You have £1000 to spend

[chris ashdown]

You have a budjet of £1000 only and you need to build up sales for the next three months.

Some suggestions are shown below:-

A) You could spend it all on Pay per click not necassarily all on the same PPC Company

B) You could print out leaflets and send them out to existing customers by 2nd class post

C) Use one off Email to target a large number of cold customers, maybe using a specialist company

D) Spend it on Magazine / printed promotional material

E) Advertise special discounts on your own sites, but discount must be costed to the £1000

F) Any other idea's

OK Ladies and gentlemen whats your best idea for improving sales on this budjet over the three months. No long term solutions please

What increase in the number of sales would you expect as a %?

[fleetwood]

Hi Chris

Assume your talking about your own business, I would guess that uniform/workwear purchases are on a 'as needed' basis, rather than an impulse or in response to a promotion (although this could have some influence).

With that in mind, I would say that targetting existing customers would not be my greatest priority (although should certainly be done at some level, as it should also be the lowest cost solution).

Print advertising is definately on the decline, but I would have thought would be the best way to target your kind of market. Using specialist trades (nursing times etc), coupled with a time limited promotion. Trying to reduce prices outside of a promotion is a no-no IMO, unless you are intending to keep prices permanantly low. Short term discounting can have a negative effective, unless it is seen to be a promotion.

If you go the magazine route, negotiate HARD. Print ad revenues are down, and most publications are struggling to find advertisers. Say you can't afford page rates, but will take late space (meaning that you'll take the full page ad if they can't find anyone else - but you expect it at a silly price - I'd go for 10% of advertised rates - you must be ready to go with an ad at short notice).

See if you can tie in advertsing to editorial content with something like 'this is our xth year - here's a bit about our company - and here's a deal were offering to celebrate'.

Mine the local papers too - they always want local content, and will probably be willing to tie into an advertising feature. I would imagine the local aspect could be a selling point for firms wishing to buy from you too.

I don't have any exeprience of PPC, so will leave that for others to comment.

[Legends]

Hi Chris

The gurus say never give a discount - customers do not really respond to discounts unless it is significant (20%+). Give away free product - its cheaper and works much better.

One tactic I use regularly is to go to one of my major suppliers and buy bulk quantities of end of line stuff and really negotiate the price down - i do not buy tat but stuff that was top draw last year and is still considered good by most people.

Then we give it away free - conditional of course - "like spend £X pounds on our site this week and get a Y worth £Z completely free" every time we do this our average order value goes sky high (we choose the value of £x to be above our average order value) and our conversion rate typically increases by about 20%.

We do this exercise whenever our suppliers offer close outs that we can get really cheap.

Incidently - we also offer the product on our site at the RRP so people can actually see the real price (funny thing is we often sell a few at full price too and this is always a bonus).

Cheers

[chris ashdown]

Just to clear up, not talking about my own company just a general question to the forum to see who has the best idea's and maybe help some new members who may be in this sort of situation

[chris ashdown]

I do like that one Ian

[pnagames]

Morning Chris

we are looking at this now as we will do a push when our website has been revamped.

it all depends on what you sell. if you are a b2b company then i would say the best is mail marketing.

if you are on a company similar to mine or to Stereo Steve then i mix is the definate answer.

with a budget of 1K we would do the following:

flyers & distribution or an advert in a newspaper
also PPC

(i think the allocation can be around 50-50 or 60-40)

for the discount / free product is down to what you sell again.

for us we believe that even a small discount will entice people back.

for someone else which has products of lower value then a bogof maybe be more appropriate

[acompton]

I'm not an expert here, but my own directions would be:
1. Increase the stock range
2. Targeted advertising.

My limited experience has shown that increasing the stock range always brings in more sales. My Adword campaign seems to have a natural click limit, so increasing the spend would be difficult. I would go for targetted on-line advertising, hitting very specific fan sites. Just a limited campaign to get the shop name around more. As a relatively new company, most of my customers
have no existing loyalty (ie. relatively new to the hobby). Targetted advertising should attract more of the established shoppers.

Alan Compton
www.greenknightgames.co.uk
Great board games and cards games you won't find in the High Street

[pinbrook]

In the short term I'd go with the theory that 80% of your business should come from your existing customer base.

Thus target £800 at mail shots to current customers.

Use the remaining £200 to do adwords/magazines etc etc to bring New customers

[RuralWeb]

Freebies to existing and new customers.

[Stereo Steve]

Following on from Ians point, is there anything you can give away to your client base. We deal in blank media and have plenty of broken tubs and customer returns where the media is perfect. Now, I can flog it out on Ebay and recoup some of the cash but I've had the idea that I might make up packs of say 5 different discs in sleeves and send them out as freebies to our customers as a 'Have you tried these?' idea. Should not only remind them of the site, but also give a good vibe and also maybe encourage sales of those items.

Other than that, freebies are always good. We are doing an offer this month which is basically a free CD wallet if you spend £30. Our average order is maybe £20 so we hope to push them up to the next level and the cases cost us about 40p as we picked up a pallet load from a desperate supplier. It's working a treat so far.

In terms of advertising, how about some real ads in trade/ farming magazines? Not lots of tiny ones but maybe one or 2 bigger ads in major publications?