6 Ways Local Merchants Can Use Rewards to Bring in Holiday Shoppers
Consumers are expected to spend $630.5 billion this holiday shopping season. Local merchants are fighting tooth and nail to take back a larger share of that revenue from their ecommerce competitors. Here’s what industry leaders said about the types of incentives that work best for encouraging shoppers to make holiday purchases at local retail businesses instead of big-box stores or ecommerce sites.
Case Study: NJ Gym Uses Loyalty Program to Increase Sales from Existing Members
When consumers commit to joining a gym and paying a fixed rate each month, they’re indirectly confirming their loyalty to the business. But after years of working with clients at Gold’s Gym of Jersey City, sales manager Mauricio Calmet noticed that a secondary loyalty market exists, one that’s rarely tapped by businesses once they’ve signed customers up for yearlong contracts or memberships.
Case Study: Salon Leverages Free Wi-Fi to Evaluate Digital Promotions
Collecting customer email addresses and generating Facebook “likes” are two tasks that are at the top of virtually every small business marketer’s to-do list. Edges Salon & Spa has a system in place to streamline this process and encourage customer loyalty at the same time. For the past seven months, it has been offering customers free Wi-Fi in exchange for the chance to learn about their behaviors and engage them on mobile.
5 Geofencing Tools for Customer Acquisition
Marketers increasingly are using geofencing and proximity marketing to send push notifications to existing customers located at specific events or landmarks. However, this technology still isn’t being used to its full potential as a new customer acquisition tool. Here are five examples of platforms that marketers can use to deliver offers to nearby mobile users, with the ultimate goal of promoting new customer acquisition.
Case Study: Restaurant Increases Visit Frequency with Mobile Ordering Option
Cold-calling techniques have a notoriously low success rate for hyperlocal vendors trying to onboard new merchants, but it was an unsolicited drop-in that led to The American Grilled Cheese Kitchen’s successful three-year relationship with ChowNow, an online ordering system and marketing platform for restaurants.
5 Ways Merchants Can Use Hyperlocal Tech to Improve Service This Holiday Season
With the holiday season upon us, local merchants are pulling out all the stops to entice shoppers into their stores and away from their computers, with many focusing on customer service as their differentiator. Here are five ways local merchants can improve customer service this holiday season by implementing hyperlocal technology.
5 Tools for Display Ad Creation and Distribution
Programmatic-driven ad spend is expected to reach $14.2 billion worldwide this year. However, research by AppNexus indicates 97 percent of programmatic campaigns still lack targeted creative for individual audience segments. To satisfy this need, more hyperlocal vendors now are creating tools that businesses can use to generate targeted ad content without hiring their own in-house teams. Here are five tools for display ad creation and distribution.
6 Ways SMBs Can Take Better Advantage of Programmatic Ad Buying
Automated advertising solutions that simplify media buying seem like they would be right up the small business owner’s alley, however it’s still much more common for national marketers to utilize programmatic advertising than independent merchants. Here are six strategies that small and medium-sized businesses can use to take full advantage of programmatic buying.
6 Tools Restaurants Can Use to Accept Mobile Orders
The mobile ordering landscape is quickly evolving, with increases in consumer demand fueling the growth. Even independently owned restaurants with just one or two locations are feeling the push to offer their customers mobile ordering. Here are six platforms restaurant owners can use to meet the demand.
5 Tools Local Merchants Can Use to Segment In-Store Visitors
Loyal customers are incredibly valuable to local merchants. A new class of hyperlocal platforms is helping small business owners pinpoint and engage with repeat visitors using a combination of in-store beacons, geo-location tools, and customer segmentation technology. Here are five platforms that enable merchants to track visit frequency and send highly targeted promotions to maximize sales among their most valuable customers.
Case Study: Restaurant Group Takes a Data-Driven Approach to Email Marketing
Data is changing the way large restaurant groups cater to their highest-value customers. Richard Sandoval Restaurants, the upmarket restaurant group with more than 35 locations worldwide, is looking for more strategic ways to use data for customer retention and acquisition. It has started harnessing its email database to make more data-driven decisions using tools like customer analytics and marketing platform Venga.
6 Full-Service Social Media Management Firms
Small business owners have a reputation for being do-it-yourselfers, particularly when it comes to marketing and advertising. But with social spending on the rise, more of those business owners seem to be saying that if they want social media marketing done right, they need a professional to handle the job. Here are six full-service firms operating in the space right now.
Case Study: Westport Restaurant Views Social Marketing as Digital Word-of-Mouth
Local merchants in every vertical are relying more on social media marketing for customer acquisition and retention, but restaurants in particular have become heavy users of social platforms. This year, 50 percent of casual dining and fine dining operators said they planned to devote even more resources to social media marketing. Hyperlocal vendors like Perch are providing business owners with a way to consolidate most social marketing tasks in one centralized app.
5 Programmatic Ad Buying Platforms for SMBs
Programmatic buying has a reputation for being geared toward large-scale advertisers buying high volumes of impressions. But more vendors are developing programmatic solutions aimed directly at the SMB market. Here are five platforms that give smaller advertisers the ability to plan, buy, and target digital ads in real-time.
Case Study: Mattress Retailer Captures Millennials with Digital Strategies
The vast majority of mattress sales still take place in brick-and-mortar stores. However, America’s Mattress of Onalaska owner Dave Weinberger says he’s found that millennial shoppers are increasingly doing their pre-shopping research online. In response, he’s begun shifting his advertising budget away from offline channels and toward digital tactics, like call tracking and recording, search marketing, and online promotions.
6 Strategies for Improving Email Pitches to SMBs
Email is the go-to channel for pitching within the hyperlocal community, but with 81 percent of small business owners now being contacted by between one and five sales reps each week, according to a survey by Street Fight and Thrive Analytics, it’s becoming harder for digital marketing vendors to stand out from the pack. Here are six strategies vendors say they’ve successfully used to break through the clutter in local merchants’ inboxes.
Case Study: Reliability in New Scheduling Platform Helps Chicago Salon Maintain Buzz
Online scheduling platforms are supposed to save merchants time by automating client bookings, cancellations, reminders, and even payment collection. But when merchants stop trusting their own scheduling platforms, and start verifying individual bookings for accuracy, the benefits of online-only systems go out the window. For an exclusive Chicago salon, switching things up helped maintain buzz and business.
Case Study: Hotel Attracts Luxury Travelers with Guest-Facing Mobile Tech
As London’s boutique Lanesborough Hotel began what would become a 19-month, multi-million dollar refurbishment in 2014, executives started looking for strategic ways to appeal to guests with luxury tastes. To go along with the newly renovated rooms, which reopened in July, the team decided to add a technology component that would be unlike anything travelers had ever experienced.
6 Tools for Tracking Business Competitors
Every business owner wants to know the competition’s secret sauce. Now, merchants who are interested in tracking their competitors can let technology do some of the work. Competitive analysis tools allow local business owners to understand what neighboring merchants are doing right through their digital marketing and on social media to get people through the door. Here are six examples of platforms that businesses can use.
Case Study: Coffee Shop Leverages Dayparting to Perk Up Afternoon Lull
Walk into any coffee shop in the late afternoon and you probably won’t have a problem finding an open table. That afternoon lull can be tough to overcome. At Sunshine Coffee Roasters in Northern California, owner Mike Doherty’s approach adds a shot of technology to established customer outreach tactics. He relies on his cloud-based POS system, ShopKeep, for the majority of his promotional work and business management.