewards™ and is a recognized expert on smart marketing strategies. Siff works closely with small business owners to help them attract and retain new customer relationships via targeted new mover marketing campaigns and Loyal Rewards initiatives. Additional information about Siff, Moving Targets, and Loyal Rewards can be found online at www.movingtargets.com and www.loyalrewards.com.

John Wanamaker, considered by many to be one of the fathers of modern advertising, once said: “half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is that I don’t know which half.” Well I hate to break it to you, Johnny, but things have gotten even worse.

We live in a world that is saturated by mass media coverage. Hundreds of channels offer us the widest selection of programming—and advertisements—ever available, and marketers pay well to compete for the attention of consumers. But do traditional advertising methods actually deliver a solid return on investment for small business owners? Not usually. Local auto repair shops are unlikely to see a significant increase in car counts as a result of a commercial or radio advertisement. Chances are that if you’re still spending advertising dollars on local television ads or radio commercials, you’re not wasting just half of your advertising budget; you’re wasting most of it.

So what is a business owner to do? Simple. Where Wanamaker had it wrong was that he believed advertising was some sort of ethereal concept incapable of being tracked, measured, and managed. In reality, your business’s marketing dollars are as easily tracked and measured as your inventory levels or profit margins. All you have to do in order to take your marketing activities to a higher level is implement marketing plans that have been designed to deliver results that can be measured in quantifiable terms.

For the past seven years I have worked with American Car Care Centers (ACCC) and its network of dealers to increase car counts and expand the customer base of ACCC’s business owners. The marketing methods that I advocate focus on 1. reaching out to receptive audiences through Moving Targets (www.movingtargets.com) initiatives in order to generate new business, and 2. encouraging previous customers to purchase services more often through Loyal Rewards (www.loyalrewards.com) offers.

Moving Targets

Moving Targets focuses on approaching new movers—individuals who have recently relocated to your town or city—and enticing them to visit your business with an attractive offer for free service. By welcoming a new mover to the neighborhood through an offer of free service, you are establishing your business as a friendly part of the customer’s new surroundings. People are creatures of routine, and if you can capture a new mover’s attention before your competitors do there is a greater likelihood that your business will become part of your new mover’s daily, weekly, or monthly routine.

But approaching your new mover with an attractive offer is only the first step in the Moving Targets equation. Once your new mover arrives to redeem your free service offer you must make sure to impress him with your business’s level of service. We’ve all heard that “you only get one chance to make a first impression,” but nowhere is this idea more important than in the modern business world. Make a positive first impression and you could end up with a dedicated long-term customer.

Loyal Rewards

But will positive experiences and world-class service always ensure that your customers will keep coming back? Unfortunately, no. But you can increase the chances of seeing greater levels of repeat business by instituting programs that encourage existing customers to visit you more frequently—programs I call Loyal Rewards. They work like this:

Every time a customer visits your business, ask for his email address. Use these addresses to create an electronic database of previous customers. Once you know who your customers are, all you have to do in order to draw them back to your business is give them a good reason to return. Next time your business is having a slow week, for example, you can send out a discount offer for a particular service (valid for that week only) to your previous customers. You’d be surprised to see how a simple service offer can drive repeat business directly to your front door.

The marketing strategies that I advocate with Moving Targets and Loyal Rewards campaigns are reliable, proven methods that deliver results and help businesses to track their marketing dollars. In addition, a number of companies, including American Car Care and Michelin, have long-standing business relationships with Moving Targets. In fact, ACCC dealers can now receive a 100% advertising co-op from Michelin for using the Moving Targets new resident program. Marketing doesn’t have to, and shouldn’t, be a crap shoot. Instituting tailored, measurable marketing campaigns can help make sure that both halves of your advertising budget work to your benefit.

Jay Siff is the CEO and Founder of Moving Targets® and Loyal Rewards® and is a recognized expert on smart marketing strategies. Siff works closely with small business owners to help them attract new customers and build on existing customer relationships with targeted new mover marketing campaigns and customer loyalty initiatives. Additional information about Siff, Moving Targets, and Loyal Rewards can be found online at www.movingtargets.com and www.loyalrewards.com.

There are few things restaurateurs find more satisfying than watching their tables fill up with familiar faces. Repeat customers, the kind that keep coming back for birthdays, anniversaries, or just to grab a quick bite on a Friday night, are crucial for the success of any restaurant. According to global management experts Bain & Co., repeat customers spend 67% more than do new customers. Thus, it is not only personally satisfying to see familiar faces return to your restaurant, but financially rewarding as well.

But how do you turn a new customer into a repeat one? While ensuring that your customers receive the highest level of service and the best food possible are crucial elements to encouraging repeat business, there are strategies that can help you to proactively build relationships with customers and increase the likelihood that new customers will become regular ones.

Previously, I discussed how smart marketing campaigns that target new movers can help restaurateurs to expand their customer base by reaching out to new residents. While inviting a new resident into your business is always a step forward, getting them to return should be your ultimate goal. Here’s how you can do just that:

1. Restaurant owners should encourage their employees to approach each interaction with a new customer as a job interview. Hosts and servers should be friendly, well-dressed, and helpful. Explain to your employees that this type of behavior not only increases the chance that the customer will leave a good tip, but also that the individual will return to tip again in the future. Each time a new customer enters your establishment you are auditioning for their business in the future—and the effects of a negative first impression are very hard to break.

2. After the customer has finished his meal and is waiting for the check, ask that he provide an email address for future correspondence. Explain that your restaurant occasionally offers specials and free meals to its most valued customers, and that you would like to include his email on the restaurant’s list. Most likely he and other customers will provide their email addresses, allowing you to create a database of information about your customers.

