Every one of us comes to our birthday gets heaps of organisations offering us something to buy with them. The reason why is because nothing else seems to bring people in like a birthday offer. Here is a screenshot of a study.

According to the study, 51 percent of consumers do feel special if a retailer acknowledges their birthday, and 40 percent are more likely to shop at a retailer that recognises their birthday. I can believe that as nothing seems to bring people into a shop than a birthday offer.

With your POS software check out the Customer Loyalty Mailing section, there are as you can see heaps of options just on the primary screen here we will discuss the other options later.

Note you can relate it to previous purchases too to personalise it.

If you are going to do this, you need to remember a few simple points.

1) The offer for maximum effect must arrive two to four weeks ahead of the birthday. People are making plans, they will be busy, they need time, and you have to give them adequate notice to be part of their plans.

2) It needs to be meaningful to them. Think of your birthday in your shop, you want something unique, special and you are willing to pay more to get it than usual, what is it or can be this item? Maybe instead of an item, you select a range of possible items so to make the net bigger.

3) Dollars overall tend to work better than discount percentages so $15 off if the item is over $100 works better than 15%.

4) A gift works well too, people expect presents on their birthday so, for example, the best bread in our store free for your birthday if you buy over $30 of stock.

5) Studies have shown people will sign up for a shop VIP club just to get a birthday present.

Many of my clients notice when they do sales report that they tend to do better when they sell brand items rather than no-name products. This is often strange as it is doubtful that many people know these brand and yet the public is often willing to spend more on these branded items.

This question often confounds experts, for example, I have done a barista course, I am a coffee junkie who takes his coffee seriously, and I claim a lot of expertise on this subject. Yet I am puzzled as to why so many people like Starbucks coffee. I do not think it is a good coffee, but I know if I put a Starbucks sign in a coffee shop, they will sell a lot more coffee. The brand sells.

If you are interested in why branded stock usually sells better, check out here this chart.

The University of Southern California | Master of Science in Applied Psychology Online

Sooner or later, we all have to decide as to what colour our business or organisation is going to adopt. So I was very interested when I got a chance to discuss this issue with an advertising agency that was advising a chain of shops. It was not considered to being a little decision what colours were the shops were going to become. I then left and did some research.

According to studies, we process about 80% of our information visually and the other 20% through a range of senses. So the first point that will show to anyone walking past your shop is the colour.

As a first-level approximation, I think that orange is a colour you want to stay away from as it gives a message that you are selling on price, and you want to be seen as cheap. However, if you do want to be seen as the cut-price shop in the shopping area, it would be the right colour.

If you want to show that you are exclusive, black and blue are your best options. Blue is useful if you are marketing to men, one problem with blue I notice is that it appears that almost everyone seems to like it, so it is probably too common.

Yellow is also suitable for men too, but aged people sometimes see yellow walls as dirty. So if older people are a significant category for you, you may want to avoid it.

One advantage of marketing to women, I notice is that you have a great deal more flexibility with colours. Purple is a problem as men tend to dislike it very much, but women tend to like it a lot My wife who studied colours a lot says that the only a few men that like it, and they are mainly homosexuals. I doubt this as I like it.

It is probably worth discussing the issue with an expert, which many of the paint companies have. They are not that expensive, a client of ours paid about $200 for an hour consultation and got a gift voucher of $80, so it cost them $120. It certainly better discussing it with an expert then what happened to me when I tried to address what colour my company should adopt with a person who is colour blind and was too embarrassed to tell me that.

The other issue is that once adopted you have to live with it, for the next 5 to 10 years.

There was some enquires and discussion after my recent post on Google #Masterclass2017 of how important is #local search for SMB. Well, here is a chart that you may find interesting although it's not dealing with SMB as such.

There obviously is a lot of interest in local searches. How influential are they to your business? Well, here is a study of just how important by brightlocal here

Here are some highlights in Italic.

84% of people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation.
90% of consumers read less than 10 reviews before forming an opinion about a business.
74% of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more.
58% of consumers say that the star rating of a business is most important.

