Category: How To

5 Tips for Running a Successful Store Event

August 2, 2017

If you think having fun at work is a myth, then you’re wrong! Maybe it’s time to bring some pizazz into your workplace and host an exciting event for you and your customers! Connecting with customers is a deeply important part of running a successful business, and what better ways to connect with the people you cater to than by literally catering to them? Starting an interactive in-store experience for your customers may seem like a daunting task, but in the long run, not only will the revenue reflect your efforts, but you will also have created a whole new community of people within your business.

Here are some tips for running a successful store event:

1. Get the word out

You may have a steady stream of customers throughout the week, but how do you know if putting on a special store event will be worth your efforts? The answer to this is to advertise until you can recite your event details in your sleep. One hugely effective way to do this is through social media. More and more people are turning to Facebook, Twitter, and websites to find details for upcoming events, so make sure it is posted well enough in advance for people to plan around your event! If you spring it on your customers the day of, they may not get the memo and the poor turnout might turn you off of ever putting on another event. Another highly effective way to do this is through word of mouth. Though social media is an expanding phenomenon, there is still a great deal of value in personally informing your customers about your upcoming events. Whether it be just with a friendly reminder, or if you hand them a physical flyer outlining all the details, customer interaction is always effective. Remember, that’s why you’re putting on the events in the first place!

2. Be passionate!!

If there is something that you are passionate about, don’t hesitate to incorporate it into your events! Many themes I’ve used have been related to my favorite authors, holidays, seasons, animals, etc. Trust me—your customers will know if you are engaged. The more enthusiastic you can be about bringing something new and exciting to your store, the more entertaining and meaningful it will be for your customers. Not to mention, the more engaged you are with your audience, the more rewarding it will ultimately be for your business. By participating and reaching out, you can form important and lasting relationships with people, which will essentially do a large portion of your marketing work for you! When you provide a good customer experience, people are much more likely to pass on the word to friends and family and send many new faces your way!

3. Dollar stores are your best friend

When planning events for a large group of people, it can be hard to fit everything you need into a budget that will still allow for profit. This is where your local dollar store comes in handy! In my experience, I have been able to provide craft supplies, prizes, decorations, and refreshments for 50+ people for under $100, just by shopping smart and making a little go a long way. Buying things in bulk and really getting your money’s worth out of the supplies you purchase makes the day’s sales numbers that much more satisfying.

4. Free is key

If you want your store event to be successful, I have found that advertising FREE attendance for your customers is the key to a larger turnout. Your goal is to get more traffic in your store, and nothing brings bargain shoppers out like free things! The more people you have coming through your doors, the more you’ll have purchasing your product when they may never have stepped foot in your store otherwise. It also never hurts to make noticeable displays of event-related product to catch their attention. Another good tip for advertising a free event is to keep a sign-up sheet and ask your customers to put their names on the list prior to the event to guarantee their attendance. This way you can gain a better estimate of the size of your crowd, and customers will have time before the event to spread the word to their friends and families. That being said, when promising a free event for anyone to attend, make sure you have adequate space to accommodate a large crowd. The word “free” often generates a pretty overwhelming response!

5. Think outside the box

Don’t be afraid to seek outside help for your events! There is a wealth of available services geared specifically towards catering to corporate events. Whether it is a magician, a live animal show, or an art workshop, there are always new and affordable ways to bring something exciting into your place of business. Many entertainment companies are also more than willing to provide discounts and extra deals to suit your needs, so it always helps to call and speak personally with your potential guests before booking.

Regardless of which direction you decide to go in with your events, remember that they are yours and if you’re not having fun with them, then your customers won’t either. Whether it is an event geared toward children, family, or adults, the more engaged you are in what you’re doing, the better success you will have. Participating in fun activities different from your daily routine will not only improve your relationship with your customers, but it is an excellent team-building exercise for you and your staff as well. The more involved you become within your surrounding community, the bigger your customer base will grow and you will find that work can be more fun than you thought it could be!

Samara Bissonnette

Book Outlet

Retail Store Manager

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5 Essential Elements of Social Media Customer Service and Why You Need Them

May 18, 2017

If your business isn’t active on social media, it needs to be.

Seventy-four percent of consumers use social networks to help them make purchasing choices. This study of more than 23,000 online consumers who interact with companies via social media found that 67% of these interactions were for customer service reasons.

What can we conclude from this? Firstly, that the impression you leave on social media is crucial to influencing your customer to buy. Secondly, if people are seeking you out on social media, it is most likely for service rather than for an interest in your marketing.

So why do customers choose social media instead of the traditional phone call or email? Convenience is the answer. In today’s fast-paced society, consumers don’t want to waste their valuable time on hold to speak to customer service. Forty-two percent of customers who reach out through social media expect a response within 60 minutes. While social media hasn’t yet replaced the telephone or email, it is quickly becoming one of the main forums customers use.