3. Use this database to distribute special offers to past customers and drive business to your front door on slower days. For example, if your restaurant is booming on the weekends but typically sees little business Tuesday nights, send out an email on Tuesday morning to your customers inviting them to redeem a gift certificate for a free appetizer or entrée. Explain that the offer is only valid for that Tuesday evening, and encourage your customers to stop by and redeem the gift. Suddenly, your restaurant will begin to fill up with customers who might have previously had dinner at home on a Tuesday night. With a few simple emails, you have turned a slow night into a busy one by reaching out to your customers and giving them a reason to visit you again.

The goal of the above strategy, which I call a Loyal Rewards program, is to create “top of mind awareness”—to keep your business clearly positioned in the forefront of your customers’ minds. While you, as a restaurant owner, may forlornly pine after your customers during slow business nights, your customers will likely not think of you or your business unless prompted by an email, advertisement, or special occasion. In fact, they may always think of your restaurant as their “Friday night” bistro, for example, unless you give them a reason—a Loyal Reward—to visit you Tuesday night as well as on Friday. Thus, you should make it your goal as a successful entrepreneur to casually remind them of the great time they had the last time they visited your establishment, and invite them to repeat the experience with a special offer. By doing so, you are encouraging repeat business by reaching out to customers who you know already enjoy your services.

The bottom line is this: Loyal Rewards programs work both ways. Your customers are rewarded by showing their loyalty to you, and your business reaps the benefits of staying loyal to its past customers. It’s a win-win situation!

There are three ways to grow your business; 1. Generate new customers, 2. Encourage existing customers to become more frequent repeat customers, and 3. Increase the average amount your customers spend. In this article, I will outline a tried-and-tested strategy to generate new customers and encourage repeat business, allowing you to focus on boosting individual sale revenues through special product offers. The ideas I present have helped thousands of small businesses just like yours succeed through expanding their customer base and driving repeat sales. But before we get down to business, let’s begin with a short story:

You’ve just arrived to your new home. Your living room is filled with boxes, and your mind is full of the excitement that comes with changing locations, changing routines, and maybe even changing jobs. You’re ready to celebrate.

But you don’t know that much about your new location. You don’t know which spots are hot, and which are not. Which clubs offer drink specials, and which have dress codes. You’re ready to have fun—but now if you could only decide on where.

Sound familiar? Many individuals have been in this situation after moving to a new location; they’re eager to get out and explore the nightclub and bar scene in their new towns, but they don’t know where to go or who to ask.

As a nightclub or bar owner, these new movers represent a perfect opportunity for you to draw new customers to your location, some of which will likely become your nightly “regulars.” But how do you speak to these new movers? How can you attract them to your locale when they don’t know anything about the area?

Simple. You make them an offer they can’t refuse.

The best way to capture a new mover’s attention is to speak to them directly. Send a letter your new mover’s home, welcoming her to the neighborhood. Briefly introduce yourself and your business in the letter, and present the customer with an irresistible offer, such as a $20 gift certificate at your establishment. No-strings-attached, no “buy one get one free” offers—just a certificate inviting your new mover to have a night out on you at your establishment.

Chances are you’ll see that new mover on Friday night. She’ll walk into your bar, armed with your offer for a night of free entertainment, and present you with a chance to create a repeat customer.

People are creatures of habit. If they go to a bar and receive quality service in a fun, friendly, and safe atmosphere, they will most likely think of the same establishment next time they feel like cutting loose.

It’s your job as a business owner to make sure that each new mover that enters your bar or nightclub has a great time and leaves excited to return. Make sure your employees provide customers that present New Mover gift certificates with the best service and products available. Explain to your bar staff that these individuals have come to your establishment with a no-strings-attached gift certificate and will most likely tip their wait staff very well. The key is to give your customers a reason to visit you in the first place, and then show them such a good time that they will be eager to return.

While building new relationships with customers is an important part of running a successful business, learning how to drive customers to your door when you need them the most is equally significant. You’ve already started to attract new customers with your New Movers program, but you must also begin to start reaching out to your current customers and encourage them to visit your business again and again during times when they normally may not. And here’s how to do just that.

Next time a new customer presents a New Movers gift certificate, ask that she sign the back of the offer and provide an email address. Use these email addresses—as well as those you should be collecting from existing customers—to build up a database of individuals that you know have visited your bar or nightclub in the past and have most likely had a good time. Next time you’re expecting a slow Tuesday or Wednesday night, create a special offer—say, half price on wells and taps—and email a certificate to the customers who have previously provided you with their email addresses. While they may not usually go out on a Tuesday or Wednesday night, if you impressed and entertained them the last time they visited your establishment, most will probably think about stopping by for a drink with their colleagues on their way home from work that night.

And there you have it. You’ve turned a slow night into one that has filled your bar or nightclub with familiar faces.

Peter Drucker, a recently deceased marketing guru, said it best when he said that “the purpose of business is not to make a sale, but to make and keep a customer." You must aggressively market your business to customers by providing them with a reason to try out your services, and must impress them enough that they will always be eager to return. In addition, smart businessmen know that the best way to foster repeat business is to target previous customers with offers and specials that they will find hard to resist. Follow these strategies, and your nightly list of “regulars” will continue to grow and grow.

Automotive sales are in a slump, and no one understands this better than employees of automotive dealerships. And while new car sales may be on the decline, the pressure to boost sales and revenues remains an integral part of the automotive industry.

But selling new and used cars during a consumer drought can be increasingly difficult, especially given the level of competition that exists in the automotive industry. Dealerships compete viciously for customers by offering special pricing deals, low-financing guarantees and other sales tactics, bombarding consumers with radio, television, and print ads in an attempt to beat out their competitors. Not surprisingly, many potential customers have begun to tune out traditional automotive advertisements, turning instead to their friends or mechanics for advice when the time comes to buy a new car.

