2009 is going to be a very difficult year for retailers, with the credit
crunch coming to a head, and most of the world slipping into a
recession, Steve Rendell a Tradingeye customer from online baby clothes retailer
Akachan Wear http://jp.akachanwear.com decides it’s time to go old school and
actually show your existing customers some love.

It’s all very well and good concentrating on getting clicks from google
and yahoo visitors in the hope of attracting new sales from your site,
but often sites will overlook existing customers who have purchased
before. I personally feel, unlike the big companies such as BT or Virgin
who offer greatly discounted teaser offers to new customers only, that
looking after your current client list and ensuring that they feel
special yields dividends as well as building an even stronger brand name
and customer base.

With a little bit of simple data-mining (explained in a moment) you
actually have a very targeted and data rich source of information hidden
away within your Tradingeye store. I’m not talking about some super
elaborate scheme like Tesco’s uses to skew your car insurance prices
depending on how much beer you tend to buy every week – but some back to
basics techniques that will allow your fledgling business the chance to
grow on previous sales.

In Japan, a technique that I’ve not seen used before in the UK actually
made a lot of sense. The technique is nothing complicated at all, its a
simple matter of making the whole web shopping process more human, and
allowing customers to see that on the other side of the PC, there are
actually people who care about their business.

Technique One – Thank you Postcard.

Stupid as this sounds, it’s an excellent way to reinforce a sale and
really let the customer know that they are important – and that each
sale matters to you (you being the web-shop owner). It takes two minutes
to do and costs the price of a first class stamp.

After making and shipping a sale, spend 2 minutes printing out a
postcard with a little handwritten thank you note on it, and post it
separately to the customer. We tend to do all ours on a saturday
morning, for all the weeks orders. What to write? Well we usually just
write thank you for the order, hope if all reached you well and that you
were delighted with the product! If there is anything we can do to help
please drop us a note, and sign it off with your name. They then feel
that there is actually a person (with a name) behind the somewhat
automated processing that is associated with web shopping.

Data-Mining, what’s that and how can it help me?

On a very high level, data-mining is taking existing information that on
it’s own isn’t much use, but linking it to other information you might
have and producing hopefully data that could lead to a sales lead.

How do we use data-mining – a real world example… We’ve just received
a shipment of mittens from our supplier in Australia, and of course we
want to sell these as quick as possible. So, who would be interested in
buying these items? Well as they are a matching item for a knitted hat
and knitted jumper that we sell, I’d think that they most suitable
person to buy them would be someone who already has half of the matching
outfit.

All we have to do is have a little dig around in the database to find
out who has bought either of these products, link the customer number
into the customer database, and voila we have a very targeted list of
people who would be interested in this product. Again a postcard with a
nice picture of the new mittens on the front would be printed off along
with a note saying “Saw these and thought of you!!” Off they go like
little laser targeted sales leads.

If you wanted to save costs – you could try emailing out something
similar, but we’ve had much better conversions from actually sending out
something.

Technique Two – Physical Newsletter

Now this is something again which involves a mail shot, but I’m
surprised by the amount of face time these little packages get when they
get delivered through my door. There is a cosmetics company which sends
out a newsletter, maybe once every 3 months, but generally my wife will
find something she likes and buys something from the store because of this.

The surprising thing about these packs are the format. It’s about a 4 or
5 loose leave A4 package sent in a clear envelope. The format of this
bundle is usually a single page – handwritten and photocopied with
little doodles and notes on the page updating everyone on what the store
has been doing, new lines, idea’s and general musings. A little like the
’round robin’ letters you get in a christmas card each year! Also
included will be product shots and new information on any new stock, as
well as details of discounts and promotions that the store is running.
Also thrown in would be a couple of business cards with website
information printed on them.

The whole point behind this is you don’t need to be a computing genius
with photoshop or word. You don’t need a fancy full colour print out to
get the message across. You don’t need to send glossy brochures out. You
just need to get the information in front of people in a cheap and
friendly manner.

Again you could email this out to make it cheaper, but I’m personally
more inclined to read something thats delivered in the mail than
something that drops into my inbox..

Technique Three – A little bribe never hurt anybody…

After packing your order and before sealing the box, chuck in a few
business cards and a little packet of sweets – its a really nice
surprise and you’ll be impressed how much word of mouth you will get by
spending pence on a little freebie..

These are all ways that I have used successfully to increase repeat
business from my existing customer list, and simple back to basic
techniques that will allow your store to stand out from the crowd with a
really personal touch.

I hope that these tips and idea’s give you some thoughts on how to tap
that superb resource that so often gets overlooked,

May 2009 be a prosperous year for you.

Steve Rendell http://jp.akachanwear.com