Why am I telling you about this? Because the larger lesson all business owners can learn here is:

If you want your business to be special in a customer’s mind, don’t just spend money on the areas that directly produce revenue (such as the register, the signage, or the labor) but spend wisely on other areas that your customer touches or sees (such as the magazines at a dentist’s waiting room). The thoughtfulness that goes into those areas will truly stand out in your customer’s experience, and encourage him to return.

I was at the Toy Fair in New York City a few months ago, where thousands of toy companies show off their newest and greatest products.  Having an educational rug manufacturer as a client was the perfect excuse I needed to spend a few days there.

While just having a booth at trade shows can certainly be a useful way to drum up some big business because the shows are audience aggregators, in a bad economy you need to take it a step further to get the most out of the trade show - if nothing else because of the high cost of having a booth.  Here are some tips I’ve put together in the hopes of helping other trade show exhibitors.

Be a Good Neighbor

Team up with your booth neighbors.  Big buyers often show up to just a few booths, but you can improve your odds of getting noticed by sharing those contacts and introducing them to your nearby booths.  Spread the wealth and they will thank you, and often reciprocate.

Offer Something

Everybody likes to get something, whether it’s free popcorn (two enterprising exhibitors had that idea), free promotional items, an entry into a raffle, or some free advice.

One of the most enjoyable moments this year at ToyFair was a wooden toy maker’s “Wine & Cheese” event.  They gathered several dozen people and spoke about their unique value proposition while hungry buyers sipped dry red wine and nibbled on exotic cheeses. The speaker had their attention for a good 15 minutes before even a single person left - what could you sell if you had 15 minutes to talk about it with a prospective buyer?

The tactics are:

• Offer something that people want, since the primary purpose here is to draw people into your sales funnel.
• Try to offer something that will be used at the booth, so that you have their attention and time.
• Be sure to introduce yourself, your company, and your value proposition. If you can get the booth visitor to take marketing material and to offer their card, all the better.

Unique Value Proposition

What is so great about your product or service? Tell me something I don’t know about it, and that makes a difference.  That’s your unique value proposition (UVP).

Let me show you an example of the problem that arises at these booths. My rug manufacturer client has the absolute lowest prices in the industry and top quality (a great feat accomplished by lean operations).  However, when you see the rug display, you don’t know to ask about those two questions.  They are unasked questions. So, lacking any UVP, you just keep walking by, because maybe you have a rug supplier already, or maybe you have seen rugs before, and they don’t excite you.

This shows the importance of answering these unasked questions either verbally or through the use of signage (e.g. “We have the lowest prices, top quality”). After all, who doesn’t want the top quality for the lowest price?

Without signage or active verbal action to answer unasked questions, you are missing out on a lot of business - without even knowing it.

The Social Butterfly Gets The Pollen

Get social at the shows.  Add buyers, merchants, and publication representatives to social networks, and hang out after the trade show to socialize, whether at a bar, over dinner or other event.  There are often shows, happy hours, or “parties” after the trade show ends, and a lot of business gets generated because of it - months and years later, in some cases.

A great way to do this is by inviting 10-15 people from the trade show for a nice dinner.  It will set you back some cash, but you’ll make a great impression and stand a good chance of offering your UVP to each of them, since few people run away in the middle of a meal.

Reach Out and Touch Somebody

Don’t be afraid to talk or reach out to shake a passer-by’s hand. Remember - if they don’t see you, they can’t possibly buy from you.

If someone walks by your booth and doesn’t even look at your booth, step out of your area and say “Hi!”.  What will most often happen is the person will look at you (to see who told him hi - after all, it would be embarrassing not to respond to someone he knows), and then he will take a quick glance at the “context” of that hi - the trade show display.  This instantly puts you in the running for getting more attention and sales, since the person otherwise wouldn’t have seen your items.

I did this over and over during the trade show, and got quite a few business cards handed out as a result of these interactions.

The Miracle of Context

Our brains work better when items are put in context. For example, think of how strange it might be for a foreigner to see everyone dressed up in green on St. Patrick’s day in the USA. Without knowing what the context is (St. Patrick’s day), the foreigner might just make the assumption that we are weird or greenophiles.  Show your products in their context (e.g. - video of kids playing on carpet) and you’ll connect better with the buyers. One might not see the use of an item until it is presented in context and he sees someone else deriving benefit from the item.