And therein lies the key to driving new automotive sales: increasing business through the dealership’s fixed operations departments.

It works like this. Consumers who know and trust the mechanics in a dealership’s fixed operations will be more likely to purchase a new vehicle from the sales department of that same dealership. As opposed to competing directly for new sales, smart dealerships should compete indirectly by building business in their fixed ops departments—business that will lead to additional vehicle sales in the future.

And how should you go about building fixed operations revenue? Easy. Institute marketing strategies aimed at new movers by giving them a reason to try your services and encouraging them to return.

Fishing for New Movers

New movers are individuals and families who have recently moved to a new location, most likely after experiencing a lifestyle change (such as a new marriage, divorce, or employment opportunity). New movers typically arrive in their new homes with an open mind, ready to establish new routines and to try out new services offered in their communities. In fact, recent research has found that 62% of new movers buy a new car within the first year after their relocation.

This open-minded mentality, and their relative unfamiliarity with their new surroundings, makes new movers the perfect target for a well-planned strategic marketing plan. So how can your business effectively target these new movers? Easy—through a tailored direct marketing campaign. Here’s how to do it:

Every time an individual or family relocates to your town, make sure they receive a gift certificate in their mailbox offering free services from your business. Not discounted services, not a “buy-one-get-one free” offer, but a certificate valid for the amount of your business’s most popular service—let’s say a routine oil change. Include a letter with the gift certificate that welcomes the new resident to your community and outlines your dealership, automotive services, and location.

Why give away $20-30 worth of services when you could just as easily have offered a substantial discount on your business’s oil change service? Simple. Customers understand and appreciate the word “free.” Almost everyone offers discounted services at one time or another, but when was the last time you received a $20 or $30 gift certificate in the mail from your local automotive dealership? Can’t remember? Exactly.

The point is that irresistible offers get the maximum rate of response. Make a powerful impression, and you will draw the customer to your store. After all, new movers are anxious to establish new routines with local businesses. By making an attractive service offer, your business immediately becomes a prime candidate for the person’s future business.

One caveat, however. You must ensure that every time a customer presents a new mover gift certificate, that person is treated with the highest level of courtesy, customer service, and professionalism. If you treat new movers well on their first visit, chances are they will return to your business again and again.

Giving Your Customers another Reason to Return

So there you have it, right? You’ve attracted new movers with your new mover gift certificates, you’ve “wowed” them when they arrived to redeem them, and now all you have to do is sit back and wait for them to return. Unfortunately there’s a bit more to the task.

Although your new mover offer has certainly gone a long way, it will not guarantee you a steady stream of loyal customers. New movers may like your services, but they may not automatically make your business a part of their everyday routine. Therefore, you must give them a reason to return.

Remember when your new mover arrived to redeem your gift certificate? With any luck, the customer left happy and impressed, probably making a mental note to return to your dealership the next time service was needed. But what if, instead of waiting passively for the person’s return, you could speed up the process with yet another attractive offer? Here’s how.

Before your new mover leaves after redeeming the gift certificate, ask for an email address that will enable you to offer future promotions of the type just rendered. By collecting the emails of your new customers, you are building an electronic database of information allowing you to speak directly to people who already know, use and appreciate your business.

Let’s say you’re having a slow week (maybe even a slow month). Maybe it’s around the holidays and your customers have their minds on other things beside routine auto service. Now think proactively. Instead of waiting for people to come to you, why not draw in those customers who have used your services before, using the same tactics you used when they were new movers?

Remember those email addresses you’ve been collecting? It is time to put them to good use. Decide on a special offer—say, 50% off a tire rotation and alignment service package. Compose a brief email to your customers outlining this discount, and explain that it is only available for the remainder of the week. Hit the “send” button and then wait.

Your customers will receive that email, remember the positive experience they had last time they stopped by your business, and drop by for the special offer. If they do—and if you impress them with your friendliness and quality service once again—they will have yet another reason to visit you in the future. You’ve turned a slow week into a profitable one, just by going back to customers who have already used and enjoyed your service!

That’s smart business. Even more, it’s a strong step towards expanding your customer base, forging positive relationships with customers, and ultimately turning positive customer relationships into new car sales.

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Oftentimes I meet with owners of small and medium-sized car care businesses who feel like they have reached a business plateau in their communities. These entrepreneurs confess that they have successfully established a steady stream of business, but can’t seem to draw additional customers to their facilities. Additionally, these businessmen worry about the level of loyalty among their customers and look for new and innovative ways to encourage repeat business. But most car care business owners are wary of committing to excessive advertising expenditures that may or may not bring measurable sales results, and are unsure of how to go about attracting new customers and encouraging repeat business.

The advice I give these individuals is almost always the same; to capture new customers you have to think about which segments of your community will be most receptive to your business offers. And to guarantee repeat business you must give your customers a reason to come back. Throwing money away on marketing schemes that do not target specific customer groups is not only inefficient, it is dangerous to the health of your business. Instead, entrepreneurs should take control of their marketing activities by aiming to draw new customers from a very important and often overlooked segment in your community: new movers.

Reaching Out for Success

New movers are individuals and families that have recently moved to a new location, most likely after experiencing a lifestyle change (such as a new marriage, divorce, or employment opportunity). These customers offer car care business owners the perfect opportunity to expand their customer base and capture new and loyal business. New movers typically arrive in their new homes with an open mind, ready to establish new routines and to try out new services offered in their communities. If you make your business one of the ones that a new mover samples within the months following her move, you are well on your way to building a new and loyal customer relationship.

