Aug. 3/10; Volume 30/Number 4
By Jim Augustus Armstrong
(First of two parts)
My goal for this column is to provide practical, hands-on strategies that you can immediately plug into your flooring business to generate money. In this series, let’s take a look at how a number of these strategies can be assembled to form a marketing blueprint. These strategies work together to create a marketing multiplier effect, giving you an enormous advantage over the big boxes and other competitors. Following is the foundation for the Core 3 strategies:
Core strategy No. 1: Sales closer system
This is a sales process that converts shoppers into buyers and increases your closed sale ratios. It also has a huge multiplier effect on the rest of your marketing. Let’s say your website generates 10 walk-ins per month and you normally close three of them—a sales closer system can increase these to four or five closed sales, multiplying the effectiveness of your website without increasing your costs.
Core strategy No. 2: Referral marketing system
By using a system to farm those five closed sales for immediate referral business, you can add another two or three sales—also a big marketing multiplier.
Core strategy No. 3: Monthly direct response newsletter
If eight customers who visited your website subscribe to your monthly newsletter, you are ensuring their repeat business and boosting your referrals over the coming months from those customers, which is another marketing multiplier.
The rest of your customer list is a gold mine, and if you’re like most dealers, it is a woefully untapped gold mine. A monthly newsletter is hands-down the best way to mine this gold. To build upon this foundation, I recommend the following set of guidelines and strategies:
Zero resistance selling environment
When customers come into your showroom, the following zero resistance strategies should be in place:
- Hand customers a beverage menu and ask, “What can I get you to drink?”
- Cover a wall of the showroom with testimonials from raving, satisfied customers.
- Feature monitors that show photos of customers, testimonials, before-and-afters and video clips of you interviewing customers.
- Serve freshly baked cookies on a tray to all walk-ins.
- Have a children’s play area equipped with toys, video games and DVDs.
- Offer men a “man cave” with a recliner, mini fridge for beers or sodas and a large flat screen TV tuned into ESPN.
Testimonial drip campaign
After the flooring is installed in the homes of each of your eight new customers, get photos of them along with testimonials. Send postcards to the 500 homes surrounding each installation with a headline that reads, “Your neighbors just got the beautiful floors of their dreams!” Include the customer’s name, photo and testimonial. Also include a special offer with a deadline exclusively for neighbors.
5-around strategy
The five homes surrounding each previous installation (one on either side plus three across the street) should get a door hanger that says, “Your neighbors just got gorgeous new floors!” Include an exclusive offer with a deadline.