Add Interactivity/Action

Everybody is a kid when it comes to a trade show.  What I mean by that is all the things that fascinated and got your attention as a kid (e.g. - videos, moving lights, other people asking questions, anything that moved fast) all work in a trade show setting where there are one hundred places to look, and your brain must select by “priority” what to look at .  Adults, just like kids, love shiny moving objects. What exactly should you do? You have plenty of options - even juggle something…do anything to catch peoples’ eyes.

Follow Through

In my business networking tips post, I explained how important it is to follow through after the actual event. The most important after show activities are:

a) Take every business card you can get your hands on, and then do the data entry as soon as possible after the event so you don’t forget any small details that might give you an edge in selling to the prospect.

b) Be sure to make contact with each prospect within a week or so - you don’t want any one of them to forget your look, personality, etc. - lest you become just another faceless caller.

Got any tricks up your sleeve? Let me know in the comments.

They say that during a recession, people flock to education to survive. In that spirit, I’ll be covering topics in my marketing glossary in the coming months. Today’s topic is one of my favorite, because it is very powerful when used properly, and doesn’t require any upfront costs.

One of the hardest jobs of a marketer is to find a targeted audience for his/her message. After all, the odds of someone outside the targeted audience buying are very low, and probably not worth the communication and sales effort, until you have exhausted all likely buyers.

This is where an Audience Aggregator comes in. An audience aggregator collects a large quantity of people from your target audience, and has either their contact info in a database or another easy way to communicate with them.

Let’s look at some examples of an audience aggregator:

• Your local car garage is an audience aggregator for people who own/drive cars.
• The National School Supply and Equipment Association (NSSEA) is an audience aggregator for sellers of school supplies and school equipment.
• A pediatric doctor’s office is an audience aggregator for reaching parents.

I think you’re starting to get the point. Now let’s look at what you can do with an audience aggregator.

Uses of an Audience Aggregator

Great, so you’ve found an appropriate audience aggregator for your marketing goals. Your next steps should be one or more of the following options:

• team up with them in a partnership
• buy their list
• advertise with them

And now, for the benefit:

You can reach many people with low cost, all of whom are “pre-qualified” for something you targeted. The worse the economy gets, the more important reaching pre-qualified leads will be.  During good times, you can spray your marketing dollars everywhere, but in a drought you need to conserve your “marketing water” and only use it on the “plants”that will respond best to the water.

A Client Example

A massage therapy instructor client of ours who had been doing very well until this recent economic mess asked us for some ideas on how to reach more prospects for the seminars they run around the country.

Determining the target audience

The only people who would even think of taking the course were licensed massage therapists, since the course counted as continuing education units (CEUs). Furthermore, CEUs were not required by each state, and some only during certain years.  We knew that people are likely to push off a $380 course for as long as is legal, given the economic climate, so we focused on seminar locations where CEUs are due this year.

Finding the audience aggregators

We then found the largest massage chains with locations within 50 miles of a seminar location, and mailed flyers to each of them.  Each location had on average 20 licensed massage therapists, giving us the most value out of each mailing.  Even if a massage therapist didn’t need to or want to take a seminar this year, we asked for their contact info to stay in touch through our email marketing.

The results

The feedback on our effort has been fantastic, and the massage chains were actually happy to hear from us.  Imagine that - people who want to hear from advertisers.  We’ve just sent out email newsletters to the largest group we’ve had yet - and the client has been in business for 24 years!

An audience aggregator will help you weather the storm and make up for the lower interest of buyers, without costing you the farm.

One of the really irritating things about tires is their proclivity for developing tiny leaks.  This leaves you feeling like a Russian Roulette player each time you step in your car, wondering if this time your tire will burst.

Fortunately, my experience with punctured tires hasn’t been all bad - it led me to find a mechanic a few years back who, while having far from the newest equipment in his garage, more than made up for it with the mental equipment he had acquired through experience.

The last time I thought a tire had a hidden leak, he whipped out a spray bottle with a 20/80 mix of liquid soap and water.  I was about to tell him “thanks, but I just got a car wash done the other week” when he started spraying the tire.  In a small area by the rim, I noticed a neat effect.  Bubbles started growing and bursting at a fast rate - a leak!