The best way to capture a new mover’s attention is to send a letter to her home welcoming her to the neighborhood. Briefly introduce yourself and your business in the letter, and present the customer with an irresistible offer, such as a gift certificate for free premium car care services. No strings attached, no “buy one get one free” offers—just a certificate for a free premium service in order to welcome the new mover to the community.

Chances are the new mover will visit your business, excited at the opportunity of receiving free premium car care services. When the customer arrives, make sure that your attendants treat her very well and ensure that her vehicle is expertly washed and polished. Talk with her to about the neighborhood, its local restaurants and businesses, and ask her if she would like to be notified via email of service specials that your business offers periodically to its most valued customers. If so, collect her email address, make sure she is happy with your attendants’ work, and invite her to come back soon.

If you make a good impression, chances are your new mover will remember your business the next time her car needs to be cleaned. Additionally, she will be familiar with your premium service and will most likely choose to purchase the same service that she received the last time she visited your business—and this time at full price. Suddenly you have a loyal repeat customer, one that prefers your premium services to your basic ones, and one that would most likely not have visited your business had she not received your welcome letter when she arrived in your community. With one letter you have created a valuable new customer relationship—that is how you begin to attract and retain new customers.

Driving Repeat Business

While building new relationships is an important part of running a successful business, learning how to drive customers to your door when you need them the most is equally significant. You’ve already started to attract new customers with your new movers program, but you must also begin to start reaching out to your current customers and encourage them to visit your business again and again.

Remember when you asked your new mover for her email address? Time to put that email address to work. The next time your business is experiencing a “slow day,” simply go to your customer address book, compose an email that offers a 1 day discount on one of your services—say, half off your premium cleaning service—and send the invitation to the customers who know and trust your business.

These individuals will be receptive to your email because of their last experience at your car care facility, and will be drawn to your business because of the discounted services. With one email you have taken a slow day and turned it into a busy one, simply by going back to your loyal customers and giving them an incentive to visit your business.

It is important to remember that your customers are among your business’s most valuable assets. You should consistently strive to build positive relationships with them so that they come to trust and rely on your services. Offering new movers free car care services is a great way to catch their attention—but in order to turn a one-time customer into a loyal one you must provide them with a quality experience and give them a reason to return. “Business basics,” such as offering helpful and friendly customer service, providing a clean and non-threatening business environment, and ensuring quality service at a reasonable price are crucial to building a lasting and loyal relationship with a new customer. And building loyal customer relationships is the key to running a successful and profitable business.

Jay Siff is the CEO and Founder of Moving Targets, Inc., and a recognized expert on marketing strategies. Siff works closely with small business owners to help them attract and retain new customer relationships via targeted new mover marketing campaigns. Additional information about Siff and Moving Targets can be found online at www.movingtargets.com.

Car care facilities are like many local businesses; they rely on loyal customers who, time and time again, return because they like the service, atmosphere, and price. And, whether your facility is a self-serve establishment or an automatic, building positive customer relationships is crucial to business success. But, how do you grow your business and attract new customers? Do quality service and good prices necessarily translate into more customers and expanded revenues? Not necessarily…

Oftentimes consumers think of a carwash as a commodity-level service. As professionals we know that this is not the case, and that the quality of both car care products and services varies widely within the industry. Our job is to demonstrate that the quality of car care service depends on the provider, and that our facility offers consumers the best value for the best price. But, before we are ever able to demonstrate the value of our services, we must first give the public a reason to visit our car care facility.

Many times consumers choose a car care provider based solely upon proximity, visiting a facility simply because it is close to work or home. But there are simple ways to entice customers to drive past other car care facilities while they are en route to your location, and to keep them coming back year after year. In order to find and catch long-term customers, car care business owners simply need to; 1. Speak to the right audience, 2. Present potential customers with the proper “bait,” 3. Impress them with quality service, and 4. Give them a reason to return.

Speaking to the Right Audience

While most business owners would like to market their services to their entire community, savvy entrepreneurs realize that businesses must be selective when initiating a new marketing campaign. Marketing dollars work best when businesses target population segments that are most likely to be receptive to the advertising message. One such demographic often overlooked by small business owners is new movers.

New movers are individuals that are just joining your community, or that have relocated from a different neighborhood or section of town. What makes new movers special from a marketer’s perspective is that new movers are generally more receptive to product and service offers, and are more likely to be willing to establish new routines and visit new locations. With a little effort and the right “bait,” your car care facility could quickly make its way into the routine of a new community member.

Presenting Your Bait

New movers typically establish their daily routines within the first few months of arriving in a new location. And, once they establish their day-to-day routines, they are typically more reluctant to incorporate a new business into their daily behavior. Therefore, entrepreneurs have only a few months to persuade new movers to visit their business and try their services before it is too late. Business owners should recognize that this small window of opportunity could develop into a valuable and lasting customer relationship if handled properly, or a missed opportunity if handled poorly.

What if the next time a new mover arrived in your community he opened his mailbox to find a welcome note penned by your car care business, inviting him to stop by for a free deluxe car wash and wax? Chances are most customers would appreciate the gesture, evaluate the offer, and possibly make a mental note to stop in to receive the free service. Suddenly your car care business becomes one of the only small businesses the customer knows in his new community, raising the chances that he will stop in for a car wash. And, if you have given the customer the right reason to stop by (i.e. an invitation worth one free deluxe car wash), the chances become even more likely that your invitation will bring him to your business’s front door.

