Marketing Your Retail Store in the Internet Age [Hardcover]

Bob Negen (Author), Susan Negen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 5, 2006 | ISBN-10: 0470043938 | ISBN-13: 978-0470043936 | Edition: 1

If you own and operate a small retail business, this guide will give you a proven system for marketing your store, allowing you to compete with online merchants and big-box stores alike. Full of fresh and innovative ideas for promoting small stores, it will show you how to create a great in-store experience and build loyal, long-lasting relationships with customers.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

There's Good news, & there's bad news....

The bad news is that as an independent store owner, your competition is fierce and getting fiercer. Never before have there been so many companies from around the globe fighting for the dollars in your local customers' pockets. They sell the same kinds of merchandise you sell. They spend millions on advertising. They have the power to negotiate super-low prices that you can't. It's enough to give you a massive headache.

Fortunately, there is good news! As an independent store owner, you have the single most powerful marketing tool imaginable at your disposal and it's one that the big boys can never beat you at, no matter how hard they try. Your biggest competitive advantage is that you can have a genuine, personal relationship with your customers, but the big boys can't.

In Marketing Your Retail Store in the Internet Age, Bob and Susan Negen show you how to use innovative, inexpensive marketing techniques to create new customer relationships and do more with the customers you already have. Using both time-honored, low-tech tactics and new, high-tech marketing ideas, the Negens adapt the best of what worked for mom and pop and expand it for the twenty-first century. You'll learn:

• Why traditional advertising doesn't work for independent retailers and what you can do about it
• How to put the "rule of reciprocity" into play and attract tons of new, loyal customers
• Fourteen key elements you must have when building your Web site
• The secret to making e-mail your best, cheapest, and easiest marketing tool ever
• Ten copywriting rules that every retailer must know in order to write messages that sell
• How to create promotions that keep your customers coming back and buying more

Marketing Your Retail Store in the Internet Age puts more than twenty years of real-life retail experience in your hands. Retail is a tough and competitive business, but you can offer something the big boys can't—personal service and real customer relationships. Follow the advice in this practical, effective guide and turn the personal touch into competitive advantage.

From the Back Cover

What retail store owners are saying about Marketing Your Retail Store in the Internet Age

"My family has been in the flower business for 126 years and I thought I had seen or heard it all. Marketing Your Retail Store in the Internet Age changed that. It's filled with great new ways to make more money without going broke. I loved it!"
—Troy Wasserman, Wasserman's Flower and Gift Shop Muskegon, Michigan

"Our customers are crazy about the new Web site we built using the principles in this book. That section alone is worth its weight in gold!"
—Bob Vasile, Discount Vacuum and Sewing Center Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

"I'm saving thousands and thousands of dollars on expensive advertising that doesn't work. The ad sales guy hates you, but I love you. Great book!"
—Grant Miller, Sun Your Buns Erie, Pennsylvania

"This book is an absolute must-read for any store owner. It not only gives ideas, but also real-life examples and hot tips. Excellent!"
—Michele Correa, Photo Express Scrapbooking Maple Ridge, British Columbia

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (December 5, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470043938
• ISBN-13: 978-0470043936
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #314,414 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #35 in Books > Business & Investing > Small Business & Entrepreneurship > Retail Businesses

More About the Author

Bob Negen is a highly sought-after public speaker, retail expert, bestselling author, and most recently the co-creator of the acclaimed Retail Mastery System. His company, WhizBang! Training, is a leader in the field of training independent retailers to run successful stores.

Bob is recognized as one of the most innovative retail marketers in the world today. He is also an expert on retail staff development, on-the-floor selling, store operations and developing a customer-focused, service-driven store culture. Bob delivers only proven, practical, down-to-earth ideas that really work. There's no fluff, no high-falutin' academic theories, no corporate mumbo-jumbo - Bob's expertise comes from his real world experience as an independent store owner for 20 years.

When Bob opened his first store, the Mackinaw Kite Co., he was only 23 years old and just out of college. Like most store owners, he started with a lot of enthusiasm and passion for his product, but almost no retail-specific business skills. Bob quickly learned that passion does not lead directly to profit!

Over the next 20 years Bob developed the critical business skills he needed to turn the Mackinaw Kite Co.'s first pitiful annual sales of $17,000 into a successful multi-million-dollar business.

In 1999, Bob formed WhizBang! Training with his wife Susan Negen, an accomplished retailer in her own right. Bob now shares his hard-won knowledge so that other retail store owners can more quickly and easily turn their passion into profit.

Bob co-authored the bestselling book, Marketing Your Retail Store in the Internet Age, and also recently completed the Retail Mastery System. This system is the most comprehensive training resource ever created for independent retailers and teaches all 11 critical business skills that store owners need to be successful.

