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Cover
Retail Rap
By Phyllis Schiller
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| Ivanka Trump |
The 4Cs are not the only things that make a piece of diamond jewelry a sales winner. In an ongoing series, Rapaport Magazine explores the “3Ws” — what’s selling, what’s not and why — by going straight to the people who really know — jewelry retailers. Each month, we ask a sampling of retailers to comment on the important issues that are facing the industry today. Here is what they had to say when asked: “How are you communicating with customers to drive shopping this year?”
“We’re doing a lot with social media this year — mainly Facebook. We do a VIP email, where customers can sign up and we send them promotions by email. We have some promotional parties, which start around Thanksgiving, which is when we do a two-day party where we invite our best customers. We’ve done this every year.”
“On Black Friday, we’re going to do our Apple product giveaway, which we’ve been doing for the past two years. Heretofore, it’s been an iPad gift with purchases starting at $2,499. We’ll probably do the iPad again; it’s worked in the past. Even if someone already has one, they can use it as a gift for a mother, father or keep it for themselves. It still has a lot of pizzazz. We’re also doing a ladies’ night, which is a traditional show-and-tell event. We advertise 52 weeks a year, not just in December. We put a little heavier budget in December, but we don’t do any special sales or percentage-off pricing.
“We do email blasts and social media — we have a Facebook page. We don’t do a holiday catalog, because it hasn’t worked for us. We don’t use catalogs all year round, so there’s no sense doing it for the holidays.”
“We do a grand preview of all the new things we’ve gotten in for Christmas, along with a trunk show. We’ve just opened up the Ivanka Trump Collection and we’re very excited about that, so we’ll be showing it in conjunction with that night.
“In the past, we’ve had a ladies’ night in November, where ladies come and make their holiday lists, but this year, we’re having the husbands come, too. We give them a gift certificate to be used that night only. On Black Friday, we are doing a trunk show with Tirisi Moda, another new line we’ve added, from Europe, featuring leather straps that you hang charms on. It’s very innovative. Since we don’t have televisions that sell for five dollars, we thought we’d do something different and have the trunk show.
“We do email blasts all the time, at least once a week. And we have custom-made ads about our history; we have a new one coming out that will be aired around the holidays. And we do postcards. We also have things in the gift bags that our community is giving out in a few weeks. You can’t sit back. You have to be proactive.”
“We never advertise sales. We just put our name out there and people know. We’re doing some radio and a lot of social media. We use a dedicated social media person to keep up our website and Facebook page. We do email blasts. We just recently did a targeted email blast where we purchased the addresses of 140,000 single men and women between the ages of 20 and 35 who are in a relationship. That got unbelievable results. We got a huge social media response to that. It was a surprisingly strong result: Our Facebook page got slammed, which was a good thing. We were advertising a Verragio trunk show and it connected with a lot of people. We included an image, which was what really got people going. So we may do that again. We have a hard catalog that we mail out and we also put it online.”
“We really don’t do a lot of advertising, per se. Word of mouth works very well for us. We’re having our anniversary sale coming up, which we’ve been doing in October for the past 27 years. We don’t do spring sales or summer sales. We’re not doing the marking it up to mark it down thing and our customers know that. They wait for this sale. We do have items about the store in the local newspapers. We’ve been doing this for a long time and it’s really word of mouth that gets the customers in here. We’ve been doing really well. For the past five years, we’ve been going up every year, even during these tough times. We take care of our customers, treating them like kings and queens.
“We don’t do much social media. We have our website and people occasionally find us on that. But most of the time, we have people coming in saying, ‘so and so sent us.’ And once you have a referral, you’ve already knocked a bunch of walls down. We’ve been here in Mount Vernon for 27 years, so we know a lot of people. In terms of getting holiday shoppers, we just do what we’ve been doing and it seems to be working pretty well.”
“We just moved from the shopping center we were in to a new store at the end of 2012. And we’ve changed our business model a little bit. I went freestanding and I have both a jewelry store and a pawnshop — we’re only doing jewelry and we’re keeping it very, very clean.
“We do a number of things for the holidays. We do an email blast usually twice a month starting in October and we’ve built that very deliberately in the past two years. We do cable. We’re very aggressive with Google AdWords. And then I’m planning two major mailers within my primary market, direct mail pieces. We doll up the store and usually have a contest for a giveaway, with the winners announced on New Year’s Eve. And we also do gift cards with every purchase.”Article from the Rapaport Magazine - November 2013. To subscribe click here.
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