Material Retail Dumps

Welcome to the Material Retail Dumps podcast. If you've listened to us before, thanks so much for coming back. If it's your first time listening, welcome Material Retail Dumps is a short form podcast with briefly valuable content for independent retailers. As business owners, we don't have time for a 30 minute lesson with a ton of banter. We get straight to the meat of the topic and aim to give you actionable information and will help you optimize your retail operation and make more money every day. Welcome to Material Retail Dumps, episode 18. In this episode, we're gonna go over a strategy we use to get customers to come into the store. We use a text messaging tool for the strategy. This strategy is gonna be very different from how most people tell you to use text message marketing. So hope you listen up, hope you kind of take something from This definitely ties back into the larger theme that we've been speaking of over the last month about building a real connection with shoppers.

So without further ado, let's jump right in. A few weeks ago, boutique reached out to us and asked us basically, do you have any ideas for getting customers back in store? And immediately we thought, what if we did a really hyper personalized text to set customers? And we don't necessarily need to make it personal to the customer, but we need to make it personal to the employee sending it out. We identified a list of 500 customers from this boutique store and we chose customers who were, you know, who haven't shopped in 90 days. These customers who have haven't come to the store in September, October, or November yet. And now it's early December holiday's coming up quick and these customers haven't shopped yet. So our idea was let's get 'em back in the store. What could we do to get 'em back in the store?

So here's a text message that went out to customers. I'm changing names for privacy, but basically here's an example of the text. Hey Janine, it's Elliot from Shop Tees. I wanted to invite you into the store to help with all of your holiday shopping, whether you need a gift for a loved one or gift for yourself. We have a ton of great new items. If you know when you can come into the store, just text me back and I'll get some stuff ready for you. If you can't make it in, feel free to shop on our website at any time. Happy holidays. Love Elliot and the Shop's team. So what we did in this message basically is we added a little personal touch to the customer by adding the employee's information in there. So we put in the employee's name. So this is very different from a text message that just get blasted out to your whole list that says, come in for our big holiday sale.

20% off everything. This is an invitation, a personal invitation that a customer received via text message from an employee of the store. Not only did we make it a personal invitation, but we offered the customer something very unique. We offered her a way to let us know when she's coming so we understand you're busy. Come in when you have time and, and hey, let us know ahead of time when you can come in and we'll get some stuff ready for you. So basically what we're telling the customer is, we know you're important to us and we wanna see you. What's the difference? Why? Why? Why do I care? Why do I care? Why don't I just send out bulk texts to all my customers? Well, the reason is because that's just not smart. It's not intelligent. You're not doing it intelligently. You're taking the easy way out.

You're taking all your customers and just sending them the same blanket message. With this message, what we did was we identified good customers who just haven't shopped in a little while. You know, not every customer could shop every week. And then we curated a message just for them. Then we took these list of 500 customers and we only sent the message to 250 of them at random. So 250 out of 500 people got texted and 250 out of 500 did not get texted. So the idea there is we need to be able to track whether or not this works. We're not, we're not here to waste time, we're not here to waste money. We're here to, to see if we do something, does it get more customers that come into the store? And the results were pretty amazing. So out of the 250 customers that we texted, 61 came to the store and out of the 250 that we did not text, only 43 came to the store, sets 18 more customers came to the store from being texted.

Another way of saying it is that a customer was 42% more likely to come into the store when they were texted this personal message versus when they were not texted this personal message. Now, I'll put a price on that for you. Let's, let's think for a second. How much would you pay to have 18 customers come into your store? And when I say come into your store, I mean they bought something. Could have been that a hundred customers came to the store and didn't buy. I'm talking about converted sales. 61 out of the 250 people that we texted came to the store and bought something versus 43 that came to the store and bought something that were not texted. So customers 41% more likely to come in. Now you might think like, oh my God, it's gotta be so expensive to text all the customers.

Well, no it's not. You could probably text these 500 customers for, you know, 50 bucks, a hundred bucks for the whole month. Honestly, you pay a good texting tool, 150 bucks for the whole month, you'll be able to text these 500 customers no problem, and get customers to come in more often. So I guess let's tie it all together. What do we learn from here? Number one, we learned that outreach to your customers works and the more you put into it, the more you get out of it. If you did not text these 250 customers, chances are only 43 of them would've come in instead of the 61 that did come in, that's 18 sales, 18 more sales that you were able to get. You know, maybe you took an hour of your time and you know, 50 or a hundred or 200 bucks. I would say that you would take those, those odds. Any day if I told you you're gonna get extra 18 customers in store, you gotta do is gimme a hundred bucks. You would do it all day. And the beautiful thing is you could keep testing these strategies and this is just one message that we sent out. The more personal you make the message the better. And that's the second thing we learned. The second thing we learned is that you don't wanna just sit around and text customers non meaningful texts that are meant for thousands and thousands of people that any

Business could send to any customer. Because guess what? Your customer is smarter than that. Your customer is sick of getting those texts. Your customer's not interested in seeing your newest arrivals in a pretty picture via text message. Cuz guess what? Hundred other businesses did the same thing. If the customer gave you their phone number, chances are they gave that phone number out to lots of other businesses. What you do wanna do is continue building on that personal connection. So putting your own name in the text message, putting your customer's name in the text message, inviting them to shop at a specific time that works for them, letting them know that you miss them. Making it personal. Those things work. Believe it or not, those things work, the old way of doing business is continuing to go away. You need to continue to get more personal and just better at connecting with your customers. And that's it. Looking forward to the next episode. Thanks so much guys.