Retailer to Retailer

How have you utilized electronic media (newsletters, web site, coupons online, registry, advertising, etc.), how successful has it been for you, and what advice would you offer other retailers on how to best use this medium?

NICK GIOVANNUCCI, FANTE’S KITCHEN WARES SHOP
About seven years ago, demographic changes in our market area led us to dabble on the Internet. Our web site, having regularly augmented our brick-and-mortar store sales, now generates about 40 percent of our volume through online orders. In our experience, it has taken some of the same basic business skills to operate a successful web site that it takes to run a successful brick-and-mortar store, namely:
- Get in early
- Provide value
- Instill trust
- Market the business
- Deliver according to expectations
The Internet is an environmental variable, as it incorporates elements common to all business plans. The following suggestions are based on how we adapted the above business skills to deal with this variable.
Get in early. Capitalize on a different angle from other web sites in your category. Search the web to determine what information, services, and products within your expertise are not readily available, then work to create that info and showcase those services and products.
Provide value. Know the market and your competition on the web, and constantly update the value of your offerings to keep your customers coming back. With every customer contact, ask for feedback regarding your site and offerings, and use the results to determine changes you should make to remain a valuable resource to your customers. Offers, such as coupons, should provide more than just ordinary value.
Instill trust. Provide clear and accurate information on your web pages. Pay personal attention to inquiries and respond to them promptly. Use secure technology for order processing and reassure your customers of the privacy they are guaranteed when providing personal and credit information on your web site.
Market the business. Make your web site search engine friendly, and list it. Make sure your targeted customers are able to quickly download your pages. Use your creative genius to overcome consumers’ hesitancy to buy because they can’t touch or feel the product, or because they don’t have a person to talk to when they are contemplating a purchase decision. Have an opt-in system for regular mailings, and provide information of value in your electronic newsletters. Measure advertising results via verifiable methods. Do whatever it takes to retain your old customers while attaining new ones.
Deliver according to expectations. Stay ahead of the demands placed on your resources in providing personal attention and fulfilling delivery expectations. During peak times, increase your inventory, space, and staffing accordingly, or control sales through marketing variables, such as by increasing, even exaggerating the timeframe you promise on delivery. Use redundant systems whenever possible to ensure consistent flow.
Keep these skills honed by testing them on a regular basis. Make sure you’re consistently meeting responsible business practices, while exceeding customer expectations. And whether the design and editing of your web site and online offerings is done in-house or by an outside firm, it behooves you to do whatever it takes to maintain the ability to quickly respond to changing forces and adapt accordingly, for, as you probably know from experience, business is never static.

ARI WEINZWEIG, ZINGERMAN’S DELI
How do we use the web? Imperfectly, just as we use everything else I think. Marketing via electronic media is and probably always will be I guess a learning process. We do know that marketing on the web like all of the work we do to build sales is a craft — a blend of science (tracking data, measuring response rates, etc.) and art (a good intuitive sense of retailing in terms of what will sell, what won’t, price points, positioning, etc.). And while it’s a less familiar venue for many of us to work in, I think that marketing on the web is ultimately a lot more like marketing in general than many people think.

So what do we do that works well?
1. Think of your web site as you do your shop.
If you don’t keep it fresh, current, and alive, it gets stale. On the other hand, if you change it too much, people become confused and your site becomes an annoyance rather than a positive experience that they feel like returning to repeatedly. Like your store, if when you get to the site, it makes you want to learn more — or better yet, to buy a lot, then you’re headed in the right direction.
I think that for many of us retailers who are more comfortable in real store settings, it’s easy to lose track of a web site and delegate it out to others. But the problem is that the web site will end up falling as flat as a store would if you were to delegate its entire management to someone else and visit it only every few months. To help avoid that problem, I’ve put myself on a regimen of checking our web sites on a regular basis. All are flawed, all can be better, but I’ve certainly discovered that (no shock here) if I pay more attention, I appreciate those who do the work more, and if I test them out more regularly, all of that leads to more effective, more energized web sites.
2. E-newsletters.
Some customers love getting these, others hate them. There’s plenty of info on what’s legal and not legal but to state the most obvious, to do this well, the guest needs to opt in and choose to be included on our list. Beyond that, again, I think that doing a good e-newsletter is much like doing a good newsletter in print:
- Start with a vision of what you want to achieve.
- Make sure it is published on a regular schedule with deadlines.
- Include some special offers so you can test response and interest people in buying. We like to put offers in that aren’t available elsewhere in our merchandising work in order to encourage customers to get and read the e-news, and also to test response rates.
- Make it newsworthy and in-teresting, not just an “ad.”
- Use the subject bar to grab people’s attention since it is in essence your headline.
3. Service on the web.
Toni Morell, one of our mail order business’ managing partners who is very attuned to web work (she helped to launch our web site in 1999), reminded me to stress the importance of providing excellent service when dealing with customers electronically. Web sites themselves and their detailed particulars have important service issues that require technical folks working in tandem with others in the organization to address customer needs. It’s a challenge because (to state the obvious) most specialty shops have far smaller resources than the big-time budgets that giant companies are able to use in the production of their sites. The technical aspects extend far outside my own expertise, so I’ll leave them as they are.
In terms of one-on-one service interactions with the customers (as opposed to the site’s operations), we’ve learned, and probably relearned more times than we should have, that all of the same service techniques that we try to apply in everything we do apply to e-mail. Just as we do in person, we want to be prompt, meaningfully polite, and enthusiastic in our interactions. We want to do a really good job of handling complaints and problems in order to turn difficult situations quickly from problems to wins. We want to go the extra mile for customers by doing things they didn’t ask us to do so that we grab their attention in a positive way. To quote Toni directly, “We handle every e-mail request like it was a customer standing in front of us asking.”