Keeping this in mind, how can you best use social customer service to benefit your business? Here are some strategies for you to consider:

1. Consistently monitor your social media pages and respond to customer inquiries ASAP

Keep your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. pages open and refresh them as often as possible. Since customers expect a response within 60 minutes or less, you will want to check frequently for any inquiries or comments, as well as direct messages. You can keep most social customer service conversations public—customers who are leery of buying online or from your company will gain confidence that your brand can be trusted when they see proof of great customer service. Any inquiries that require follow up or that involve personal information (tracking numbers, payment information, or account details, to name a few possibilities) should be moved to direct message if it is available. If direct message is unavailable (for example, on Instagram), ask the customer to send the information to you through email and make sure that the proper follow up is provided. Be sure to post your hours of availability on your pages so that customers will not be frustrated if they reach out to you outside of business hours and need to wait for a response. You will also want to have a link to your website posted so that they can look there for more information.

2. Be proactive

Show your customers that you have an ear to the ground for their needs and that you truly care. It is one thing to respond to a customer, but finding customer issues and resolving them before the customer complains provides a high level of service. For example, you can search for your business name on Twitter and bring up conversations that are about you but aren’t directly tagging you. You may also Google search your business name and keywords to bring up relevant posts (i.e.: your business name + review). If you find positive comments or discussions, it is courteous to thank them for their words. If you find a situation that needs addressing, you are able to solve the problem and impress your customers with your thorough attention.

A different way of being proactive is by preventing customer complaints through social media in the first place. You can effectively reach your followers with important messages that may have an impact on your service. For example, you can tweet and post on Facebook that you are closing early due to inclement weather before the customer shows up and leaves upset. This kind of gesture changes the framework of the customer service conversation into a positive one rather than always doing damage control.

3. Make it personal

Although customers expect quick responses, they do not want to be given a cookie-cutter or thoughtless answer. When space permits, use the customer’s name and sign off with your own. (Note that initials are acceptable on Twitter due to character limits). Ensure that your responses match the tone of the person reaching out—it’s appropriate to be more casual with social media than you would in email.

4. Surprise and delight

Sometimes it is beneficial to go above and beyond good customer service when addressing concerns on social media. Many companies have had random acts of kindness for customers go viral—this is the kind of attention you want drawn to your brand. See the example here of what Lego did for a little boy who lost his toy. While it is not feasible to offer free product to everyone who asks, from time to time you may wish to do something special for your followers to see.

5. Know when to ignore someone or delete a post

Although you definitely want your customers to see you turning upset customers around, there are times when it is necessary to end the conversation before it starts. Social media is an excellent way to reach a lot of people, but this can backfire when your customers are exposed to posts or comments that are inappropriate or insulting. Be sure to delete posts or comments that are belligerent to other customers, use foul language, or are discriminatory in any way. These people likely cannot be turned around anyways and are using social media as a way to vent and spread negativity for their own enjoyment.

While it reflects poorly on the company to ignore posts directed at you, if you are socially sleuthing and come across someone that repeatedly complains despite multiple attempts on your end to make things right, you can let it go. Some customers will become more annoyed if you reach out to them too many times asking if you can assist them, especially if these are conversations that are going on in the background and not on your pages.

The more you reliably interact with customers socially, the more likely your other followers are to reach out in the same way. You will develop a rhythm and a style that works for you and helps you to address all inquiries efficiently and effectively— and your customers will trust your brand as one that offers comprehensive and conscientious social service.

Written by:

Jaimie VanAmerongen

Book Depot Marketing Team

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Wooden arch filled with books in book outlet store.

Book Art: Get People Talking About Your Store

December 5, 2016

Book Art

Creating something interesting in-store for people to talk about can increase foot traffic and chatter around your business! Book Art is a great way to achieve this!

Gerry Wikkerink, retired father (and avid woodworker!) of Book Depot CEO Wilf Wikkerink, built this book arch which serves as the entrance to our 40,000 square ft. retail store in St. Catharines, Ontario. The arch has become the subject of many social media posts, contests, and creates an amazing impression for first time customers to the store. We also started a hashtag gallery that can be viewed here, in which customers who visit the store are encouraged to share their picture under our #bookportal.

Check out some other book art below that may seem a little elaborate at first, but use your creativity to see how you could install something on a smaller scale to your store and get your customers talking!

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People attending BookExpo America trade show.

Trade Show Success: 4 Guidelines for Attendees

April 6, 2016

I have a secret to share. I’ve been called “The Old Timer.” It was a shock when I first heard that nickname thrown in my direction. How can it be? I’ve only been in the book business for … well, 20-plus years. When I started, my youngest was only ten months old. Now, he’s a handsome grown man and a sales rep too. So yes, it’s true; I really am “The Old Timer”, which means I’ve also seen a trade show or two.

So today I want to share some of my sage old advice about trade shows. Why attend? The shows are important and can have a major positive impact on your business if you prepare and make the most of it. To give you a step in the right direction, I have summarized four simple guidelines to a successful trade show.