So folks, next time you think your tire is losing air, use a spray bottle and some soap to check, and enjoy the confidence of driving safe.

JetBlue has always had creative marketing programs, like its customer bill of rights. JetBlue is back at it again, and has sent out a press release detailing its “Promise Program“. Under the Promise Program, JetBlue will refund your ticket fare if you lose your job (with some additional terms attached, of course).

This is an effective marketing program, because many people are hesitant to purchase tickets in the future at a time when the “future” is so uncertain.  This takes out some of the risk to the ticket buyer which is at the root of the problem for many customers.

As always, there’s fine print. The two questions I have about this program are:

• Doesn’t this program discriminate against self-employed workers?
• If JetBlue doesn’t accept the request, they automatically charge you a $100 cancellation fee, and return the rest in credit…don’t you think that should be optional? It doesn’t sound terribly fair.

Please watch as Jackie describes what happened:

Summary of the Video:

Jackie buys goat milk from Whole Foods, and the milk needs to be shaken each time before use. However, when she shakes it the milk flies all over the place because the carton lacks a tight seal.  The next time she visits Whole Foods she notices the milk carton has a cap, and has text right near it stating “Customer Requested”.

The company could have just added the cap and left off the “customer requested” label, but they are showing that they listen to their customers AND expressing that it made a difference, and that’s a great PR victory for that company.

The time and place of that label is also important. The company put it near the actual changed area (the cap), and a customer sees it at the right time to make the decision to buy.  I’ve discussed the importance of delivering the right message at the right time in the past.

The Lesson:

Next time your company institutes changes to a product or service, based on feedback, think about how you can show your customers that you listened AND make it clear that it was a direct result of their feedback.  This is sure to encourage future feedback from your customers, further improving your product.

Did you have a similar experience where a company let you know it changed a policy, product, or service because of customer feedback? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.

If you’ve been paying attention to the media, you know that the long talked about recession is upon us. As gas and food prices rise, many consumers are left wondering how to adjust their budgets accordingly. Self-sufficiency skills, long seen as a thing of the past, are back in vogue.

I recently discussed how to recession-proof your career, and some readers asked what accompanying lifestyle changes they should make. Today, I’d like to recommend a few changes that the average consumer can make to help get through this recession without feeling too much of the strain.

1. Convert to a Cash Economy

Make the switch to cash for your household purchases, or use one credit card for everything and pay it off in full each month. Doing so will help you to be more aware of your spending, and make it easier to cut out unnecessary or expensive luxury purchases. Using cash will also help you with Tip #3, as well.

2. Save an Emergency Fund

Set aside money each month for your savings account, with a goal of amassing three to six months of living expenses. In case of an unforeseen job loss or medical expense, this money will be extremely useful. Living paycheck to paycheck is harder than ever as prices rise - adding a cushion will help you to feel more secure in tight times.

3. Live within Your Means

If you regularly spend more than you make, now is the time to re-evaluate this pattern. Consider switching to a zero based budget, allocating a purpose for every dollar. This will also make it easier to fund the emergency fund mentioned above, while helping decrease the amount you charge on high interest credit cards monthly.

4. Limit Your Media Exposure

The media survives by drawing attention to current events, and sometimes hypes them up to be worse than they really are. Limiting your exposure to recession and depression oriented news stories will also help to keep your stress level low.

5. Learn New Self-Sufficiency Skills

We have all been spoiled over the last decade by the lowest unemployment rates ever, eating at restaurants nightly, and having others do the dirty work. These may be luxuries we can no longer afford.

Learn a new skill that helps you live self-sufficiently, such as installing doorknobs, basic plumbing, changing your own oil, painting, cooking, and canning food. Too busy, you say? Spend time with your kids and turn it into a lesson for them by having them hand you the tools while watching, and you’ll be raising self-sufficient offspring.

If you’ve been afraid to try any of these skills, rest easy - the rise of internet video can give you dummy-proof instructions.

6. Get Gadgets That Offer a Return

Technology has always been a way to improve productivity during hard times. Don’t wait for it to happen, bring the technology into your home with gadgets that lower your costs of living, and also provide healthier ways to live. What kinds of products can do this?