SCOTT SILVERMAN, RICE EPICUREAN MARKETS
We use the Internet to promote our company in various ways. Like most companies today, we too operate a “full-blown” web site. Like most, ours is a place where our customers and suppliers can learn about the history of our company, inquire about job opportunities, make customer requests and comments, view our weekly ad or monthly newsletter, locate our stores, find exciting recipes, learn about new items, etc.
The most im-portant link on our web site is the one that directs visitors to our home-delivery service. Home de-livery has deep roots in our company; it dates back to our first days in business in 1937. People have been discussing developing a successful business model for home delivery for years, but we’ve been delivering groceries successfully for decades. The only way our model has changed is the method of taking orders. From the days of taking orders over the phone, to accepting orders by fax, and now to ordering via our web site, virtually nothing else has changed. Our home-delivery web site makes our Delivery Department more efficient operationally and more convenient for our customers. Through our web site, our customers are now able to quite literally virtually shop our store. Navigation through the site is actually quicker then shopping in our store. Shopping lists of staple items can be saved, minimizing the chance of forgetting a purchase. We are finding that a majority of our home-delivery customers were previously not customers at all. Many occupy offices, are the elderly, or are either permanently or temporarily disabled. Several actually feel that we are providing a community service by offering home delivery via the web. We’ve even received orders from customers traveling throughout the world. It provides a convenient way for them to restock their pantries and refrigerators soon after they return from a long trip abroad. Recently, we even received an e-mail order from an airplane.
Most importantly, the Internet has given us a more cost-effective way to communicate with our customers. The primary focus of our marketing strategy is centered on our customer loyalty program. We now have the ability to effectively use the Internet to communicate special offers, programs, and promotions directed specifically at our very best customers — target marketing at its finest. A side benefit is that through the web site, we are now able to accomplish this in a very stealthy manner. We have been extremely successful in garnering a tremendous base of e-mail addresses from our customers. This was one of our primary goals when we established our loyalty program. We recognized the need to be able to communicate with our customers but have been very careful not to abuse this privilege. All of our offers are significant in nature and are intended to be a service to our customers, not a nuisance. We have very strict privacy policies and frequency standards on our e-mail communications with our customers. We conduct a limited amount of customer surveys online and take customer feedback very seriously.
Recently, we added a reward points program as yet another layer of our loyalty program. Signing people up for our E-Points Program gave us still another opportunity to expand our e-mail base as it is the quickest way for customers to check their point balances and at this time, the only way for them to redeem the points for products.
Over the past five years, the only thing that has changed faster than our selection of merchandise or the markets themselves has been the way we have chosen to go to market. None of the initiatives we have taken to build our volume and customer base would have been possible without the use of technology, the Internet, and our web site. I can’t even imagine what the next five years will bring.

RICK VERNON, WEST POINT MARKET
Initially, we struggled with electronic media. Early efforts were expensive while we gained experience. We began very simply with an informational site. There were false starts where web designers thought they could put together a web site for us, only to find out later that the project was over their heads and out of control. In the mid 90’s, our site began to develop.
We currently offer 370 products on our site and plan to add cheese and wine in the near future. We ship via FedEx either two-day delivery or standard overnight and charge according to an order’s total price. Local delivery is charged by zip code.
Our local web site design firm installed Big Tree Media’s Internet Retail Suite as our shopping cart software. We’re very happy with this software since it manages our entire virtual store and does it with the merchant in mind. It’s a combination of a full-featured storefront, flexible design, and a comprehensive set of business management tools. Although it was a large investment for us, it has paid off. If you want to be serious about Internet sales, you need professional help and an in-house webmaster who can keep everything up to date and running smoothly.
This software allows us a dynamic site map that guarantees that Google and other web crawlers find every product detail page in our online store. Page names are also dynamically produced to provide optimal search engine friendliness. The page names are actually the names of your categories and products. Keyword and description meta data can be entered across the site or at each category and product level.
Our specialty foods sales have risen significantly since we implemented the new software. For example, if a potential customer types in “Lemon Garlic Finishing Sauce” into a Google search, our site comes up number one and this makes a
huge impact.
Our Gift Department also receives a significant amount of phone orders from customers who have first shopped online and then called us to place an order.
What has also worked very well for us on our site is the “Contact Us” option. Customers can use it to request specific items or just ask for advice. This helps us to develop relationships with our online customers and they learn that we can satisfy all of their needs.

The following are some suggestions on how to best use the medium.
- Decide if you want an informational site to promote your retail business or be an actual online store.
- The rules for a dot-com business are no different than any other business. Before you spend money, be sure that you can generate a profit and that you actually have a business.
- Link your web site.
- A web site is NOT a business. It becomes a business only when it generates revenue.
- Your web site is not about you — it is about your customers and ways you can help them.
- Integrate your web site marketing strategy with the entire marketing plan for your business. Your site is only a single component of a larger strategy.
- Start out small and grow gradually. This way, you can learn as you go and save much time and money.
- Web sites are a long-term investment and work best when complemented by a physical catalog.