If you quit wire service you need to get serious and plan new marketing methods

domineaux

domineaux

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Jun 9, 2009
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Costa Mesa
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B & M florists that have discontinued WS cannot sit on their hands when they quit WS.

It is imperative to start thinking of new ways to stay in touch with your customers and build business in newer and better ways.

There are other:

1. things to sell, that will complement your business.
2. ideas, you can use to perk things up.
3. services, you can add that work with your business.

IF you have determined to quit WS because you aren't producing adequate income from the WS, remember your business will feel an impact when you quit.

If you cut off your wire service you will probably lose alot of activity that was unprofitable to your business, which is a good thing.

You probably have to lower your payroll. You won't have activity for activity sake any longer. If your incoming WS orders were significant enough to keep one or more employees busy most of the time you must deal with cutting your staff immediately.

Get involved on various flower/florist discussion forums. Turn off the TV drama and spend some nights on the internet, go to local trade events, wedding shows, etc. Get you mind working to develop new markets for your business.

You must take inititative to reach out to your customer base. Direct mail still works, and you can buy demographic mail lists. THe USPS has a very inexpensive service where they will create and mail for you. You don't even have to create the mail piece. You can use the mail piece to help build and email list as well.

Emailings are excellent for keeping in touch with your customers. You should think of a marketing method for acquiring email addresses of prospective customers:

1. You might have you delivery driver ask for email addresses when they deliver
2. When anyone is in the store you can ask for email addresses.
3. You can have some type of discount promotion you can tell the person about to encourage them to provide their email.

Acquiring a email list will mean big returns for you. The 1800 and FTD say that over 50% of their business is repeat customers. They are harvesting the emails with every order, in turn they are mailing several promotional pieces one or more times per month to maintain that customer relationship.

It's not going to be enough to just quit WS, you will have to make changes for maerketing and doing business effectively in NON-WS ways. The WS cash cow has moved into other pastures controlled by the OG and internet marketers.

One thing I think that you should seriously think about once you have quit the WS. Don't second guess yourself, proceed with resolve.

The proponents of WS are usaually big sender accounts, and OG in disguise. Everytime one of us quits WS that is one less potential fill florist for them to use.

Maintain a postive attitude about choices you make for your business.

These are just a few ideas, and I'm sure if others participate in this thread you will read some very good ideas that work as well.
 
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Good post.

I have always thought that the Wire Service fees you are paying should be considered a marketing fee, and not lumped in as a wire service expense. By ear marking that money for continued marketing, you should feel little to no difference in the way things are going, but will be promoting your own local business, rather than gathering orders from abroad.

When the change is made, hopefully the design team as stated above, IS less busy, leaving time for the owners to do this all important "owner stuff", like marketing and purchasing better. <--- something to consider rather than layoffs or the like for we smaller operations where the owner is tasked with operational work all day. (As the wire service was not profitable or losing money, it shouldn't affect the bottom line at all)

If volume decreases significantly for some products, you may not be able to buy full boxes of certain products any more, which can have an effect on your cost of goods.

That being said, if you do decide to quit, I would imagine that your product purchasing won't be affected because it is significantly low volume anyway, but it is still something to consider.
 
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duanermb said:
Good post.

I have always thought that the Wire Service fees you are paying should be considered a marketing fee, and not lumped in as a wire service expense. By ear marking that money for continued marketing.........
Click to expand...

We run a 3 step marketing on all w/s orders. Our grab rate is 40%.............so we take 40% of the w/s fees and move to the "marketing column"..........I know most don't agree, but you get some value for those fess. Over 200 new customers last year and the value in the thousands by doing this. The cost for these customers in the campaign was about $8 each.................so the next time they order no "fees" do to anyone..............................
 
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Excellent post!

I actually did turn around and up my marketing budget when I quit. My budget was far lower than it should have been, especially in a down economy. I doubled my marketing budget, which was easy to do because I used the money I was saving in fees. I now dedicate roughly 10-12% of my gross sales. Steep yes, but when the economy turns around and people are buying again, my name will be the one they remember.
 
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What is being outlined here are some basic business and marketing concepts that should be followed and adhered to whether a shop belongs to a wire service or not. I am a strong believer that a wire service and the business it generates (incoming and outgoing) should be considered gravy. Too many times wire service business is evaluated and dismissed as unprofitable due to that fact that a shop is running so close to the wire no pun intended) that incoming wires skew their margins and their lack of customer traffic results in few outgoing wires. Thus the owner determines the return on investment does not justify the membership fee.

A shop should strive to build its "bread and butter" business through ongoing marketing. Unfortunately in many cases marketing is considered an expense (one that can not be justified and as such is cut) rather than as an investment in building the business. I am often asked "when can a shop cut back or stop spending money on advertising" my answer is always the same. Anytime you choose, just make sure that you mark the day on the calendar as the day you decided to watch your business decline. Lets face it, customers die, move, change their buying habits, if a shop is not marketing to replace customers the writing is on the wall.

Just my thoughts
 
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Doug,
That is a brilliant post. I completely agree.
I have said time and time again that I look at my WS as a marketing expense. My designers are there already, they might as well design something with OUR name on it instead of the competitions.
In November and December we hand out 500 calendars to our in-store customers, but also to recipients of deliveries. These are people who may not have purchased from us in the past.
We have SO many new customers who come in because of something they received.