Impressing Customers

“But our deluxe car wash retails for $24.99,” you may ask. “Why should I give it away for free when the customer may never even come back?” Good question. Why offer your premium services for free when you could just as easily offer one of your less expensive services—or better yet, a simple discount coupon that grants customers 10 or 15% off the price of a normal car wash? Because you are creating a new customer relationship, and the first step to creating lasting relationships with members of your community is to impress them with the quality of your services. Not many customers will be impressed by an offer of 15% off a normal car wash—but most will be surprised at a special invitation that offers a service valued at $24.99.

Business owners must remember that humans are creatures of habit. One of the most compelling reasons to target new movers is to establish your business as part of the mover’s new routine. If you can impress your customers with your premium services, chances are they will not settle for just your basic “wash-and-rinse” next time they visit your facilities—and next time you can charge them full price! You’ve given away services that retail for $24.99 (but probably cost you far less) to establish a relationship that will earn that amount on a monthly or bi-weekly basis, maybe for many years to come. When you put the cost of giving away your free premium service to a new mover in perspective, it seems less like charity and more like a smart business strategy.

A Reason to Return

So, you’ve enticed new movers to your business with an attractive service offer and have impressed them with your facilities and customer service—now all you have to do is sit back and wait for the business to come to you, right? Wrong. While your new mover offer has certainly gone a long way, it will not guarantee you a steady stream of loyal customers. Unfortunately, while new movers may like your services, they may not automatically make your business a part of their everyday routine. Therefore, you must give them a reason to return.

Now, take a step back to when that new mover entered your business for the first time after receiving his service invitation. He was new to your facilities, unfamiliar with the area, and hoping for a positive experience. And, if you did your job right, he was probably impressed. So why not invite him back? After your attendants have washed, waxed, and detailed his car, ask him if he would be interested in receiving information about future offers such as the one he just enjoyed. Tell him that from time to time your business sends out emails to preferred customers with information about discounted services. Chances are your new customer will eagerly offer his email address for future use. That email address is the beginning of a customer database that will help you to drive business to your doors whenever you choose, and allow you to speak directly to the very customers that appreciate your services.

It works like this; let’s say it’s a cloudy Wednesday afternoon, and your car care attendants have been waiting hours for a customer. They’re getting bored, you’re getting anxious, and cars keep driving past your business. Now think proactively. Instead of waiting for one of these cars to stop by your facilities, why not draw customers who have used your services before to your business using the same tactics you used when they were new movers? Remember those email addresses you’ve been collecting? It is time to put them to good use.

Decide on a special offer; let’s say 50% off your premium service. Compose a brief email to customers outlining this discount, and explain that it is only available for the remainder of the day. Hit send and then wait.

Your customers will receive that email, remember the positive experience they had last time they stopped by your business, and will consider dropping by for the special offer. And, if they do and you impress them with your friendliness and quality service once again, they will have yet another reason to visit you in the future. You’ve turned a slow day into a profitable one just by going back to customers you know have already used and enjoyed your service! That’s smart business!

Remember: customers hold the key to your success. The more often they come to see you, the more likely you are to reach your business goals. Go ahead and give them a reason to stop by.

Everyone knows that a carefully selected wine can make an ordinary meal into a dining experience. But oftentimes relying on common knowledge isn’t enough to drive sales to your door. Beer, wine, and spirits retailers must be as aggressive and innovative in their marketing techniques as any other retailer—and sometimes more. Consumers frequently see beer, wine, and spirits as commodity-level products, and as such focus on details such as proximity to home or office when choosing a retail location. In order to drive customers to your front door you must, 1. Speak to a specific audience, 2. Draw customers to your door with an enticing offer, and 3. Give them a reason to return.

Speaking to a Specific Audience

Imagine moving to a new town. Chances are your move is the culmination of an extended process that includes finding a new job, finding a new place to live, and leaving familiar routines behind. New movers are typically excited, but often arrive at their new homes tired, frustrated, and confused. Unpacking is tedious, they are unfamiliar with their surroundings, and they often feel out of touch with both their friends and the world.

Believe it or not, these new movers represent a perfect potential market. New movers are unfamiliar in their new surroundings, and are eager to establish new routines with local businesses. So, why not send each new mover a note welcoming them to the community with an enticing product offer? Simply by reaching out to new members of your community, you are well on your way to establishing a new and loyal customer relationship.

Enticing Customers

It works like this: When you send new movers your welcome note, include a coupon offering a free bottle of wine, free 12-pack of beer, or free bottle of spirits. Not a “buy-one-get-one free” or a “discounted price” offer, but a genuine, no-strings-attached free gift to welcome your new mover. Ensure that, every time a customer enters your establishment and purchases product using one of these coupons, they will be treated exceptionally well and offered advice about local restaurants, live entertainment, and community amenities. That way, not only will the customer receive a free sample of your store’s product, he will come to think of your establishment as a part of his new community, and a friendly part of his new daily routine.

One important side note: don’t skimp on the free gift. Don’t welcome your new customers to town by offering them a 40oz. bottle of malt liquor or a box of table wine. Select high-end domestic or imported brews, well-respected bottles of wine, renowned spirits—or surprise your new customer with a gift certificate good for $15.00 of store merchandise. A customer isn’t going to remember a free six-pack of low-end domestic beer. He will, however, remember a free six-pack of imported stout or ale, or a gift certificate that allows him to choose whatever he wants.

It may seem counterintuitive to give away inventory with no promise that a new mover will become a loyal customer. But chances are that if your clerks are helpful, your store is friendly and clean, and your shelves are stocked with a wide selection of products, the $15.00 bottle of wine that you gave away will turn into a $15.00 bottle of wine a week for years to come. Additionally, loyal customers tend to pass on information about their favorite stores to friends and family, creating more business and bringing in new customers. And, just like that, you have your return on investment.

