5/18/2012

Weekly News, Loyalty Rewards

DESIGNER RESOURCE – LOYALTY REWARDS

Have you thought about your loyal fans lately? It’s a great idea to reward your customers and fans with a little something extra once in a while. This increases loyalty to your design business. In this competitive environment designers have to do more than just crank out new products – they need to work on building a relationship! One way to do this is loyalty rewards. Today I encourage you to look at every way you connect with your customers and devise a reward for them. Here are some ideas
Facebook fan-only freebie
Discount coupon distributed to your newsletter subscribers, fans or followers. I recommend you make it a really good one, not something like 25% off. I have my own personal store so I was able to offer $3 off any order (no minimum) to my newsletter subscribers but if you are in a consignment store it will need to fit in with your store pricing policy. Check with your store owner to see if you are allowed to do this. (Make sure you set up your coupon for enough uses but only 1 use per customer!)
Newsletter subscriber freebie – at least a mini kit. You can make it coordinate with a new product or other promotion. I did this on the May blog train (see the post here) and have occasionally done an extra bonus for my current subscribers.
I’m not including a blog freebie in this list unless you are using a syndication service that allows you to directly email your subscribers such as Feedblitz. This idea is for the people who have shown an extra interest your products by subscribing, liking and/or following you.
These projects can take away from your design time but I have seen myself that they increase loyalty and sales as well. When I did my store coupon, I did end up giving away a lot free but there were additional sales as well. When I did the newsletter subscriber free on the blog train, my readership increased by over 20%. I truly believe it is worth your while to reward your fans every once in a while and I hope you find the same.

NEW PRODUCTS

PHOTOSHOP ACTIONS
Digiact001 - Frame1Digiact001 - Flower2Digiact001 - Flower1
Digiact001 - Bow2Digiact001 - bow1Digiact 001
TEMPLATES
CU Big Machines Layered Templates
EMBELLISHMENTS
Vintage FramesCU Date Beads
OVERLAYS
Embossed Overlays #12Embossed Overlays #11

 

$2 PRODUCTS – today only

We have 73 fabulous products in the Fantastic Friday section – SHOP HERE.

5/11/2012

Designer Presence Tip

Happy Friday! I have an important designer tip and some store news to share with you.

DESIGNER TIP – ONLINE INFORMATION

This week, I was in the process of contacting a few select designers for a special opportunity. I wanted to communicate directly with the designers instead of going through the owners of the stores where they were selling. I was really surprised to see that for a significant number of these designers, it was really hard to find a way to contact them. For a couple, I could not find ANY way to contact them.

Have you considered how to let people get in touch with you? Because this is a very competitive market, I think it’s important to do as much as you can to develop a strong online presence. That includes letting potential customers and business partners get in touch with quickly and easily. You can lose sales and miss opportunities if people cannot contact you. This is especially important if you are exclusive in one consignment store. The best design income opportunities and relationships I’ve developed after 6 years designing have come by people contacting me through my blog and Facebook page – never by having a store owner forward an email sent through their site’s contact system.  I don’t think you should depend on consignment store websites to provide information about you to customers – you must develop a presence yourself. I encourage you to think about this aspect of your business and develop a plan to build up your online presence.

Some avenues to explore are buying a domain with your designer name, blogging and having a Facebook fan page. On your domain and blog, be sure you put up contact information.

When I was on Blogger, I simply used a yahoo email graphic in my side bar with a link to email me. That cuts down on spiders who collect email addresses and spam you. If you are concerned about your email being published out on the web, get an extra email account just for that purpose and have it forward to your main email. This could be a very important step in increasing your customer relationship, sales and business opportunities.