Part 3 : Product promotion strategies

The monthly free gift pak giveaway allows you to capture email addresses and permission to send people promotional email. Has this worked for you from a marketing viewpoint?
The best thing about our monthly registrants is the information we capture about our audience. It is important for us to know the demographics of our visitors and to establish a personal relationship when possible (and when requested). We never, ever share personal information about our clients and they do not have to agree to be added to our mailing list in order to register for our free monthly giveaway.

We mostly use our promotional emails as a means of communicating information that the customer wants to know. One month we may do nothing more than notify them of who our monthly winner was for that month, and the next month we may notify them of a really cool promotional basket we developed for an upcoming holiday or occasion. I guess the answer is that, yes, it has worked.

We don't believe in pushy sales approaches but the fact is that the more you are in contact with your customers, the more memorable you become, and the more likely they are to come back.

While we're on the subject of marketing, what has proven effective for you in promoting the site and bringing in new customers?
I don't believe in blowing a lot of money and hoping that something works. We waited a few months after launching our site before pursuing any paid advertising at all.

First we focused on search engines and our positioning. Although I would not spend hundreds of hours stressing over search engine positioning, it is important in a targeted, direct manner. Unless you have a very unique product, you are going to be competing with a lot of other companies for keywords and positioning. For example, a search for "gift baskets" in Yahoo! displays well over 10,000 companies offering gift baskets. Pretty hard to compete with. So you get creative - focus on your niche and your unique selling points and develop your site around those features.

As far as paid opportunities, I try to stay away from the "advertising" side of promoting our company. I think the best way of bringing in new customers is to help them find your web site. List yourself with directories, online yellow pages, targeted web sites that your customers are visiting, message boards, etc. And, of course, it never hurts to receive press from respectable sources.

There are some products that people do not realize they "need" until they've seen your ad, but most of our customers know they are looking for gift baskets. Making it as easy as possible to find us is the best thing we can do. Once they have found us it is our responsibility to show them the quality products we offer and to make them trust our abilities in handling their order. We have a high ratio of repeat customers so we are confident about our business practices - but getting the customer to us in the first place will always be a challenge. As with the search engines, there is a lot of competition out there so it is important to stay one step ahead.

Finally, what's your best-selling "city", and why do you think this is?
This is an interesting question and one that I spend a lot of time analyzing.

Our most successful cities should be no surprise because they are some of the largest cities in the country and ones having a huge social appeal - Chicago, San Francisco, New York, Portland, Las Vegas, Atlanta...

The thing I have found most interesting, however, is that all of our cities are successful but during different times of the year. For example, Las Vegas is a very popular city throughout the year because of its attraction for corporate events and weddings. San Francisco is a holiday favorite with our consumer clients because of its attraction as a vacation spot - they want to send a sample of it to loved ones for the holidays. On the other hand, Chicago is very popular during the holidays with our corporate clients because so many companies are headquartered there and want to send holiday gifts reflecting their corporation and the city they are proud to call home.

So, as generic as this answer is, all of our cities are successful but during different times and for different reasons. Although this can be frustrating from a marketing standpoint, it is very validating from a business perspective because it is confirmation of the need for our products on a national level.