Giving Them a Reason to Return

So a new customer just passed through your retail location, was awarded a free bottle of his favorite wine, and chatted briefly with the store clerk regarding local entertainment and cuisine. You’ve done all you can do to encourage him to become a repeat customer, right? Wrong.

While an enticing offer and superior customer service are important parts of creating loyal customer relationships, beer, wine, and spirits retailers need to take a more proactive role in driving customers to their front door. How do you do this? Easy.

Next time a customer passes through your store with a new mover coupon, ask him or her to fill out a card with their name and email address as you are offering them advice about their new surroundings. Explain that their email address will only be used to send special offers and information about discounted products in your store from time to time, and that their address will be kept private and away from spammers.

Now, use these addresses to create a customer database of loyal patrons. Do you see sales slump on Tuesdays? Examine your inventory and send out a special offer to your customers valid only for that Tuesday afternoon. Did you just receive a shipment of Newcastle Brown Ale or Yellow Tail Chardonnay? Send your customers a special offer on the products you have in stock.

Suddenly you have become perhaps the most proactive beer, wine, and spirits retailer in town! You no longer wait quietly for customers to visit your store- you actively recruit them, entice them, impress them, and give them a reason to come back to visit you, again and again. You have become an integral part of the community for a large number of new movers, and a trusted part of many customers’ daily routines.

PERKASIE, PA — (DATE) — Imagine if 20% of your retail customers bought twice as often…or if each customer had a compelling reason to spend $20, $30, or $40 more on each sale. Imagine what would happen if every customer brought in a friend or family member who also made a purchase…or if you could spend less on advertising, but get a better response.

These powerful scenarios are what drive Loyal Rewards™, a brand-new email service of Moving Targets designed for even the most budget- and time-challenged local merchant. Loyal Rewards is so easy-to-use and effective, retailers are charged only when they use the program—and then only at a cost of 4-1/2¢ per user message.

“Retail business owners are busier than ever,” says Jay Siff, CEO of Moving Targets and the driving force behind Loyal Rewards. “Most are not interested in learning the finer points of email marketing campaigns. Loyal Rewards gives them a powerful new tool that is as close as their phone. By calling up Loyal Rewards and speaking to a live person, they can email a promotional offer to all their best customers with the knowledge it will be in recipients’ inboxes within minutes.”

Minimal Work, Maximum Return
Simply put, Loyal Rewards is an email program that incites action through free gift certificates sent to a list of the retailer’s current customers. Recipients welcome the attractively-designed certificates because the offers come from a store or business each person already knows and patronizes.

To help build the email list, Loyal Rewards provides the merchant with 1,000 free “enrollment tickets” at sign up. The tickets are a tried and proven way for customers to easily jot down their contact information, including email address, at the cash register. “All the retailer does is ask the customer, ‘Would you like some free gift certificates for a future visit?’ The answer is nearly always ‘yes,’” says Siff. “Sign-up is simply a matter of handing the customer an enrollment ticket and asking him or her to provide the necessary information.”

Once enough tickets are filled out, the merchant sends them to Loyal Rewards, who then builds a confidential email database. Using the list of email addresses, Loyal Rewards issues specially-designed gift certificates—whenever, or as often as, the merchant wishes—good for a wide range of specials or promotions. The service requires no knowledge of email campaigns on the part of the retailer—simply call the toll-free number, talk to a live representative, and describe the particulars of the offer. Loyal Rewards does the rest.

“The beauty of the Loyal Rewards program is that it’s not perceived as spam by the recipient,” Siff notes. “This is email the customer has requested, from a retailer they know and trust. It’s amazing that most local merchants don’t leverage the power of email to build their business. Loyal Rewards gives them that power—quickly, with virtually no work, at a cost they can afford.”

Cheaper Than Ads

For each mailing issued by Loyal Rewards, the retailer pays just 4-1/2¢ per recipient. An email blast to 600 loyal customers is just $27…or 1,000 for just $45. “After two-and-a-half years of research, we’ve established that gift certificates beat out any other kind of mailed offer, especially coupons mailed through impersonal services like Valpak® or Advo,” adds Siff. “This is measurable, trackable advertising that is guaranteed to produce results.”

Loyal Rewards is so certain of the power of its program that it backs it up with a money-back guarantee. If the retailer is not satisfied with any response, even a year after starting the program, the $49.95 yearly maintenance fee is refunded in full. What’s more, there is no contract with Loyal Rewards and no minimum number of emails required. Retailers can ask for a promotion at any time and are free to stop using the service whenever they wish.

Immediate Response

Because of the immediate nature of email, retail businesses can use Loyal Rewards to stimulate sales at a moment’s notice, for any reason. “Say a seafood restaurant overbought for the weekend and now has fish it has to liquidate quickly. Even if it’s Monday morning, we can get out an email blast in minutes,” Siff points out. “Customers can be bringing their gift certificates with them that evening for dinner.”

For more information about Loyal Rewards, visit www.loyalrewards.com.

About Moving Targets:
Founded in 1992, Moving Targets is one of the nation’s leading providers of direct marketing programs for small businesses. The company’s marketing programs, tailored specifically to the needs of restaurants, pizzerias, auto repair shops, car washes, oil change/lube shops and other small retail operations, focus on powerful sales and/or behavior incentives. For more information, call Moving Targets at 800-926-2451 or visit www.movingtargets.com.

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Oh ye of little faith. If you’re a small, independent restaurant, you’re probably convinced you can’t possibly compete in the marketing arena against those big chains with their huge ad budgets and big-time ad agencies.

Actually, nothing could be further from the truth.

Local restaurants can not only survive, but thrive, in an industry increasingly filled with deep-pocketed national competitors. In fact, independent eateries have unique advantages that can put larger businesses on the defensive. All it takes is an understanding of those advantages—and the willingness to leverage them.