Aerogarden - This little gadget lets you grow vegetables and herbs right in your kitchen. I began looking into this product when vegetable prices were climbing faster than Jack on a beanstalk. It grows your food without soil, so there’s no mess, and apparently grows higher levels nutrients in the vegetables than you’ll find in a supermarket.

The best part is that the vegetables will grow all year round. While the machine isn’t as inexpensive as I would like to see, I do think it is a good deal, and they have several versions ranging from $80-$210.

If you grow 30-40 pounds of vegetables, you’ve already covered the cost of the machine, and you are no longer subject to the rising prices at the supermarket.

Breadmaker - While there are plenty of brands out there, the SunBeam breadmaker I use is very reliable, easy to clean, and was a great price.

Why in the world would I want to make my own bread? Well, for starters, wheat prices have gone up a lot over the last few years, and I love making whole wheat artisan breads for about $1 a loaf. Compare that to your average supermarket offering the bread for 3-4 times that amount, and you’re setting yourself up for savings.

Brita water pitcher - Bottled water is a huge industry, and it often just involves selling municipal water back to us at outrageous prices. The Brita pitcher lets you take water from the sink and purify it, saving you a few hundred dollars a year, and carrying heavy bottles home each week.

7. Drive Less

The costs of car ownership and driving in America are huge. Between maintenance, monthly payments, insurance, gas, parking, depreciation, and many others, you pay thousands of dollars a year.

However, owning a car isn’t the only option to remain mobile. Consider selling your car and taking a train, bus, subway, bike and you can save more than 10% of your salary each year, if you are an average American. If you have two cars in the family, sell one and coordinate use of the car you have left. If you live near friends, sell your car and pay them a bit to drive you short distances as needed.

If you can work from home, even for one day a week, you’ll see significant savings.

For those of you who love crunching numbers, figure out the REAL cost of driving with this calculator.

8. Save on Groceries

Would it surprise you to hear that I rarely buy grocery products at full price, yet don’t clip coupons? I do this by my flexibility in eating seasonal foods which are on sale, and I make a weekly shopping list of all the 50% off items before entering a supermarket. Each week the supermarket circular cycles through various products and categories on sale. This allows me to get the very best prices each time by waiting for the “low tide”.

For example, La Yogurt’s little yogurt cups have a huge fluctuation on price, and it all depends on the week. I’ve seen it at 29 cents each on some weeks, and all the way up around 99 on others. It all depends on when you buy it, so keep your eyes open, and stock up when you find it on the lower side of the range.

Remember to plan ahead and keep track of what you have in your house so that you don’t run out of anything essential while waiting for an item to be on the 50% off sale.

9. Guard Your Health

Staying healthy is probably the most important thing you can do to recession-proof your lifestyle. This is because health care costs are no joke, with America’s total spending averaging out to $7,900 per person in 2008. In fact, spending just one night in a hospital can cost your $1,000-$2,000. This makes it a pretty high priority to guard your health against avoidable accidents, diseases, and stress. Thankfully there are some good steps we can take to improve our health without too much of a hassle.

Manage Your Sleep - Many experts note that your body’s immunity drops off a cliff if you don’t get enough sleep (7-8 hours). This is quite possibly the single best way to keep healthy.

Eat Your Veggies - All sorts of disease risks can be reduced dramatically by eating a colorful selection of vegetables. It’s a lot cheaper to buy an eggplant than to deal with the disease it could have prevented later on.

Reduce Stress - Stress is the silent killer. Look at which situations are causing you stress, and word to reduce or eliminate those situations. Like the saying goes, “it’s not worth getting a heart attack over.”

Exercise Daily - Going out for a walk or run each day can lower your chances of catching a cold, as well as improve your heart’s health. You’ll be killing two birds with one stone, because your stress level will go down as well.

These tips should give you quite a cushion to make ends meet, and hang in there - times will get better!

Do you have any tips you’d like to see added? Let me know in the comments below!

How often do you find yourself contemplating a task, only to avoid getting started on it and move on to something else?

Procrastination is a major problem for everyone, but especially dangerous for entrepreneurs. After all, when you work for yourself, YOU set the pace. If that pace is slow, profits will be slow as well. Beating procrastination, however, can be accomplished with a few simple tips.

1. Baby Steps

If you find yourself struggling to get started on a project, consider breaking it down into the smallest tasks possible. Then complete one (or a few) of these tiny tasks. You’ll gain momentum with each micro-task that you complete, allowing you to knock out procrastination quickly and painlessly.

