Retail & restaurant marketing

SUMMARY: The appeal of direct mail continues to decline as the prices of printing and mailing increase. What if there was a way to avoid the high costs without losing direct-response impact?

Find out how BMW Germany tested a mobile campaign to sell winter tires that achieved a 30.31% conversion rate. Includes a step-by-step guide and creative samples. read the complete case study

SUMMARY: College-age mobile users are among the most likely to sign up for SMS alerts. And an SMS subscriber base can be a valuable audience when approached wisely.

Read how a restaurant chain used SMS alerts to drive store traffic and saw mobile-coupon redemption rates of 30% in college areas, compared to a 10% redemption rate for non-college areas. 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