People today are clearly forming a view on your business faster than ever. Based on this it does not take them much time. A few dreadful reviews, a awful star rating and you are out.

The good news, is that the study shows.

7 out of 10 consumers will leave a review for a business if they're asked to, so ask people to write something good and you have to keep doing it as
73% of consumers think that reviews older than three months are no longer relevant, in fact, I doubt they would read these old reviews no matter how good they are, as reviews are listed from most recent backwards and very few people are reading more than a few. So great five star reviews, three months ago are of minor use.

Here is an example I needed to buy some dog food urgent on the way home as we had run out, so I did a google search "Dog food near me" and got something like this.

I looked at how close they were and also the rating. What would you look at? Now tell me it does not matter in retail?

Well, the Gift show in Melbourne closed today. As it is the largest in Australia, so many retailers come from all over the country to see it.

Overall, I had mixed feeling about the Melbourne Giftware show for retailers. It was clearly a great chance for retailers to see thousands of unique products. It certainly presented them with a large and fresh assortment of products and resources, plus it was a great opportunity for retailers to meet many of the newer and smaller suppliers.

My big concern is that I thought most of the items on offer were too expensive. I think if I was seriously thinking of selling gifts, I would go to a large Asian overseas gift show as well. Trips to Asia are not that expensive and it would not take a large order to cover the trip.

Anyway, here are some photos which will give you a feel of the large range of products that were available.

A few of my clients realised too late that they had missed out on extra sales due to World Chocolate Day. One that did promote it, told me that the sales today are very good on chocolate, the public really got behind it.

What it shows is that you have to follow the latest trends, it is not enough to use your reporting in the point of sale software with its low-stock alerts, because some days can if you push it, produce extraordinary sales.

If you are going to send SMS in bulk to promote your shop please be careful of what time you are sending it. One of my clients yesterday sent a few hundred SMSs to his clients advertising a sale for some products for Wimbledon tennis.

The SMSs went out at 2:00am. Although we do not think that any law was broken, I doubt many of their clients would be pleased with getting SMSs at that time. If you are using SMS, which under our group deal is now even more economical, please send them, it at a reasonable time, you may find this useful as a guide on this question.

Product bundling or group sell is probably the second most common marketing system in retail today. The wikipedia has an article on it here.

You can find it in our software in stock pricing under group sell.

What you are doing is grouping certain stock items together, to sell them as a group. Here are some typical scenarios, which can show you the power of this concept.

1) Make a group with a slow-moving item that few want, add it to a fast-moving item and try to sell them together. Often people wanting that fast item, will grab the pack for a little more.

2) Put several slow moving items together at a reduced price and hope that someone wants them.

3) Put many of the same items together and make a bundle for people that want large quantities.

4) Putting several items together to up sell e.g. most people in a coffee shop only want a coffee, make a special item a cake and a small coffee and people tend to order it, so giving the coffee shop owner overall a better sale.

5) Create a pack for people that makes a solution for people so making it easy for them to buy e.g. a set of paint brushes, canvas, etc. for people thinking of doing some painting. This works great with kids.

I do suggest that you look through the options available in our software as you will find there is much you can do with it. Of course as with all business strategies, you will need to experiment in your particular shop.

Over the years with my clients, group selling has proven to being the most successful method of getting rid of unwanted stock without excessive discounting.

Sometimes what happens is that a person gets a voucher like this and comes into a shop which has items discounted. Now if you allow the person to claim this voucher off the already discounted items, what you have is a double discount.

As expected studies have shown that these double discounts confuse people but what they also have been shown is that as a marketing tool double discounts are very effective. You can read about a study here.

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http://info.bondbrandloyalty.com/the-2014-loyalty-report-us

I think it had some interesting points.

Firstly, it stated that if a solid points program for purchases exist, they felt the consumer tend to stick with that company. I agree with that as both the Nextra and Lucky Charm programme show that in our marketplace it does work.

Now the study was done by interviewing 6,000 people in the US to determine what loyalty programs worked. I would expect Australian figures to be fairly similar.

According to the report, 63 percent of all consumers say they liked the brand/shop more than the loyalty program.

