I had a great conversation this week with some fellow owners of promotional marketing companies. We all have online stores for our clients and we were brainstorming ways to increase traffic.
If you haven’t explored having an online store of promotional products for your clients I highly recommend you try. The four of us combined have more than 20 stores representing millions in revenue.
What is an Online Company Store?
What is an online store? It’s a dedicated site for a client’s branded materials. It can be limited to promotional products and apparel or include collateral materials as well.
Most of my stores in the past have been developed for a client where their employees are required to purchase all their promotional needs from the dedicated site. The items and branding has been approved by the marketing department.
Benefits on an Online Store
There are many benefits for clients to have an online store but the primary are:
Better Pricing and Cost Savings
Time Savings and Increased Productivity
Ease of Maintaining Brand Integrity
When you have an online store you can choose products and work with your supplier partners to put them into a program for better pricing. But the savings to the client can go much further. Since the employee has already approved choices to choose from you are also saving the company time with the reduction in time to order.
Cheaper is Not Always Less Expensive
One of my Account Managers met with a potential new client this week and the client told her that she wasn’t sure she would be pursuing a promotional product supplier any more. She told the account manager that she had been able to find some great tote bags at a great price all on her own. But when she started asking her about the time it took her she admitted it took her about 5 hours. 5 hours of her time. She saved about $.25 per bag over what we might have charged her (many reasons why the difference).
She spent 5 hours to save $125.00.
In addition, the manufacturer she chose does not have the best of ratings and from our personal experience the quality control for their imprinting is lacking. We wished her luck on getting her tote bags on time and in good condition.
When you have an online store, that employee would have been working on their business not losing them money (because she makes more than $125.00 for 5 hours of work).
Online Stores Maintain Brand Integrity
Another big win with online stores is the ability to control the brand identity. You and your client have control over the quality of the products available as well as the quality of the branded logo imprint. How many times has a client shown you an item asking how this happened? The logo is purple and it should be dark blue! Our answer is, “we didn’t do that”.
Yes, the employee went outside of ordering protocol and used a company that was not familiar with the company’s brand guidelines.
Online Stores Help You be the Logo Police
When we work with any company we become intimately familiar with their brand guidelines and become their logo "police". We counsel employees when they want to go outside of standards. We become an invaluable asset. We’ve actually had marketing departments call us to find out if they could do something with their own logo!
We are launching a new online store in a few weeks where it will not be mandatory for the employees to order from the store. It will be encouraged only. So, in this instance we are developing a marketing plan for promoting the site and keeping the site top of mind with all the potential buyers.
Our plan includes a combination of email blasts, self-promo mailings, client branded mailings, what’s new videos, and quarterly lunch & learns. We feel the investment is well worth it. They have the potential annual spend of over $250,000.
Explore the Online Store Option
If you haven’t explored the online store option before it is worth some of your time to discover if it might be right for some of your clients. I wouldn’t develop a store for any client that spends less than $100,000.00. I know some have online stores for less, but it would have to be a required dedicated site with limited choices.
An online store will help streamline your operations as well. The items are already determined so you are just processing the orders each time (less quoting and researching for each order. You, of course, have to keep the site up to date with new choices but that can be done on a monthly or quarterly basis depending on the store/client.
There are many industry resources to help you build a custom or customized site for your clients. They all have the basic search capabilities and depending on the reports or bells & whistles you need you can choose accordingly.
Danette Gossett is the founder of Gossett Marketing, co-founder of Promotions Rescource LLC and co-author of the best-selling book “Transform” with Brian Tracy. Danette utilizes her more than 30 years of advertising agency and corporate marketing experience to develop effective promotional campaigns and products for her clients. Visit GossettMktg.com or SalesPromo.org and follow us on twitter @MarketngTidbits.