Joules Clothing – email marketing at its best

Congratulations to Joules for coming up with such a great idea for their email marketing! This gave me enough of a laugh to forward to friends and with a prize of a chicken coop, it fits perfectly with Joules’ country image and the new “back to basics” mood of the public.

You have until the end of today to be in with a chance of a chicken coop!

Future Focus London… and WordPress

I attended the Future Focus event hosted by the Telegraph Business Club and IBM yesterday. Not surprisingly, one of the themes was DIY media, blogging, twittering and using social media. Twitter was monitored through the day and descriptions of the event were put up on the Future Focus blog as it happened. The url of the blog was given in the event and I looked it up today. I was most impressed to find that the blog is hosted here at WordPress.
Another theme was that of cloud computing. I was trying to think of cloud computing services which I use in my working day and I could only come up with this blog and Google Analytics. So well done, WordPress does it again!

Maybe Retail Answers could benefit from using the cloud a bit more? Or should we market our retail intranet Rapid as a cloud service?

By the way, the best bit of the event was the live voting on topics such as when will the recession end using hand held terminals and the results being displayed on screen immediately afterwards. It was great to have the interaction.

Can the owners of gift cards get their money if a retailer goes into administration?

Three things have happened together in the last couple of days:

Retail Week ran an article about the problems faced by customers who have Principles giftcards

I read an article based on some research by Zebra Technologies saying that money sitting on gift cards totals £30m in the UK

I was contacted in error by someone who has £60 worth of Bay Trading gift cards and has been told that she cannot spend them in store.

Are consumers who are holding gift cards and vouchers really at risk of losing the value of them if the retailer goes into administration? Presumably they can put in a claim to the administrator like any other creditor? Is it right that the administrator can continue to trade to gain the most value from the stock in the business but refuse to accept gift cards? Is there a government body who will guarantee the money?

Whatever the case, it seems like a good idea if we get out and spend that £30m quick!

With the death of technology shows, how’s a retailer to find a system?

With the recent decline and eventual demise of all retail techology shows in the UK, there is a question over how potential buyers find potential suppliers. Of course the simple internet search using Google is the obvious answer and it is probably the success of internet search which has caused the afforementioned demise. Searches of the whole internet though, tend to bring back a pretty mixed bag of results and you would need to try several search terms to get a reasonable list. It would also not be possible to filter the results by companies based in the UK, or those supplying systems using Microsoft technology, for example.

In reponse to this problem, a couple of new directories have sprung up. The first is On Windows. This is managed by Tudor Rose who publish Retail Speak and is for Microsoft partners only. This type of information is also on the microsoft.com but if you are looking for a specialist retail systems, the On Windows site is much easier.

Secondly Conjungo is providing supplier search service for all types of system across all industries. Retail Technology magazine is planning to link to this engine in the near future.

The limitations of this type of directory are that they only list suppliers who have paid to be listed and those suppliers get to write their own entry. It is therefore very hard to get a view on the quality of the suppliers and you will only see those who have paid to be on the directory. Of course this is also true of internet searches – suppliers write their own websites and only those who invest in SEO will do well in the searches. However, for the technology buyer these developments can only be good news. Suppliers will need to think carefully about how they spend their marketing budgets.

Delivering promotions to the last inch

Forget worrying about the last mile, delivering retail business strategy successfully to the customer relies on that last inch!

Take the Waitrose promotion “Indian meal for two for £10″. This must be in direct response to the M&S “Meal for Two for £10″. Waitrose marketing department have put their heads together and come up with a variation on M&S and scored in a couple ways – the Indian meal is extremely easy to cook and therefore really does replace at least a take away, and no-one expects desert with a Indian so Waitrose can provide a more complete main course  for the money.

So once the idea is in place what else needs to happen? Product development and the commercial team must have been involved to develop the dishes and negotiate prices with suppliers. The level of stock required needs to be forecasted and on Saturday evening had reached the store and was displayed prominently, the instore signage was in place – a large banner as you entered the store and the promotion was set up on the tills so the customer got the promotion in the end.

But retailers will always need to deal with dumb customers like me who take a different route around the store and miss the display. When I asked a member of staff (admittedly a young lad who is probably only Saturday staff) about the promotion, he said that only some stores were doing it. I would have challenged this anyway in view of the banner at the store entrance but another member of staff said that this store was doing the promotion, took me to the display and my husband and I enjoyed a very nice meal yesterday.

