Customer Archives - BOLLYWOOD SURKHIYAN

A Retail Clothing Store Business Plan – Customer Analysis

Your retail clothing store’s business plan requires a well-thought out customer analysis which describes what type of customers will make your store succeed.

Not Too Broad, Not Too Narrow

When choosing your customer target markets, make sure that they are neither too broad nor too narrow. The broader a target market, the more expensive and difficult to reach it and sell to it. For example, if the target market is simply “Residents of the Tri-state Area” this will tell you and readers little about the most effective means of reaching them.

Think further about who the most profitable customers within these broader markets will be and whether there are distinct groups of profitable customers worth mentioning. Profitable here refers to the total revenue that a certain customer will bring in through clothing purchases over a certain period, the customer’s likelihood to remain loyal and keep purchasing after that period, and the cost of achieving that customer through marketing and sales work.

If customer groups are too small, readers will be concerned that there isn’t enough potential revenue from the target markets for the store to show a profit. Remember that readers will not believe that you can ever achieve 100% of a market. You have to show that you will be able to break even with much smaller market shares, especially in the early days of your store.

Three or Four Segments Is Good Enough

To prove the excellence of your store’s potential, you may be tempted to write a list of target markets segments that you can target. Resist this temptation, and clearly show your focus on three or four segments at most for the short-term. If the amount of revenues that you can achieve from these groups seems limited over time, then you can go on to describe some future target markets, labeled as such, to detail the next steps the company can take when the original targets are tapped out.

Customer Values

For customers in each segment you describe, write about their specific reasons to buy from your store based on their values. Show the difference between each segment, because if two segments have the same values and needs, they could probably be lumped together as one. Don’t detail your promotion methods and product line again here as a way of explanation – those are covered elsewhere in your plan. Do be clear as to why each group listed is a good target for your clothing store.

Effective Website Design: How to Turn a Visitor Into a Customer (Part One)

One of the biggest challenges of a business website is how to turn a visitor into a customer. You only have a few seconds to grab the attention of your prospect, keep it long enough to build your credibility, and make them choose you over your competition. How do we convert these potential customers into a sale?

You do it with effective website design.

Your website design determines whether they like you, and whether they want to do business with you. It’s as simple as that. If you can build enough interest, there will be a tipping point that turns them from visitor into a customer. I am going to share with you some effective website design elements that will deliver those customers. This article is part one.

Website Branding

When I sit down with a client who wants to build a website for their business, the first thing I ask them is if they have a logo. Why? Because this is a good starting point to see if they have created any kind of branding for their business. What’s a brand? It’s a visual element (or a group of elements) that helps your target market identify you from your competition. When the market sees your brand, they think of you. For example: When you think of the insurance giant Aflac, what comes to mind? The duck, right? You might also think of their logo with its specific font, specific shade of blue, and of course, the duck with the orange beak. Your website should be no different. When someone lands on your home page, you need to arrest them with a very distinct look and feel that sets you apart from your competition.

A recent example of this is from a client’s website we just launched a month ago. Even though he had been in the label business since 1995, he had absolutely no branding; just a really lame logo with no colors, and a lousy font. As I started researching the competition, I noticed that most of his competitors’ websites also had terrible branding (which made me happy), and were rather impersonal. Something I noticed about my client was that he had only one leg (he had lost it the previous summer from diabetes). So, I went for broke and said, “Let’s make you the icon of your business with your one leg”.

He loved the idea.

So, I took a picture of him with his one leg, and put it up on the site. I wrote a few paragraphs with the heading, “A Leg Up on the Competition”. It was written from his point-of-view. We had him talk about losing his leg, and not being discouraged about it. I then had him urge people to donate to the American Diabetes Association. Instant personality and branding. It was real, and real engaging. After doing some search engine optimization for his website, we now have it in the top 10 (nationally) for the search term, “labels for bottles” on Google. He is starting to get some good feedback from his site even though it has only been launched a few months.

By creating a good brand for your company up-front, you’ll have a much easier time building a website that connects with your intended audience. Good branding will set you apart from your competition, and make your potential customers choose you to do business with instead of other websites.

There are three other elements to capturing visitors to your website, and turning them into customers. I will be writing parts 2-4 for EzineArticles.com in the coming months, but if you would like to read about these three other elements now, you can visit my original article on the subject of effective website design (link shown below).

Will Amazon Give Away Free Kindles To Gain Customer Loyalty?

The idea of Amazon.com, Inc. handing out free Kindles may seem farfetched. Even though eReader sales have skyrocketed over the last year (6.6 million eReader devices were sold in 2010), Amazon.com has dropped the price of Kindles from $399 to $140 over the last three years to remain competitive and to increase its market share. Competitors, like Apple’s iPad, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, and Google Books for the Android, are fighting for Kindle’s market share. Is the next step to give away free Kindles?

A few business insiders speculate that increasing consumer loyalty to spur repeat purchases of ebooks may be worth giving Kindles away for free.

Analysts predict that Amazon will still have a dominant portion of the eBook market share in 2011 (about 68% market share), but Apple’s iPad is becoming a growing threat to Amazon’s Kindle. Apple’s iPad has grown from a 16% eBook market share in August 2010 to a 32% market share as of November 2010. Additionally, earlier this year, Barnes & Noble claimed it now controls 25% of the U.S. e-book market, thanks to its Nook color eReader device.

Amazon.com has recently finalized negotiations to put their WiFi Kindles in electronic stores around the country. AT&T is one of the first companies that has jumped at this opportunity and will offer the Kindle WiFi beginning on March 6. These newest partnerships will help sell more Kindles for another financial quarter or two, but we can only speculate what will happen in later quarters.

Many ebooks are priced nearly identically between Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook, which means price points on e-books do not necessarily influence a consumer’s decision to buy a Kindle over a Nook. The decision to buy a Kindle is largely influenced by Amazon’s stellar reputation of offering the best customer service experience. Kindle users can download an entire eBook in seconds; they can tap into thousands of books in one place; and they have access to an online registry to save books in case of loss or theft. Additionally, Amazon.com has made reviewing, browsing and buying ebooks a viral online and offline social activity among Kindle users.

The idea of Amazon giving away Kindles for free could be justified by the fact that new loyal Kindle owners would make repeat purchases of ebooks and digital content exclusively through Amazon.com for an indefinite amount of time. But who really knows for certain?

Will Kindles be free by the next holiday season? The reality, right now, is most likely not. It is not that hard to imagine that the price of Kindles may break $100, if not closer to $50, within a year.