2. Stop Planning and Take Action

You can research and plan for days, weeks, or months without ever beginning on a project. Instead, set a clear goal for when you’ll begin to ACT, and stick to it. If you need more information, you can always gather it as you go. Money likes speed, so take action today.

3. Don’t Be Afraid

Procrastination is often motivated by fear. Fear of making a mistake. Fear of the project falling flat on its face. Even fear of overwhelming success. Look fear in the face. Stare it down, and act anyway. Without taking action, nothing will ever happen - and THAT’s something to be afraid of.

4. Track Progress

After you have taken the first actions, be sure to track your progress. There is no greater motivation to get out there and do something than seeing where you have been in the past and what you have accomplished.

By putting these four tips into action, you can begin to knock out procrastination before it starts. Success is all about focused, determined action, so take your first baby step towards that goal today!

Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate

Definition: The percentage of shoppers who place an item in their shopping cart but do not successfully complete checkout.

Causes:

• Anxiety over having chosen the right product
• Fear over the security of giving out credit card details
• Confusion about how to checkout
• Anxiety over not having found the best deal
• Website error
• Shopper didn’t have or like the payment options

The chart below offers a glimpse into reasons for shopping cart abandonment.

Good Practices:

• Include thumbnail product images in the checkout pages to make shopper confident he added the product he actually wanted to buy.
• Put third party secure site seals (such as Thawte, Verisign, or McafeeSecure ) to lower shopper resistance to providing credit card details
• Make as short of a checkout as possible, and if you need several pages, be sure to show visitors what step of the checkout they are on, and how many more are left. This will serve the double purpose of being less confusing and shortening the time to purchase (and avoiding “buyer’s remorse“).
• Show a price-match guarantee or a low-price policy at checkout to make the shopper feel confident he is paying a low price for the item.
• Have your programmer create a way for you to know when checkout was started but not completed, and save the info (in case the shopper returns).
• Include as many payment options as possible to raise the comfort level of the shopper, as well as not to exclude anyone from being able to buy.
• Don’t force a shopper to login or register in order to checkout, make it optional (and obvious). Forced registration at checkout lowers trust, raises frustration, and steals time from the customer.

Percentage Of Products Sold At Least Once

Definition: The percentage of your product line that is sold at least once over an examined time period.

Most savvy web marketers keep up to date on what is the best selling product in their web store, but few go a step further to find out the percentage of products sold at least once in a given month, half year, or year.

To find out this figure for your online store, follow these steps:

1. Download a report of all your sales grouped by product sold.
2. Count how many different items were sold. For example, if you sold 2 red apples and 1 green apple, you sold 2 different types of apples (red and green).
3. Calculate how many unique products you have in your e-commerce shop that can be purchased.
4. Divide your answer in step 2 by your answer in step 3 and multiply that by 100.

Did that sound complicated? To save you some time, I’ve already gone ahead and created a simple Excel calculator for working out the percentage, but you’ll still need to check your own inventory to know which products have and have not been sold in a given time period.

Download this calculator

This is a very important metric that few people check for several reasons. If your e-commerce store is confusing to shoppers and your store doesn’t have useful search filters to bring shoppers to deeper areas in the site, then you will likely have a very low answer after step 4. You can be confident that your store is doing well if you are selling at least 30% of your total product line in a given month, and 85% in a given year. Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, routinely discovered that leading websites sold up to 98% of their products at least once in a quarter.

Good Practices:

• Lure shoppers away from the bestsellers by showing them the newest products, suggesting complementary items (such as socks to go with a belt), and randomly rotated products throughout their shopping experience.
• Provide multiple filters and search options to help shoppers “drill down” to reach obscure items. See an example below, how a rug store accomplishes this:

  

• Add a social aspect to the shopping cart, such as we did recently with a recent client’s site, pictured below. As you can see, (1) the store allows you to make a wish list, and add a gift registry item, (2) tell a friend about a product or read other shoppers’ product reviews, and (3) the e-commerce store recognizes what previous shoppers have bought, and suggests it to other shoppers.

The more niche the product line offered by an e-commerce store is (such as a watches only store), the more difficulty a shopper will have in finding long tail products, since the keywords he might search are likely to describe virtually the whole inventory. The social shopping features will gently guide and suggest deep products, solving this problem to some degree. This means the social aspect I described above is one of the most important features on a niche e-commerce store.

