We are currently planning our next set of podcasts. Instead of focusing on FloristWare, the three planned episodes will feature three different experts talking about how you can improve your business.

One contributor is a small business expert. Another is a branding and marketing specialist. The third is a well known expert in the retail flower business. In each 20 - 40 minute episode they will share their thoughts on how you can make your business better, stronger and more profitable than ever.

More information will be released as it becomes available! In the meantime, please let us know if there are any specific issues you would like to see addressed or questions you would like to have answered.

Thank you.

As you know, the FloristWare Flower Shop POS System makes it very easy to market with e-mail and postcards. FloristWare will walk you through the process of building a list and then automatically create a customized e-mail or postcard for each person on it.

Writing the content for that e-mail or postcard is up to you! The message that you send to your customer will play a huge role in determining the effectiveness of your campaign. It is very important that you get it right.

This excellent article by Janine Popick contains some great information on how to create an effective message. You should give it a read before your next batch of e-mails or postcards.

Thank you.

One of the new features in FloristWare Version 2.0 helps you generate the greatest possible revenue from your outgoing wires.

First you enter the rebate that you receive from each of the wire services in your settings. Then, every time you send an outgoing wire, you see a list of all your services along with the rebate that you will receive from each. This makes it easy to select the service that pays the biggest rebate to maximize your rebate revenue!

To get started visit the "Wire Services" section of your settings and enter the rebates that you receive from each service.

Many florists are reluctant to be so aggressive as to market to recipients (people who have not bought anything from you but have only received flowers from you) and they should be. It is something that must be handled very delicately.

Why? Your first loyalty should always be to your customer. If a customer buys flowers from you and sends them to his wife he wants you to help make sure that she feels good about it. If you send her a tacky flyer the next day proclaiming that you have the "CHEAP, CHEAP, CHEAPEST ROSES IN TOWN - $AVE $$$$ - BUY NOW" then you devalue you the gift - you have told the wife that her husband bought her the cheapest flowers he could! Not a nice thing to do.

You can however do it with some class. Here is what we would suggest - once a week you could prepare a postcard or letter for everyone who received flowers the previous week. Send them a message explaining that you hope they liked their flowers. Assure them that you pride yourself on the level of service and quality of work that you provide.

You can then suggest that they consider you they next time they or someone they know buys flowers. If you handle it like that you can really increase your sales without insulting anybody!

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.

For those of you who don't know Tim Huckabee he is a highly respected floral industry trainer. He comes into a flower shop and works with the employees, teaching them to employ a special methodology that has evolved over years in the business.

His program enables staff to provide (among other things) better service for the customer (making for more loyal customers) and substantially higher average sales figures.

Last night I met with Tim as he finished up a day of training at a local flower shop. The owner and her employees were very pleased and excited to put his program into practice.

I was very impressed with Tim. He outlined his program and it made sense. More importantly he has countless satisfied clients who all swear that his training has increased their sales dramatically and immediately.

If you are interested in increasing your sales please take a look at Tim's website and give some thought to getting him in to your shop.

Floral Strategies Website

Thank you!

FloristWare Version 2.0 includes a new feature that allows you to easily run fundraising programs on behalf of charities and other non-profit and volunteer organizations. The goal is to help these organizations out while increasing your sales.

The idea is simple. Almost every florist we know is besieged with requests for donations, free product, etc. It often feels like you get hit up every single day, and while the people making the request always say they will only buy flowers from your store, they often don't look very familiar....

The new fundraising feature is designed to help them help themselves. Here is an example of how it works.

Let's say someone from the local Little League comes in and asks you to donate $50. You tell them that you will do them one better. You will set up a special program, and every time someone participates in it by buying flowers you will set aside a portion of the total sale as a donation to Little League.

It's now up to the Little League to make it work. If they want a decent donation, they are going to have to promote this program. They will have to promote it to all the other parents and coaches and urge them to shop at your store and participate in the program. They effectively become your sales force.

