Tips & Tricks: October 2006 Archives

The AdTracker report allows you to monitor how well your various advertising campaigns are working for you. The idea is to improve sales by concentrating your advertising budget on the types of advertising that are most effective.

Here is how it works. In the AdTracker section of your settings you will enter all of your "Campaigns". These can be anything from a yellow pages ad to spots on the local radio station. Then, each time you make a sale, you will ask the customer which of these campaigns prompted them to make a purchase and then enter their response into FloristWare.

Then, once a month or so, you will generate the AdTracker report. It will show you the number and total value of sales generated by each campaign. You can also enter the cost of each campaign - so in the case of a yellow pages ad you would enter the cost of running the ad for the month.

FloristWare will then show you how effective each campaign is by showing you how many dollars in sales each campaign generated in return for each dollar spent.

As we mentioned the idea is to advertise most effectively. If you have efforts that are not working for you we suggest spending less on them and more on the efforts that are effective. You want to concentrate your advertising budget on the types of advertising that give you the biggest possible return on your investment.

One of the best ways you can increase sales is to review each customer's spending history each time they make a purchase.

Why? Because you never want to undersell a customer. A quick review of their spending history will make sure you don't.

For example, let's say you see that you are dealing with a customer who spends $85 on average. You don't want to let them spend any less! DO NOT suggest that they take advantage of your current $19.95 special. This customer is comfortable in the $85 range and that is where you want to keep them.

The FloristWare POS system shows you the spending history for a customer each time they make a sale. It appears right after you have confirmed their contact information.

FloristWare was designed from the ground up to be compatible with touch-screen monitors. To the best of our knowledge it is the only floral POS system that works with touch-screen technology.

This is one of the reasons why most of the buttons are so big. Big buttons make life easier when using a mouse, but it also makes them easier to use with a touch-screen monitor.

Using a touch screen can make FloristWare easier and faster to use than a mouse alone - particularly for people who are unfamiliar with computers. The touch screen gives them a more intuitive way to interact with the software.

Setting up a touch screen monitor is very easy. We have a separate article on it but if you can connect a mouse and a regular monitor to your computer you can hook up a touch-screen monitor. The monitor, your computer and FloristWare do all the work.

Touch screen monitors are more expensive than regular monitors, but prices are dropping and the difference is getting smaller all the time. A touch-screen LCD monitor would typically cost about $200 more than a regular LCD monitor of similar size.

You can also take some consolation in the fact that touch-screen monitors are generally built for commercial use and are much more sturdy than a standard monitor. They will hold up much better to the abuse to which they will be subjected in a retail environment.