In my fifteen-plus years as a developer of marketing programs for local merchants, I’ve helped many independents make it amidst a crowded local restaurant scene. And while there is no shortage of good ideas out there, those ideas can all be organized around a few key marketing principles every restaurant owner or manager should know. Master them, and you can compete against anyone, big or small.

Using the disciplines outlined here, your establishment can attract new customers, regain lost ones, generate referrals, increase per-table sales, stimulate repeat visits, build customer loyalty and much more. I call them The 10 Commandments of Promotional Marketing:

1. TAKE YOUR CUSTOMER’S POINT OF VIEW. This commandment makes it to the top of the list because it’s one of the most fundamental, yet most often violated, disciplines of all.

How many times have you seen restaurants touting “New Décor” or “New Menu” on window signs or in newspaper ads? (Every time I see “Under New Management” I’m baffled as to who is supposed to be impressed. The customer? All it does is make me think about how bad the place was under the old regime.)

When you promote your business, whether in brochures, on table tents, or in a direct mailing, lead with what’s in it for your customer—not for you. Don’t say, “Buy one, get one free”; instead say, “Get one free with every purchase.” People deal in their own self interest. Make sure your offers reflect that fact.

2. MARKET TO YOUR CURRENT CUSTOMERS. Every day scores of people enter your establishment who have already made the decision to buy from you. These are pre-sold, active customers. Allowing them to exit without asking for personal information—especially a street or email address—is a big mistake.

Gathering such info is easier than you think. All you need is an incentive. It might be a “free lunch” drawing for those who drop their business card in a fishbowl. Or the offer we use in our company’s packaged program, Loyal Rewards—free gift certificates emailed to patrons who provide their online address.

Once you’ve built up your mailing list you can issue any number of powerful promotions to encourage repeat visits or higher check totals. Your goal is to make these past customers think of you first when planning their next night out. Give them a good reason, and they’ll come back again and again.

3. BE THE HOMETOWN FAVORITE. The essence of Local Store Marketing (LSM) is connecting yourself to the pulse of your community. As a locally-owned small business, you have opportunities national chains simply can’t duplicate.

It’s a fact that people have a soft spot for neighborhood merchants who support local causes. Sponsor a community event. Donate food for a good cause. Tell your local little league that any winning team showing up at your door in its entirety for ice cream will receive extra scoops for free. Your support and good will, expressed in ways that are important to your community, will make your restaurant the go-to place in town.

4. GIVE AWAY YOUR PRODUCT. Have you ever considered that giving a 100% discount one time, may be more valuable in the long run than a 10% discount offered on ten occasions?

One of our firm’s most effective promotional programs for restaurants is built around giveaways for people who have just moved into town. These are folks who are trying to feel connected to their new community. What better way to discover a great restaurant, than to receive a coupon in the mail for a free dinner with no strings attached?

You can also use a freebie to bring back past customers—or to reward continuing patronage. Say you’ve noticed a customer who comes in five or six times a month for lunch. After a couple months of this, what if you approached the person’s table and said, “You’re such a good customer, today it’s on the house.” You don’t think that person will tell ten of their best friends about the amazing service they receive from you?

5. PRACTICE “FOUR WALLS” MARKETING. Every area of your restaurant should be well thought out as to how it will promote your product. This gets people to spend more at each visit.

Do you promote menu items on your walls? In the bar? Are special events or holiday offers listed in the restrooms? Four walls marketing extends to the limits of your parking lot or property line as well. Is your street signage readable and well lit?

Servers should also be part of your sales strategy. Train your servers to suggestive-sell side dishes or specials. You can offer incentives to your wait staff such as a $20 bonus to the person selling the most soup in an evening. (Just don’t allow customers to be badgered as a result.)

6. BE OUTRAGEOUS. Wow your customers. Give them a customer experience so unique, so compelling, that they can’t resist coming back.

T. Scott Gross, author of OUTRAGEOUS: Unforgettable Service, Guilt-free Selling, says that such experiences are created using four simple tactics: Have Fun; Create Traffic; Involve The Product; and Do Something Good For Others. And lest you think otherwise, manifesting these experiences can be inexpensive, or even free, for your business.

Cold Stone Creamery has built a reputation on, among other things, singing servers. Ford places white gloves in the trunks of its Explorer SUVs next to the spare tire, so owners don’t have to dirty their hands when changing a flat. Zappos, the online shoe purveyor, has a 365-day return policy for unworn shoes—no questions asked.

7. CREATE A SWIPE FILE. The old saying, “If you can’t think of a good idea, steal one,” isn’t unprincipled when it comes to marketing. In the marketplace of ideas, strategies from other industries or professions can be of great use if you reshape them to fit your particular needs.

Hang onto ads or direct mail pieces that catch your eye. Take notes on effective promotions from businesses in other fields. Collect new service ideas. Put these items in a folder so you have a ready resource when brainstorming ways to stimulate your sales.

8. TRACK EVERY CAMPAIGN YOU RUN. Unlike big companies with multi-million-dollar ad budgets, you don’t have the luxury of throwing money at “image” advertising. Your marketing dollars must provide a direct return on investment. And you can’t manage what you can’t measure!

Ask your new customers how they heard about you, to find out if your ads are working. Whenever you run a promotion, collect the coupons or certificates along with daypart and party size data. Keep a pad or clipboard by the phone to record information. It’s the only way to know which efforts are making you money—and which aren’t.

Lastly, if a promotion is working, keep doing it. Too many restaurants make changes too quickly. It’s ok to add to an effective campaign, but don’t stop a profitable effort until it’s no longer generating results.