So for all the meticulous planning, the success of a promotion relies on every member of staff knowing about it. This requires excellent communication between head office and store in the first instance. There are many ways of achieving this but more and more retailers are deploying store communication systems based on web technology to achieve this. In a large store like a supermarket, a further level of communication needs to take place within the store. Realistically this is probably going to take the form of daily team briefings but technology could also be deployed by requiring staff to check the store communication system for key messages before starting a shift.

Not at The Retail Business Show…

What a shame we are not at The Retail Business Show today. The sudden cancellation of the show and the sad demise of Retail Events means that there is no mainstream retail technology show in this country.

It is easy to follow the fortunes of retailers in the national press or Retail Week. Most operate in a gold fish bowl of having to regularly report sales to the stock market and it hits the head lines. Retail technology companies are much less widely publicised. However, it can only be inferred from the cancellation of the show that suppliers were not queueing to book stands.

In any case, it is not good news for suppliers who lost money, for retailers who wanted to have a look at new technology or simply get together, and anyone who was planning to attend the seminars which Retail Events had worked hard to put together.

The end of the Retail Solutions era

It is a sad sign of the times that Retail Solutions will not take place in the UK next summer. Who knows how long it has been running? I first went as a raw graduate in 1998 and have attended most years since, partly to keep up with developments but mainly to catch up with people in the retail technology business. A similar event will take place in Barcelona next summer but it won’t be the same.

Given that the show has been slowly shrinking over the years and losing its buzz, the decision is not surprising. The move to Excel last year seemed to accelerate the process rather than reverse it.

It is also hardly surprising that Retail Events took the opportunity to publicise the demise of Retail Solutions. Can the Retail Business Show (28th and 29th Jan) fill the gap in the retail calendar? It must surely be placed to pick up some business both in terms of exhibitors and attendees.  It would be nice if this show could deliver some of the buzz that ecommerce EXPO delivered. Let’s hope that Retail Events attended that show and took some notes. I think the strong seminar programme was key.

Or will retailers lead the British public in the move away from face-to-face shopping over to internet shopping? After all shows were where retailers used to shop for systems.

What is the value of gift cards and vouchers in your house?

gift cards

Do an audit and add up the total value of gift cards and vouchers in your possession. Some will be generous gifts from friends and family, some will have been earnt as part of loyalty schemes and some will have been free gifts with purchase. I even found one in my house which had been won in a sailing race!

If we just consider the traditional gift voucher or card which someone has actually paid the retailer full face value for, this is excellent business for the retailer for a number of reasons:

• there will almost certainly be a delay between purchase and spend when the retailer can earn interest on the money
• a proportion of vouchers and cards will be lost or simply never spent – pure profit
• many customers when they come to spend the voucher will exceed the value – increased sales
• customers who do not usually shop in a particular store may be encouraged in – increased customer base

Technologically there are three main approaches:

• traditional paper pre-printed vouchers – many will have serial numbers and scanable barcodes and stolen vouchers can be cancelled
• vouchers printed at the till with scanable barcodes – these don’t look as pleasing but are easily tracked by EPOS systems and don’t exist before issue so therefore cannot be stolen
• gift cards which can be charged with money at the till, the value usually being stored in a central database – these arguably look the most pleasing and are certainly marketing as being superior for presents. Gift cards can also be precharged to be sold away from the till, most often in so called “gift card malls”, where a retailer offers a selection of other retailers’ cards in return for commission.

I used all three types this weekend with equal success.

The third annual Retail Gift Cards Europe Conference lasting two full days in London in September is testament to how big this business is and considers the details and challenges of setting up a scheme. It also reports on creative ways of marketing gift cards. Even retailers with successful schemes might find some new ideas.

In the meantime, clear out your house, find out what you’ve got and go on a spending spree !

Sports Sponsorship – Extending the Benefit

Well, the tennis excitement at Retail Answers has died down. While Chris is getting down to hard tennis practice to consolidate his progress I am planning how to keep the benefit going, how to retain some of our doubled website traffic and how to convert the excitement to relevant marketing for Retail Answers. I have yet to file the press cuttings. The PR file will have more than doubled!

We sent our first marketing email on the day Chris played his second round – a new experience for us and we got great coverage on the back page of Retail Week. A photo of Chris with a light hearted piece about Mike Eaton (Managing Director of Retail Answers) being the father of a Wimbledon sex God.

I also need to get back to other marketing such as announcing that Borders have recently selected our store management system, Rapid.

When Sports Sponsorship Really Pays

Our sponsored tennis player, Chris Eaton, continues to make stunning progress through Wimbledon and is all over the national news. To come from 661 in the world and make it through to round 2 is fairy tale stuff and the press have not failed to notice!

It is now my job to make sure that our customers and prospects make the connection and that Retail Answers reaps the benefits.