Learn more about how Bob can help your business or to book Bob to speak, www.whizbangtraining.com

Subscribe to the WhizBang! Tip of the Week, a free business-building tip for retailers delivered directly to your inbox each week, www.whizbangtips.com

Become a fan of WhizBang! Training on Facebook www.facebook.com/WhizBangTraining.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sound Advice, December 12, 2006

By 

Mike Buckley "http://www.tacony.com/myob" (Fenton, MO) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Marketing Your Retail Store in the Internet Age (Hardcover)

Bob and Susan Negen have put together an excellent book on how to "do" retail. The book is laid out in four "steps".

Getting new customers

Turning first-time buyers into regular customers

Getting customers to shop more often

Keeping customers for life

It may seem simplistic, but it's often the simple things that trip us up. Any retailer or any other business for that matter that can execute the four steps consistently and well is sure to be a success. Bob and Susan provide practical, proven "tactics" to do just that. This stuff would work just as well for dentists or barber shops as it does for retailers.

While the title might suggest that this is a book about internet marketing, tactics are described as either "Low-Tech" or "High-Tech". For example, "donut marketing", taking donuts to neighboring non-competing businesses who are in a position to send customers your way is about as low-tech as you can get. It's something that's been used successfully for as long as there have been sales people and donuts. The question is, do you do it? There are a lot of tips like that in this book.

The thing that sets this book apart from many similar books is that it's practical. You can read about a tactic in the morning and actually be making money using it in the afternoon. This is not an academic book. It's like a cookbook for retail merchandising and marketing.

The book is well laid out. You can read it from cover to cover, which is what I did, in a couple of evenings, or you can use it as a reference book, cherry-picking the various tactics.

Unless you buy the book and throw it into a drawer without reading it, you'll recover its cost many times over if you just adopt a few of its suggestions.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great full-service retail marketing book with emphasis on the Internet, November 29, 2006

By 

Amy (Lansing, MI) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Marketing Your Retail Store in the Internet Age (Hardcover)

I'm not a retailer but I work with them daily. In researching an article about e-mail marketing for retailers, I looked for books like this, but found very few good ones. Two months later a review copy of this book came my way from the authors. It was just the book I had been seeking but not finding.

It's written for an audience of small or midsized independent business owners, and the examples show that the authors have a lot of experience working with this type of client. The book offers a good mix of general principles to bear in mind ("The real value in a customer comes after the first transaction") and very specific, practical suggestions that retailers of all types will be able to quickly apply or adapt to their businesses.

I also like that it's not TOO narrowly focused on using the Internet for marketing. It's a full-service marketing book that also covers well the important areas of websites and e-mail. The authors break most sections up into "key concepts," "low tech tactics" (i.e. non-Internet) and "high tech tactics."

It's also current, of course. Books that talk about the Internet become dated rather quickly (all the books I looked sounded archaic if they were more than 12 months old.) This one reflects today's marketplace and technological landscape. It's impossible to say how quickly it will become dated, but since it's not exclusively about the Internet, most of it should remain useful and insightful even if e-commerce continues to evolve in surprising ways.

I was particularly interested in the high-tech angle, feeling that many small retailers still don't know exactly how to get started with email marketing or how to take it up a notch. This book does a great job of starting with the basics (which more advanced readers can skip) and moving on to fairly sophisticated suggestions. Same with the section on websites. After all, even among small retailers, there's a range of technical ability and comfort level, but I think most retailers will find many great ideas somewhere in the book.

The authors also use a kind of coding or rating system to help a retailer quickly indentify ideas that fit with his or her style and budget. Three scales--time, money and relationship-building--indicated by simple icons, show what each suggestion will require or provide. One idea might be inexpensive but takes lots of time and builds customer relationships well. Another (such as placing a newspaper ad) might be expensive, take little time, and have little "payoff" in terms of providing a personal customer relationship. I like this way of visually portraying what goes into and results from a particular suggestion.

If you're a retailer who wants to get more out of your marketing budget, or who needs some convincing that effective marketing can make a difference, I recommend this book. It's a much smaller investment than another ad buy and it might have a much higher ROI in the long run.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Must Buy for retailers looking to succeed using the Internet!, December 8, 2006

By 

Peter P. Brand (Grand Rapids, MI) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Marketing Your Retail Store in the Internet Age (Hardcover)

I have owned an Internet Technology company for the past 7 years and this is THE BEST information I have found on marketing your retail store on the Internet. If you want to succeed....BUY THIS BOOK! We have contacted Bob and Susan and plan on sharing the information in this book with all our customers. Thanks for the incredible info guys!