9. DON’T BE THE COUPON KING. While we’re on the subject of coupons, a word to the wise: while sampling, discounting and gifting all work well to promote product trial, you must be careful not to overdo it and create a “discounter” image. If you do, your customers will simply become hooked on coupons and wait for the next one to come along. In the meantime your sales and profit opportunities suffer.

As for delivery media, coupon packs like Valpak and Money Mailer lump you in with scores of other coupons. That only dilutes your offer’s uniqueness. Better to come up with a fresh, original idea, then deliver it to your best current and potential customers in a such way that you become top-of-mind versus your competition.

10. IF YOU HIRE PROFESSIONALS, HIRE PROVEN WINNERS. If you’re convinced you need advertising or PR agency help, that’s fine. But don’t be fooled by slick presentations. Check references to ensure that the agency or consultant has a track record of success in the restaurant field. Otherwise you’ll likely be throwing your money away.

Also, guard against attractive promotional pieces that don’t sell. Good design alone is never a reason to approve a piece of creative. Remember that a quick, handwritten note can easily outperform a slickly produced mailer. As a small independent, you have to base your decisions on what will generate a solid return. Demand results from every marketing effort you undertake, and you’ll find your money well spent.

JAY SIFF is a principal of Moving Targets (www.movingtargets.com), a Perkasie, Pennsylvania-based provider of new resident direct marketing programs for small business. Jay can be reached at 800-926-2451 or jay@movingtargets.com.

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As a restaurant industry veteran, I’ve attended and/or exhibited at industry trade shows for many years. Nearly every time I go, I’m surprised at the peculiar lineup of seminars being offered.

Food safety, new credit card options, employee benefits, uniform rentals…nearly every subject of interest to restaurant owners and operators is covered. Every one, that is, except marketing.

Why is marketing acumen taken for granted in the restaurant business? Perhaps it’s the divide that exists between major operators and small independents. Chains and high-volume independents have the staff and the resources to develop sophisticated marketing programs that attract and retain customers as well as promote new products. Their need to acquire new skills is relatively small.

Small independents, on the other hand—the largest segment of the restaurant industry, by the way—are in critical need of help. As I meet small operators one-on-one at these shows, the question I hear most often is, “How can I get more customers?” It’s a question that deserves to be answered.

Marketing, in its simplest expression, is the process of creating and maintaining a relationship between a merchant and his or her customer. The science of marketing as practiced by the “big guys,” however, involves disciplines that are way beyond most local eateries.

In order for smaller restaurants to succeed, they need tools that are appropriate for their size and capability. Sadly, they get precious little support from the industry in acquiring or leveraging those tools.

The fact is, a wealth of local store marketing tactics exists for the local operator that is both practical and highly effective. Menu spin-offs, tableside selling, strategic couponing, email, and targeted direct mail are just a few examples of activities that can pay off in a big way.

Powerful solutions are available for regaining lost customers, generating referrals and word-of mouth, increasing bar sales, attracting new residents, and converting phone inquiries. Special event sponsorships, public relations, sales promotion, one-on-one marketing—the instruments available are endless. Are they properly communicated? Hardly.

Many local restaurants labor under the assumption that they’re at a disadvantage compared to deep-pocket franchise or chain operations. Actually nothing could be further from the truth. Small restaurants typically have a better knowledge of the community, can execute programs faster, and are more willing to take risks. All they need is someone to show them the ropes.

Nor do most marketing ideas take months of practice or advanced business knowledge. Many of the best local store marketing ideas can be implemented quickly and with minimal effort, yet generate benefits that chains simply can’t duplicate.

So how can marketing knowledge be better imparted to small independents? National trade shows are probably the first and most appropriate place. By the looks of most seminar rosters, marketing is an afterthought. It needs to be front and center, right along with other critical business topics.

National restaurant conventions could take a cue from the pizza industry. At this winter’s International Pizza Expo in Las Vegas, the lineup of marketing seminars included presentations on “10 Ways to Increase Your Business in 20 Days,” “Pricing Secrets of Restaurant Owners Who Get Rich,” and “The Fun-Damentals of Four Walls Marketing,” among others. Attendees reported that rooms were packed, with people literally sitting in the aisles to hear the various tips and ideas.

Other informational venues are also underutilized, such as state association gatherings. There’s no shortage of qualified and dynamic marketing experts who, if sponsored by trade groups or vendors, would be willing to give talks. More trade magazine articles on the subject would help as well.

The Internet is one more place where trade groups and associations can offer marketing advice. At the National Restaurant Association website, www.restaurant.org, articles, books, and networking opportunities are currently available. Not many, however—and unfortunately they’re not emphasized. Perhaps if NRA members, particularly small independents, strongly voiced their desire for more street-smart marketing information and training, a broader range of materials would surface.

For independents seeking immediate help, a number of marketing specialists have created excellent books and websites that shouldn’t be missed. Among the ones I recommend are Joel Cohen’s RestaurantMarketing.com (www.restaurantmarketing.com); Cohen’s book “The Last Restaurant Sales-Building Manual You Will Ever Need!” is an invaluable marketing resource. Another expert is Rory Fatt (www.roryfatt.com), whose website includes a free restaurant marketing report as well as other powerful publications.

If the restaurant industry is really serious about helping its practitioners succeed, it will finally address the need among independent owners and operators for practical and cost-effective marketing help. After all, most restauranteurs are chefs first and salespeople second. It’s about time we help them market their food as well as they prepare it.

JAY SIFF is a principal of Moving Targets (www.movingtargets.com), a Perkasie, Pennsylvania-based provider of new resident direct marketing programs for small business. Jay can be reached at 800-926-2451 or jay@movingtargets.com.

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