Retail & restaurant marketing

SUMMARY: Using an emailed coupon is a common marketing tactic, but could you get better redemption rates if you added a Web 2.0 element into the mix and let your customers make their own discount offers?

See how a fast-food chain combined email and a custom-built landing page that got staggering open and clickthroughs, plus download rates nearly double their average. read the complete case study

SUMMARY: Running a TV ad during Super Bowl can cost a mint. True, tens of millions will see your commercial, but will they act on it?

Don’t have a super-sized budget? No worries. Read on to find out how you can still use the tactics that Denny’s used in their Super Bowl media buy. Hint: they include an exciting, easily communicated offer with broad appeal. Also, see how they pulled off the PR blitz to support the ad, and follow their example on how to use a multichannel approach to stretch the impact. read the complete article

SUMMARY: Wholesalers who supply products to independent retailers still depend on face-to-face meetings as their bread and butter even as ecommerce evolves. But one national wholesaler has embraced the Internet to boost orders for their reps.

See the steps they followed to create an email newsletter program. Retailers who subscribe are ordering 36% more often than those who don't, plus their orders are 13% larger. read the complete interview

SUMMARY: For the past five years, brick-and-mortar retailers have been (slowly) shifting marketing dollars away from TV toward online; that shift is still happening, but today online is not the only medium benefiting from it. Event marketing, word of mouth and traditional print advertising may also soon be seeing a lift, says George Anderson, Editor-in-Chief RetailWire.

Here are the top four trends Anderson has spotted in retail marketing for 2006.

Trend #1. Comparison shopping online, purchasing offline

Over the... read the complete article

by Anne Holland, President

Although I live in a fairly small town on a not-so-big island, every day as I drive to work on the mainland, I pass signs for eight different garden centers.

Obviously it's a garden-crazed community that I live in. But even so, with eight garden centers duking it out on the main road (not to mention the ones off it), the competition for marketshare is ferocious.

It's also tremendous fun for those of us... read the complete blog post