Whether WS affiliated or not, I completely agree that marketing should be front and center.
 
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lil_goldie said:
Doug,
That is a brilliant post. I completely agree.
I have said time and time again that I look at my WS as a marketing expense. My designers are there already, they might as well design something with OUR name on it instead of the competitions.
In November and December we hand out 500 calendars to our in-store customers, but also to recipients of deliveries. These are people who may not have purchased from us in the past.
We have SO many new customers who come in because of something they received.

Whether WS affiliated or not, I completely agree that marketing should be front and center.
Click to expand...
Bravo!

The intangibles of wire service membership that need to be taken into account when making any decisions regarding said membership.

I don't think it is right for everyone, but if you are part of it, get as many orders as you possibly can and make it work for you.
 
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yep, I used a wire service to market to the customers who used them.......a great number of them are now my direct CC repeat customers.........
 
We used WS over a year, knowing it was unproftiable. We thought we could build customer goodwill through WS orders filled, similar to what you mention.

Our WS fees -- $1.50 per order with direct commission to the sender of 20%. Additionally we paid appx $350 per month in direct WS fees.

We did acquire some customers, because we made higher quality arrangements on all fill orders. We enclosed marketing brochures and kept addresses for direct mail.

We made practically nothing on the fill orders above variable costs, because we really felt we should go out of our way to use WS orders for developing a good customer base.

Again, we did acquire customers this way, but we calculated at the end of the year we had spent over $4,000 (350x12) in direct WS fees to acquire that business.

We determined our total income from business generated by customers whom we filled WS orders for has amounted to around $400 total up to now

That equates to a return in gross dollars of 10 cents per dollar spent a very poor return.

We now have better promotion of our business without the burden of WS monthly fees.
 
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Palms said:
all of these things should be done anyway really regardless of whether a shop is relay or not. Totally agree with most things but i do not use the ignore button, but each to their own. Thanks for the post :)
Click to expand...

I have to strongly agree wtih Palms.

You should be doing this the first day you used your own money to start your business. But I will admit its easy to get stuck in relying upon the wire service to do the work for you and at a time thats what they where suppose to do.

I have more shops calling me asking for advice. There biggest concern is there website and the very first thing I ask them regardless of what website they use. How many of their own images are being used?

Here's a challenge for everyone. You have one week to take a picture of a dozen red roses and add it to your website. If you can do that then you are one step closer to promoting your own business.
 
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Eric S said:
Here's a challenge for everyone. You have one week to take a picture of a dozen red roses and add it to your website. If you can do that then you are one step closer to promoting your own business.
Click to expand...

Eric,

THANK YOU FOR THE KICK IN THE BUTT!!!

So......here's mine. Please click on the image for the description and tell me if I have gone over-board.

http://www.any-timeflowers.com/
 
Very nice.

Here are my new products from yesterday.
http://www.everydayflowers.net/ed228.html
http://www.everydayflowers.net/ed229.html
http://www.everydayflowers.net/ed230.html
http://www.everydayflowers.net/ed231.html
http://www.everydayflowers.net/cbb166.html
http://www.everydayflowers.net/cbb167.html

Don't just stop there. Keep going everyday every week until you have a constant flow of new products. Your customers will love it and the search engines will love showing off your new content.

See how much fun that is....
 
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anytimeflowers said:
Please click on the image for the description and tell me if I have gone over-board.
Click to expand...
maybe too much jargon?
"freedom" rose and "veriflor" grower?
People have NO clue what these mean.

People like romance in their description.

Here is an example from The Keg Restaurant.
When you look at their menu:
Blue Cheese Filet: Our filet mignon wrapped in applewood smoked bacon and grilled to your liking. Covered in a Bleu cheese crust, served golden brown and sprinkled with roasted garlic cloves.
versus
Blue Cheese Filet: Our filet mignon from a grade A farm in Alberta, Canada wrapped in bacon from a farm in new jersey and grilled on a 48 000 BTU stainless steel barbecue.

Remember our guerilla marketing book. People don't want to hear about "our" roses, they want to hear about "their" feelings.
How are these flowers going to help them?
 
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lil_goldie said:
maybe too much jargon?
"freedom" rose and "veriflor" grower?
People have NO clue what these mean.

People like romance in their description.

Here is an example from The Keg Restaurant.
When you look at their menu:
Blue Cheese Filet: Our filet mignon wrapped in applewood smoked bacon and grilled to your liking. Covered in a Bleu cheese crust, served golden brown and sprinkled with roasted garlic cloves.
versus
Blue Cheese Filet: Our filet mignon from a grade A farm in Alberta, Canada wrapped in bacon from a farm in new jersey and grilled on a 48 000 BTU stainless steel barbecue.

Remember our guerilla marketing book. People don't want to hear about "our" roses, they want to hear about "their" feelings.
How are these flowers going to help them?
Click to expand...

Excellent, excellent points Chantelle. I have to work on all of my descriptions, I forget what is important to me is not always important to them.

Still no new baby?
 
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