FloristWare Technical Support Article: 10107

Valentines Day Marketing Plan

A great plan for using the FloristWare marketing tools to maximize your Valentines sales and pre-orders while building your customer database AND maintaining your sanity.

This article will show you how to use FloristWare during the Valentines period to increase sales and pre-orders while decreasing headaches and building your customer database.

Before Valentines

As you know, FloristWare is great at helping you market to your existing customers. Many of your existing customers will probably buy their Valentines flowers from you anyway, but we still want to use FloristWare to do the following:

1. Marketing FloristWare is great at helping you market to your existing customers. We want to use the marketing features in FloristWare to make sure that your existing customers order from you and not another florist, online retailer or grocery store.

2. Pre-Orders

In addition to getting as many sales as possible from your existing customers, we want to encourage them to order well in advance. This will allow you to purchase accurately and avoid being long on product.

There are a few commonly used incentives. Some stores offer free product after Valentines. We admire this aggressive approach but believe it sends the wrong message to the customer - you are almost admitting that you are making way too much money on your Valentines prices, and that your regular product is almost worthless. This type of incentive can also be hard to administer.

Other stores offer discounts on pre-orders. This is a better solution, but there is another option that we like still more.

We suggest offering bonus points. Instead of discounting your prices you offer double or triple points.

There are several advantages. The first is that you still charging your full prices. The discount you are offering in terms of the bonus points is not only deferred long into the future, it will also be a much smaller discount - especially when you consider many if not most customers will never actually get around to redeeming their points.

There is another great benefit to offering bonus points - it gives the customer a reason to part with valuable marketing information. In order to take part in the points program, a customer has to give you their name, phone number, etc.

It's easy to set up bonus points. You simple go in to your settings and increase the rate at which points are awarded. When you reach whatever deadline you set, you simple turn the rate back to normal.

You will of course have to promote this to your customers - all of your receipts and invoices as well as your marketing material should mention that you are offering bonus points on all sales between, say, January 10 and February 10. Not only will this increase your pre-sales, it should also increase your regular sales during the slow January period.

3. Build Your Database

We keep talking about how FloristWare can help you market to your existing database of customers. The bigger that database is, the more FLoristWare can offer. You want the biggest possible customer database!

Valentines is a great opportunity to build that database. You are going to have a huge number of people placing orders, and you need to take advantage of that.

It can be hard. When you are really busy it is tempting to skip over things like customer e-mail addresses, mailing addresses and reminders, but you need to avoid that temptation whenever possible.

Try to collect as much customer information as possible during the busiest time of the year!

During Valentines

1. Organize your Deliveries and Pick-Ups

This will make your life easier on the craziest day(s) of the year! In the reporting section you can generate Delivery Lists, divide the deliveries into separate runs and sort them however you see fit.

You should also generate Pick-Up lists. You can then sort these by the last name of the customer and print them out. Then, as customers come in to pick-up their product it is relatively easy to find their name in the list, see the order number and find their items. You can then stroke their name off of the list.

2. Continue to Collect Customer Information

Even though you will be tempted to skip the customer information sections you really shouldn't - you want to collect as much information as possible. This is probably your busiest time - if you work hard you can build a database that will form the basis of your marketing efforts for the next year.

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