Here is how it works on your end. You will use your settings to specify that you want to run programs of this type. You will then enter as many of these programs as you like and define a certain contribution percentage for each. You can also turn programs on or off as you see fit.

When a customer makes a purchase you will be prompted to ask if they are taking part in a fundraising program. If they are FloristWare will show you a list of all the possibilities. You then select the appropriate one and FloristWare calculates the donation.

Whenever you see fit you can generate a special report that shows you how much money has been generated by each program, and you can make whatever payments are required to the organizations involved.

At this time of year I hope that FloristWare users will be doing everything they can to generate Valentines pre-orders. There are a couple of reasons for this:

It Makes Life Easier
Instead of trying to take hundreds of orders over just a few days, you can spread them over a month or more. It makes it easier to buy, plan and prepare. It just makes everything run more smoothly.

It Increases Sales
As a guy I know that on Valentines Day I better have some kind of gift for my wife, and I’m a little bit stressed about it. If a florist contacts me today with the right offer I can jump on it and forget about all that stress.

If I don’t get that offer I’m going to be looking around for other ideas. Maybe I’ll decide to get her a gift certificate, a spa day, theater tickets, chocolates, etc. Maybe I’ll even go to another florist. The bottom line is that I have number in my head that I’m prepared to spend on Valentines, and once it’s gone it’s gone. Whoever gets my money first wins.

So if you are interested in generating pre-orders the next decision is how to best go about it.

There are lots of ways. Typically you want to reach out to your customers with some kind of incentive. You want this incentive to be very appealing to the customer while costing you as little as possible.

One of the most common is a discount of some kind - something like “order before January 31 and save $5”. This is a good approach - it appeals to the customer and doesn’t cost you all that much.

I have also seen some really wild promotions. One shop had a deal that when you bought a dozen roses for VDay you would receive another dozen free later in the winter.

I love that idea for being so creative and aggressive. I also worry about a couple of things. First, unless you have huge standing orders and know that you will be throwing away roses throughout the winter you’re spending money on product. Even if you are certain you’ll have extra product you’re still paying for prep and possibly delivery. This kind of promotion costs you money!

As a consumer it also feels a little weird - it leaves me thinking something like “I must really be getting screwed on these flowers if they can afford to send me more flowers for free after Valentines.” It also leaves me thinking that outside of Valentines flowers really can’t be worth very much. This might not be the kind of thing you want rattling around in your customer’s head.

If are a running some kind of points program I suggest that you promote something like double or triple points on any orders placed during the month of January.

Why is this better? It costs you less. A typical points program rewards at between 2% to 4%, so let’s use 3% as a reference and double that (our special pre-order incentive) to bring it up to six percent.

Let’s say your average Valentines order is $70. A cash discount of $5 costs you $5 real dollars in revenue. Awarding the points at 6% means a theoretical loss of $4.20 in revenue.

Why theoretical? Because a large percentage of points will never be redeemed for a variety of reasons. So, even though awarding the points means that someday you might have to give the customer $4.20 in free product, the odds are that at least a third of the points that you generate won’t ever be redeemed. That means that the $4.20 in free product becomes about $2.75. So instead of giving up $5 in real revenue right now, you may one day be giving up $2.75 in free product.

Which brings up the next point - hopefully you make a decent margin on your product! That means that the $2.75 in free product at retail actually costs you much less - maybe less than $2 - it all depends on your shop.

This is why I’m such a big fan of these programs - instead of losing $5 in revenue right now you can get the same result by being prepared to give away about half of that in free product somewhere down the road. It can make a big difference.

The next step is promoting it.

The special should be promoted on every receipt, invoice and statement that you send out. Your staff should mention it during every phone call and face-to-face interaction with a customer.

You also need to promote it even more actively. I would say you should do at least one e-mail, a postcard and, if at all possible, a phone call. FloristWare makes all of this easy.