29 percent overall said they would not be loyal to the brand if not for the rewards program. Interestingly here report stated that for such people the programme would likely not be sustainable. Principally, as the report stated later these people mainly wanted discounts. I am sure as soon as someone is cheaper they are gone.

Most people depending on the popularity of the loyalty programme 18% to 61% LOVED communication from the loyalty programs they use. If you do not have the peoples' email or home addresses how are you going to communicate with this group?

Now this is the part that was really interesting.

22 percent said they made purchases of something they did not need in order to maintain eligibility for points or benefits, and 35 percent said they modify the brands they buy in order to maximize their benefits in the program.

The report is well worth reading, particularly if you are thinking of making a loyalty programme, you can find it on the above link.

This offer was made by Mark Fletcher in this blog site and also in his own website on Discount Vouchers stated.

I published what I published on the newsagency blog as a newsagent to share the results I am seeing. I did so in the knowledge that you claim to have the vouchers too.

Pick your most successful Lucky Charm store running your points based program and lets compare publicly.

Well, I did not have to pick a Lucky Charm shop as Lucky Charm are very proud of their VIP system. Both Lucky Charm head office and one of their members Cris jumped in quoting figures.

So I then requested that Mark as he agreed to share his data. The offer to share data was suddenly rejected. I was stunned. My first thought was if it is as good as you say, "Why not release the data?" If people do not see this data, they will start asking questions.

So before the questions start, I want to say it is not Lucky Charm and its not me.

So I am publishing here a correction to say that this offer by Mark Fletcher to share his data publicly for comparison purposes is withdrawn.

In a retail loyalty program, the big problem is you need to ensure that the incremental sales lift from this program are not caused by the cannibalisation of existing revenue by selling at a discount, product that would have been bought anyway.

The cannibalisation of existing revenue is easy to measure with a VIP system.

In your VIP marketing system, divide your customers into two arbitrary groups say A and B. Say all you joined from the 1st to 15th of the month are A and the rest are Bs. Check to see that in marketing they are about the same and if not adjust by putting a few from the stronger group into the weaker one.

Now give your offer a whirl by sending it to the A group. You should be able in a short period to compare the results of A to B.

Now make a table.
A purchased X times, and the profit was P.
B purchased X1 times, and the profit was P1.

Now do some figures, generally when you do this the results are fairly obvious say A's buy 20% more times and the A's profit is 15% up. Now is that good?

If you really have to think about it, then I would say the idea is marginal and it is back to the drawing board.

If it works, do not stop. Try to refine the idea further. For example, maybe you could try reducing the offer to group B instead of say $2.00, try $1.50 for group B if you are still getting good results at $1.50 try setting group A to $1.00 and so on.

As over time, the world changes you need to be continuously updating. The key to a successful marketing program is not just ideas but ongoing measurement over time.

This is the only way to ensure a positive return.

The following here is a list of the Touch products together with their margins. Optus I noticed if you are set up correctly is now 8% as is Telstra.

We were sent this marketing report on Australian newspapers, which I found interesting.

One comment certainly gave me food for thought.

Despite increasing internet usage, in 2008 substantially more people are reading a newspaper each week than are using the internet each month

I suspect it is true. I know my Mum, Dad and brother-in-law rarely go on the net but they read newspapers every day. Many like me that are almost wired to the net often read daily newspapers too.

I would also disagree with some of the section on “Recent trends in newspaper circulation”. I would say that currently, circulation is slightly down. Still starting from such a high sale figure for a typical newsagent, even a few percent down still leaves a big market.

There is a market report we have which is well worth reading about newspapers today if you are interested.

The people selling to collectors for newspapers are already out on ebay here.

For a Sydney Morning Herald with Obama on the cover, they want $1.51 and $64.71 postage.

I wonder what the publishers would think of that delivery fee. Maybe the publishers should think of issuing special commemorative issues as clearly there is a market for it.

Anyway I will enjoy seeing what price these newspapers go for.

Maybe one of my readers wants to try getting into this market too. After all many of you still have copies, have a plastic wrapping machine to wrap it and all you need is an ebay account, which is easy to get.