By keeping an eye on these two stats for your e-commerce business, you’ll be able to feel confident in your site’s ability to convert visitors to shoppers and to show the full range of products to your visitors to maximize sales.

Each year, I play a fun guessing game on which day(s) will be the biggest online selling days of the year. My “bet” for this year is going to be mid-day Dec. 12th -13. Why that particular day and a half? Allow me to explain:

Paycheck syndrome

In bad economies, we are less likely to have cash sitting around. This particular recession is no exception, and because this recession is partially caused by the credit crunch, we are certainly less likely to have cash. Therefore, we are more likely to spend based on our paycheck date. We are especially more likely to purchase something expensive near the time we are getting a paycheck (thursday evening) in anticipation of having the money, or when we have an actual paycheck in hand (friday).

Need an example of paycheck syndrome?

When you get a promotion or a raise, what’s the first thing you do? You take your buddies or family out to celebrate (that is, spend money), but you have not yet actually gotten anything in your hand. It’s akin to “counting your chickens before they are hatched.”

Guilty as charged

Sales at high luxury have plummeted recently. It’s not so much that the rich can’t afford to buy it, but rather they “feel guilty,” or don’t think it’s “politically correct” (as GM’s executives found out the hard way). Furthermore, in studies, researchers have found that offering a “do good” incentive, such as putting up a sign that a charitable donation will be made from the proceeds of a sale, allows people to make luxury purchases guilt-free, so they are more likely to buy.

What is this “guilt”?

We feel “guilty” spending money when we see others suffering and when we have or expect to have a lack of it, so we need some sort of a “cushion” to help us feel that it is OK to spend. Whether that comes in the form of a do good incentive, or a promise of better times around the corner, doesn’t matter much.

Free Time

We’ve all heard the phrase “shop till you drop” many times. But to shop until the point of exhaustion requires quite a bit of time to elapse (except for those men who hate malls). Saturday the 13th is likely to be a big day because people aren’t working (or going out at night the same way they do on Friday night), and it’s the last weekend to order at most places and still be sure to get in time for Christmas.

Ship Happens!

If you were to make a graph of the value of holiday gifts, the highest point would be near the time you are giving it to the recipient, and the graph would drop off a cliff shortly thereafter. The reason for this is that a late gift creates a social situation many prefer not to be in. (Why else would people go crazy shopping the last week or two before Christmas each year?)

Now, there’s nothing more frustrating than buying something for a particular event, and then only getting it after the event.

People get worried about shopping and getting delivery on time. This is why during these days a full guide to shipping with last days to get certain shipping options is one of the greatest influences on a purchasing decision.

Here is an example of HisRoom.com’s shipping table, where they even separate the chart based on the particular holiday you are trying to get the shipment before:

Indeed, if you run an e-commerce store, and don’t offer that information, you’ll watch your sales nearly flat-line as it gets close to Christmas, since shoppers won’t feel safe ordering and getting their products on-time without some assurance by you.

‘Tis The Season For Deals

This year is bringing some very big changes to shopper behavior. There is a huge move by shoppers to try and buy online. This has to do with the “branding” of online buying. People associate buying online with some positive things, like:
Ease of shopping, the prevalence of “deals,” and no threat of huge lines at checkout in retail stores (which has become a growing concern among many shoppers, especially males).

The main motivations for buying this season, according to the NRF are:

• 40% of total shoppers give preference to or select those stores which offer good discounts & promotions.
• 12.6% consumers say that they would be interested in daily bargains or lowest prices tagged on daily basis.
• 21.5% consumers are looking for wider selection of merchandise/products.
• 13.4% consumers give preference to the quality of the merchandise.
• 5.6% of consumers choose the store on basis of after sales/customer support & location wise respectively.

I’m sure you noticed the top motivation is caused by great discounts and promotions, for which the internet is king. Everybody knows you can go online and find a great deal. This is perhaps the best branding in this economy, and likely to mark a huge shift of buyers from stores to the internet this season.

For all these reasons, my bet is on mid Dec. 12-13 being the biggest online shopping day this year. Well, I’ve got my popcorn ready, and I’m ready for the show - are you?