Marketing Your Retail Store in the Internet Age

Bob and Susan Negen have put together an excellent book on how to "do" retail. The book is laid out in four "steps". Getting new customers Turning first-time buyers into regular customers Getting customers to shop more often Keeping customers for life It may seem simplistic, but it's often the simple things that trip us up. Any retailer or any other business for that matter that can execute the four steps consistently and well is sure to be a success. Bob and Susan provide practical, proven "tactics" to do just that. This stuff would work just as well for dentists or barber shops as it does for retailers. While the title might suggest that this is a book about internet marketing, tactics are described as either "Low-Tech" or "High-Tech". For example, "donut marketing", taking donuts to neighboring non-competing businesses who are in a position to send customers your way is about as low-tech as you can get. It's something that's been used successfully for as long as there have been sales people and donuts. The question is, do you do it? There are a lot of tips like that in this book. The thing that sets this book apart from many similar books is that it's practical. You can read about a tactic in the morning and actually be making money using it in the afternoon. This is not an academic book. It's like a cookbook for retail merchandising and marketing. The book is well laid out. You can read it from cover to cover, which is what I did, in a couple of evenings, or you can use it as a reference book, cherry-picking the various tactics. Unless you buy the book and throw it into a drawer without reading it, you'll recover its cost many times over if you just adopt a few of its suggestions.

I have owned an Internet Technology company for the past 7 years and this is THE BEST information I have found on marketing your retail store on the Internet. If you want to succeed....BUY THIS BOOK! We have contacted Bob and Susan and plan on sharing the information in this book with all our customers. Thanks for the incredible info guys!

With 20 years of experience as an executive with retailers such as Abercrombie and Fitch and American Eagle, and am thinking of opening my own brick and mortar store/retail website. Because most of my knowledge lies on the buying and production side of the business, I read this book to familiarize myself with what I will need to do to make a small business work with customers. I was so energized by all of the great in store marketing tips and ideas about how to make your website user-friendly! Anyone who is in a small business trying to make it out there along side the big guys should read this to help give them an edge!

Simply put, this book is a must-have for any business owner interested in growing their business. This is real-world information that really works. The ideas are fresh and fun, written by real retail owners. This book will pay for itself immediately.

I'm not a retailer but I work with them daily. In researching an article about e-mail marketing for retailers, I looked for books like this, but found very few good ones. Two months later a review copy of this book came my way from the authors. It was just the book I had been seeking but not finding. It's written for an audience of small or midsized independent business owners, and the examples show that the authors have a lot of experience working with this type of client. The book offers a good mix of general principles to bear in mind ("The real value in a customer comes after the first transaction") and very specific, practical suggestions that retailers of all types will be able to quickly apply or adapt to their businesses. I also like that it's not TOO narrowly focused on using the Internet for marketing. It's a full-service marketing book that also covers well the important areas of websites and e-mail. The authors break most sections up into "key concepts," "low tech tactics" (i.e. non-Internet) and "high tech tactics." It's also current, of course. Books that talk about the Internet become dated rather quickly (all the books I looked sounded archaic if they were more than 12 months old.) This one reflects today's marketplace and technological landscape. It's impossible to say how quickly it will become dated, but since it's not exclusively about the Internet, most of it should remain useful and insightful even if e-commerce continues to evolve in surprising ways. I was particularly interested in the high-tech angle, feeling that many small retailers still don't know exactly how to get started with email marketing or how to take it up a notch. This book does a great job of starting with the basics (which more advanced readers can skip) and moving on to fairly sophisticated suggestions. Same with the section on websites. After all, even among small retailers, there's a range of technical ability and comfort level, but I think most retailers will find many great ideas somewhere in the book. The authors also use a kind of coding or rating system to help a retailer quickly indentify ideas that fit with his or her style and budget. Three scales--time, money and relationship-building--indicated by simple icons, show what each suggestion will require or provide. One idea might be inexpensive but takes lots of time and builds customer relationships well. Another (such as placing a newspaper ad) might be expensive, take little time, and have little "payoff" in terms of providing a personal customer relationship. I like this way of visually portraying what goes into and results from a particular suggestion. If you're a retailer who wants to get more out of your marketing budget, or who needs some convincing that effective marketing can make a difference, I recommend this book. It's a much smaller investment than another ad buy and it might have a much higher ROI in the long run.