How Do We Communicate With Our Customers?

We received some interesting comments to last week’s article. It all comes down to the way we communicate with our customers. I listed all of the webinars that I was planning for 2012. Someone wrote that the timing for my webinars, which is 4:00 PM EST is not the best time for a store owner to listen. That gave me an opportunity to share some feedback about my webinars that can, and should, affect all of you. According to my statistics, 96% of all the people who view my webinars do so at a different time from when it is first broadcast. Because they are available online 24/7, the need to be by your computer screen at 4:00 PM EST is not important. I can’t believe that 23% of the people who watch my webinars do so between 1:00 and 5:00 in the morning. (It was encouraging to know that I am not the only person who works in the middle of the night!)

How does this affect you? It affects you because the goal today is the Returnability Factor. I define the Returnability Factor as what is on the website that would make a customer go back to the website again and again. It is offering little snippets of information. What is on the mind of your customer goes a long way. Do a Skype call and have it recorded with a friend in the same business you’re in from another state and add that to your website. Specialty retailers are becoming more special because of their expertise. Make it a New Year’s resolution to add one 60-second snippet to your website every month. Watch what happens!

The other comment which I found quite interesting was from someone who had advertised on both Facebook and Google Ads and discovered what a waste of time and money it was. I can’t agree with him more. He went on to say his two best forms of advertising were signage and word of mouth advertising. He then went on to compare political ads and realized that signage is a major tool in every political campaign. Again, I can’t agree with him more.

In the last two weeks, I have immersed myself in finishing my book called Signs Sell… Harnessing the Power of Your Advertising. I wrote this book specifically for individual industries. I am determined to finish the generic copy by the end of this month. I am thoroughly convinced that I can increase the sales of any retail store by at least 10% with the proper use of signage. This is a bold statement to make during these challenging times. I believe that signage is the most misunderstood and underutilized tool in retailing today. The problem is that most people look at signage as just sales or price signs. There is so much more to signs than just that. Extensive research has been done that proves that when you can add the benefits to the customer in a sign, it will make that product sell even faster. That’s not even to mention educational signs, entertaining signs, and signs that will create an emotional attachment to a business.

What I found interesting in the blog comments was that signage and word of mouth advertising were their two best resources to generate sales. The reason for that is that signage is a form of word of mouth advertising. There have been extensive studies over the years to determine what advertising medium is the best source for customers in different types of stores and in different types of areas.
These studies and surveys asked customers how they heard about a store. They list all of the various forms of advertising, from newspaper, radio, TV, magazines, billboards, signage, to word of mouth advertising.  Naturally, word of mouth advertising would always be number one. Then the numbers would vary depending on the type of store or location. In rural areas, a radio station or newspaper can be the dominant player. But that is not what is important.

What was important is the fact that when the category of signage, including billboards, was eliminated from the list, the majority of those who choose signage moved over to word of mouth advertising. For some reason the customer perceives signage as a form of word of mouth advertising. As if someone told them about it but they don’t remember who said it.

Within the next couple of weeks, I am going to be releasing a FREE Sign Audit for you to use in your store. This will become part of the new book but I thought I would like to share it and get your feedback. This will help you assess if you are taking full advantage of the power of signage.

Another comment that was made on the blog was from someone who talked about how effective their email newsletter was. Obviously having written a weekly newsletter for the last several years, I am partial to this type of communication. Having said that, I realize that the phenomenon of texting is becoming the new frontier of communications. The unfortunate part about email is that the open rate is constantly dropping. It is currently approximately 22%. Compare that to the open rate of a text message at 98%. The more disturbing statistic comes from a study done by a Boston research firm that states a staggering amount of the people who had opted into a website to receive email from a store had unsubscribed to at least one or more of these emails per month. In short, you better give them value and a reason to open them up.

There are so many new and innovative ways of reaching customers today. Our challenge has become figuring out the way our customers want to hear from us most. Maybe that is why signage has worked so well. Look for the sign audit and thank you for the interesting feedback. Have a great week.