▶ InstagramIf you have unusual vintage pieces in your case that your customers don’t fall in love with, chances are, there’s someone searching for it on Instagram. Reaching that audience isn’t an easy task, and it’s even harder to earn those people’s trust and build a relationship with them.
We started truly focusing on the Nelson Coleman Jewelers Instagram account, nelsoncolemantowson, in December 2017. Not only did our brand awareness increase in our local market, it has increased worldwide. We now have loyal customers from Australia and Germany who have reached out to purchase our jewelry. It’s also introduced us to a network of wholesalers, designers and stonecutters we never would have met.
Here are five keys to success for Instagram:
1.Instagram allows you to use 30 hashtags on each post. Use all 30!
2. Research those hashtags. If no one else is using them, the chances of you being seen are incredibly small.
3. Post two to three times per day. You won’t overload your followers by posting that much, but posting once a day or less will result in you not being seen by any of your followers. Trust me. I’ve tested it.
4. Use a scheduling app from an official Instagram partner to tell you when to post, and allow it to schedule your posts for you.
5. Interact with everyone. Like posts that are similar to yours, comment on posts from people in your community. You’ll grow faster when you’re a part of the community.
▶ EmailOur main focus with our email campaigns is to make more sales. It’s not to educate, let them know our favorite cookie recipe, or do a monthly roundup of what’s happening. It is for the sole purpose of increasing sales. But that’s also the sole purpose of the 100-plus other emails being ignored in their inbox. So how do we, a small business selling luxury goods, stand out and become relevant? Hyper-targeted marketing.
To send out our emails, we use a software called Active Campaign, which combines a customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation suite. It holds a lot of information about our customers, and it hooks up with our website to show what customers are looking at. We’re using that data, paired with customers’ past purchases, to send them products targeted specifically to them.
Let’s say you have a customer named Mary. You see her once every other year or so, and she buys herself something. She spends about $300 on average, and almost exclusively buys something with colored stones in it. You also have your customer Dave. You love Dave. You can count on him to be in the doghouse a couple times a year, and he’s always good for a big anniversary and Christmas purchase. And his wife only wears diamonds.
But you’re sending both of these customers the same emails, with the same products. Mary doesn’t like diamond jewelry. And Dave doesn’t need to know about the newest Alex and Ani release. So why are they receiving those emails?
By tagging our customers within Active Campaign and tracking their product interests on our website and in previous emails, we are able to send them emails based on what they’re shopping for. So when Mary is shopping for her next pair of turquoise earrings, her emails are going to have turquoise earrings in them. When Dave is looking for an upgraded pair of diamond studs, the emails he receives will have studs in them.
Once a customer reaches a certain score in our CRM system, we have the ability to create a new lead for our sales team. They’re able to pull up that customer’s account and see exactly what Dave and Mary have looked at on our website and what they clicked on in the emails. From there, it’s a simple call or email: “Mary, we just got in this amazing pair of turquoise earrings, and I immediately thought of you!”
Because of the hyper-targeting, we are no longer sending out email blasts. We’re still sending out emails, but clients in different categories are only viewing products we believe they’re going to be most likely to buy based on the buying cycles of customers who have purchased similar products.
▶ Lookbooks
Last year, we created a completely custom winter lookbook celebrating our community, our family, and most of all, our jewelry. When it came to picking the merchandise for the catalog, we did something new for us. Instead of putting in vendor images, ads or pages, we looked at what our customers tended to buy during the holidays. We compared the data for five years, figured out what categories and price points were trending up or down, and compared that to the data for all of 2017 in case there was a trending category for the year. And then we used that data to pick the majority of the merchandise. We also know that a holiday catalog is a chance for customers to fantasize and see some incredible pieces, so we added a few of those in as well.
In addition, we refocused on who was receiving this catalog. We only mail this piece to our active customers. Since they’re already our clients, the majority of them already have their bridal, so we didn’t dedicate a lot of real estate to those categories.
We also included a staff-picks section right in the middle of the book. The catalog is long; it’s 36 pages. With today’s attention span, that’s really pushing it. Breaking the catalog up in the center with something a little different, with people the readers recognize, rebuilds the emotional connection they have with our team members and re-engages them so they can look through the entire book. We decided to avoid loading up the pages with too much jewelry as well — an approach inspired by Tiffany & Co.
We put a lot of thought into the experience the customer was going to have with this book. We mailed it in an envelope so it would arrive in good condition. We picked a heavier-than-average envelope stock that had a smooth feel to encourage opening. The cover stock of the book feels luxurious; when you touch this piece, you know it’s special.
Image: Sarah Goggins, marketing director at Nelson Coleman Jewelers in Towson, Maryland. Article from the Rapaport Magazine - May 2018. To subscribe click here.