StORES Magazine - August 2007 - (Page 74)

E-COMMERCE Taking the Plunge Marketing strategies help smaller businesses drive web traffic BY MICHAEL HARTNETT T he abbreviated swimming season presented a barrier to sales growth for Pool Town’s six Detroit-area stores, so it began offering its pool and spa accessories to shoppers in the Sunbelt and beyond via the Internet. “We now ship as far as Alaska, Southern California, Florida and upstate New York,” says general manager Scott Garden. “By reaching out to the rest of the country, our seasonal window is not as narrow as it used to be.” Pool Town’s e-commerce operation has been up and running since March, and sales results have been “excellent,” Garden says. Fashion Furs, also based in the Detroit area, has identified a market niche for quality mink coats, vests and jackets, at price points ranging from $450 to $2,500. “The Internet allows us to reach a whole lot of those customers,” president Jason Dittrich says. The key selling season for furriers is November through January, he explains, and the website was launched in November 2006. “We were tweaking the website throughout the season, but based on those 2006 results we expect to triple our sales in 2007. We’ve had orders come in nationwide, and some from Canada.” Web design + marketing To create their online shopping portals, both retailers turned to Oak Park, Mich.-based Biznet Internet Solutions, which is helping small and medium-sized 74 STORES / AUGUST 2007 companies achieve big-time success by combining user-friendly web page designs and customizable software with a program that emphasizes the absolute necessity of marketing to drive website traffic. “Our approach has always been very different,” says Biznet president Kevin Krason. “We’ve never approached the web as the savior because it’s not about the technology — it’s about the [client’s] business.” The key component is a robust direct-marketing function consisting of carefully selected keywords Sponsored Internet searches using specific keywords are key direct-marketing components in sponsored searches with Google, Yahoo! and other search engines. “If you know how to do online marketing and research, you can predict how much it will cost to get a qualified visitor to your website,” says Krason. The nice thing about direct marketing, he says, is that clients “tell me their marketing budget and I will tell them how much traffic they will get,” he says. “We help them determine what the marketing investment should be to generate the expected return. “A certain threshold of investment is needed to generate a good return on investment, but there is a much higher level of predictability for what that investment will buy in the form of web traffic and the number of consumers that will be converted.” Pool Town’s pay-per-click program with Google “has almost doubled visits to our website,” Garden says. “There is a definite cause-and-effect with traffic to the site: When I turned off the pay-perclick with Google, that was when the traffic slowed down.” The company’s next marketing initiative will be the launch of its e-newsletter, which will contain coupons, weekly specials and discounts like free shipping. “It’s cheaper to get those coupons to shoppers online,” Garden says. “We would have to run an ad in six different newspapers to reach those same people.” Fashion Furs uses a similar approach that allows the company to maintain and update its own website. “We specifically had it set up so that we are self-sustaining,” Dittrich says, adding that the package Biznet presented “was twice as complete as anybody else, and the cost was midStORES dle of the road.” Michael Hartnett is a Brewster, N.Y.based business writer. WWW.STORES.ORG http://WWW.STORES.ORG

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of StORES Magazine - August 2007

Contents Executive Editor's Page President's Page Upfront NRF News Retail People Concept2Watch Supermarkets Cover Story Online Marketing In-Store Marketing RFID Data Management Payment Systems Software Loss Prevention E-Commerce Risk Management Communications Loyalty Marketing Human Resources Mobile Commerce Loeb Retail Letter Arts Update Point of View Advertising Index Retail Industry Calendar

StORES Magazine - August 2007

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