It really does work! Below is an e-mail that was received from a user who threw a program like this together. She was happy with the results, but I think they would have been much, much better if she had started sooner!

We tried the marketing feature in FloristWare for the first time just in time for Mother's Day. We created a mailing list of 300 names and mailed out a postcard 10 days before Mother's day. . We also did a follow up about 5 days with an email reminder. You could have knocked our socks off with the response. We had 48 orders --- not responses -- but 48 orders from the postcards.

This by no means the only thing that you should be doing, but I hope it’s something that you will consider doing.

Thanks - and good luck!

P.S. There is an article that covers much of this material in the FloristWare support library.

FloristWare has many different tools all designed to help you improve your sales. Used properly they will do just that.

Unfortunately there is one Achilles heel - in most cases you need to have some customer information on file to take advantage of the marketing features.

Until you enter a customer into the system, you can't send them marketing e-mails or postcards. You can't keep track of reminders for them. You can't get them into a points based loyalty program. You can't view their spending history and ensure that you are getting the most out of them on every single sale.

Because customer information is so vital to getting the most out of FloristWare we urge you to enter customers into the system whenever possible. Don't skip the customer information section of a sale unless you are so busy you don't have the extra minute it will take, or you have a customer who simply refuses to take part.

You should also enter whatever customer information you may already have on hand. Do you have old order forms, business cards, etc? You should be taking customer information from those and entering them into FloristWare.

This week you should try using the Marketing features in the FloristWare POS system to send some e-mails promoting a summer special.

Don't get crazy. Sending thousands of e-mails can be dangerous if you don't have enough products to fill the orders that you get. For this experiment we'd suggest maybe 100 e-mails.

Just enter FloristWare at the Manager level and choose "Marketing". From there you should build a list "name-by-name" and select only the people that you think will be interested in the special you have in mind.

Make sure you put some thought into your e-mail. Remember, you don't want them to think you are sending them junk mail so try and offer them something of value.

That's it! If you have any questions please give us a call.

A discussion of the elements of planning and implementing a successful points-based incentive/loyalty program can be found in the public articles section of our website.

There is a great article on the Inc. site about how CRM software like FloristWare can help you build stronger relationships with your customers.

The second point really jumped out at me:

2. Rewards
Every industry has companies who do reward and customer loyalty programs differently. It is a very simple form of saying "thank you." And particularly of late, loyalty programs seem only to have grown in popularity. Why? Customer loyalty programs are the next-generation marketing strategy. It is a viable and measurable marketing tool that small businesses can use to retain their customers and grow their business.

User feedback has always indicated that the points based incentive program is one of the most powerful features in FloristWare. Seeing it mentioned as the second point in this article makes me even more excited about.

I hope all users take advantage of this feature. All florists may also benefit from this material on designing a successful points program.

Earlier in the week I was speaking with a user who shared a great way to end phone each phone order. She encouraged me to pass it along to the other users - I hope you find it useful.

At the end of each order she explains to the customer that they will receive three e-mails. The first will be their receipt, and she encourages them to review it carefully and call back if there are any questions or concerns.

The next e-mail will be a delivery confirmation. Here you want to stress that you are adding this valuable service free of charge.

Finally she explains that in a few days she will send a follow-up email - just to make sure that everything went well and that everyone was happy with the flowers.

Here is the best part - she will also ask for an online review/recommendation! She is putting all this great customer service forward (putting the customer in her debt) and then politely asking for a small favor in return. It is a great idea and a very persuasive technique.

Please give it a try!

There is a great article on the Inc. site about how you can use a "mystery" shopper to evaluate the performance of your employees when it comes to dealing with customers.

You should read the article to understand the idea (having someone pretend to be a customer and reporting back to you) and benefits but don't get discouraged. While they may be talking about some grand and fairly complicated programs you are lucky - you can do the same thing cheaply and affordably.

This is one of the great things about this business - most of it is done over the phone! You don't need to hire a service to provide mystery shoppers - you can have friends and family members call to place orders while you listen in.

This is a powerful technique that you can implement at virtually no cost. I knew one florist who would visit a different friend or family member every few weeks and listen in while they placed an order to his shop. They would get to keep the flowers and he would refund their payment.

Tim Huckabee of Floral Strategies makes great use of the mystery shopper technique - it's one of the cornerstones of his program. If you ever want to hear someone expertly dissect the handling of a phone order and then show you how to do it right you need to try his service.

Flowers look nice. That visual appeal is something you should exploit as much as possible.

Good photographs are essential. Using your own photographs - and not the same images you see on thousands of websites - is something you need to consider.

With that in mind please take a look at this excellent article on Improving Product Photos .

With the busy season fast approaching many florists will be hiring additional employees to help get them through it. There is a great article on this very subject at the Inc. magazine website.

One of the best things about FloristWare is that it so easy for new employees to learn. We received this e-mail from a user just before Valentines 2008 describing how quickly his temps were able to pick it up:

Oh, I did have one great reaction from a temp to the software. She didn’t work with us Christmas, so the last time she has been in the floral shop side as an employee was mothers’ day last year. We were still on pen and paper with cash registers, credit card machines, the whole nine yards.

She came in for a hour last week and I gave her her login and password. She then started playing with the software. Taking a “phone order” then a “walk in with customer info” then a complex walk in with customer info and delivery on the same sale. Then finally a walk in with no customer information. It was minimal how much she had to be talked through. She loved the fact that she doesn’t have to write encloseure cards, fight for access to a cash register or credit card machine, or have her hand cramp up from writing three/four/five orders during the same phone call from the same person. She likes the duplicate feature!!! She is thrilled, and I am thrilled that I get another computer friendly person for VD!

We've had a few calls from users who wanted to send one last e-mail blast before Valentines day. If you are thinking about the same thing please check out this article on Improving Your E-Mail Marketing for Valentine's Day.

There are a few points that seem especially relevant right now...

1. Keep it short and simple. Don't waste too much time crafting the e-mail.
You don't have much time to create a masterpiece right now anyway - you just want to remind your customers that Valentines is here and you are ready to help.

2. Qualify the e-mail addresses and information about the people... Don't carpet e-mail blast every address in your database.
The good news is that FloristWare has great tools for helping build targeted lists of customers.

3. Use a third-party e-mail system.
FloristWare is great at creating and refining lists and it can also send those e-mails out but ISPs are getting more and more aggressive about shutting down their clients (you) who send large volumes of similar mail. They will assume you are spamming and block you from sending. With that in mind you should consider a dedicated e-mail marketing service to actually send your mail. The two we suggest are ConstantContact and MailChimp. In either case you create the list in FloristWare, export it to the service you select and they look after actually sending it out and keeping from getting in trouble with your ISP.

Good luck!

We've had a few calls from users who wanted to send one last e-mail blast before Valentines day. If you are thinking about the same thing please check out this article on Improving Your E-Mail Marketing for Valentine's Day.

There are a few points that seem especially relevant right now...

1. Keep it short and simple. Don't waste too much time crafting the e-mail.
You don't have much time to create a masterpiece right now anyway - you just want to remind your customers that Valentines is here and you are ready to help.

2. ...Don't carpet e-mail blast every address in your database.
The good news is that FloristWare has great tools for helping build targeted lists of customers.

3. Use a third-party e-mail system.
FloristWare is great at creating and refining lists and it can also send those e-mails out but ISPs are getting more and more aggressive about shutting down their clients (you) who send large volumes of similar mail. They will assume you are spamming and block you from sending. With that in mind you should consider a dedicated e-mail marketing service to actually send your mail. The two we suggest are ConstantContact and MailChimp. In either case you create the list in FloristWare, export it to the service you select and they look after actually sending it out and keeping from getting in trouble with your ISP.

Good luck!