1 – Be Informed

Look at the trade show website. You would be surprised how much useful information is listed. You will find discounted hotels, bus schedules (free transportation to and from your hotel!), exhibitor listings, floor plans, show dates and hours, and much more. I know, some of this is so basic, like dates. But did you know BEA opens four hours early for bargain book buyers on the first day of the show?

2 – Efficiency = Opportunity

Come to the show ready to work and place your orders. The bargain book business is a true closeouts business, as the inventory is finite and will sell out. You may miss some terrific opportunities if you do not lock down the titles you want with a formal purchase order.

3 – Make Appointments

Make the most of your time on the show floor with the following hints.

Set appointments with your sales reps. Often, two or three of my accounts will walk into the Book Depot booth at the same time. The customer with the appointment gets the priority, while the customer who wants to “drop by” must wait. Waiting is not an efficient use of your time, and time is money.

Plan enough time for each appointment. This can vary by vendor. I recommend at least one hour for Book Depot. As the largest bargain book distributor in the market, we’ll have several thousand titles to see. Thirty minutes will not be enough time to shop.

Plan a second visit. This time, “dropping by” will work fine. The first couple of days are crazy—many of the best books are lost in a rush of customers or accidentally left hidden in a stack under a table. A revisit will give you the chance to see what you’ve missed. We restock and categorize the displays in the morning, so you can see the most early in the day.

Make your rep work for you. If you are looking for a specific category (Spanish or Kitchi crafts, for example), drop us a note prior to the show. We’ll have suggestions ready for you to review or, if the category is a little thin at the show (we never have enough room to show everything), we’ll prepare a catalog of in-stock titles for your perusal.

4 – Enjoy & Network

Last but not least, enjoy the show! BEA is a great time to pick up on trends, share information with other retailers, and learn about categories that will add profit to your bottom line. Make sure you schedule enough time to roam the floor and attend the events at the trade show.

I hope my easy steps have been helpful. If you have more to add or any questions, please drop me a note at [email protected] or connect with me on LinkedIn and I would be happy to get in touch!

Vicki Kral

Book Depot

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How to Lower Your Shipping Costs

March 22, 2016

This past summer my wife and I decided to take a small vacation and visit the east coast. Coastal communities with their seemingly more relaxed pace, fresh seafood and salty air attract many tourists who descend on local shops and eateries. While we were walking the downtown street I recognized 3 bookshops we have done previous business with and decided to drop in and browse around. One of the bookshops purchase bargain books regularly from us but the other 2 were very sporadic in their purchasing. I was fortunate the owners of these stores were working the floor and had a few minutes to speak with me.

The stores that purchased infrequently were well laid out, had a great selection of titles but a relatively small bargain book section. “Do bargain books not sell well for you?” I asked. “Yes, they sell quite well” both owners replied. “If you don’t mind my asking, why don’t you purchase more from Book Depot since your selection of bargain books is quite small?” The answer I got was not what I was expecting: “The shipping costs are too high relative to the price of the books”. Book Depot gets great rates from UPS and many other carriers so I didn’t quite know how to respond at that moment.

As it turned out these stores would shop bargain books primarily from our New Arrivals section that gets refreshed daily at 9PM EST and check out their order before items in their cart sold-out. Being a smaller store they might just meet the minimum order requirement that would result in approximately 3 boxes weighing 120 pounds (~54.5 kg). Typically within 1 day our warehouse staff starts picking, packing and prepping orders for shipping. Based on some recent samplings these smaller orders will cost approximately $0.43 per pound to ship in Canada and $0.46 per pound for much of the United States (more for the west coast).

How to Lower Your Shipping Costs: Consolidation is Key

So what, I probably told you something you already knew; you want to know how to save on shipping costs! Did you know that if you consolidated several orders over a period of a week or two that your shipping cost per pound can decrease by more than 50%? By consolidating several orders together your shipping method changes from a service like UPS Ground to a common carrier LTL (less-than-truck) method. Here your boxes get packed onto a pallet, wrapped tightly in plastic and shipped as one unit instead of individual boxes. Our experience in the industry also shows that boxes shipped by this method have less chance to go missing or get damaged since they are secured to a wooden pallet. Below are some actual examples that detail out the costs of shipping between small package and LTL:

Sounds great you say, but how do I make this happen? Our warehouse staff will pull and pack your order as quickly as always but with proper instruction, our shipping department will allocate a secure area and start consolidating your bargain book orders onto a pallet. When you have reached the desired consolidation level you simply instruct our Customer Service by phone or email to release the shipment. Our shipping department will inquire of several LTL shipping companies for the best rate or as an alternative you can instruct us which LTL company you want to ship with. If you choose to go with our LTL provider then only one charge for shipping will be applied to the last order.

To set up your account for consolidation please contact our Customer Service by email at [email protected] or call 905-680-7230 extension 229, toll-free at 1-888-402-7323, and provide them with your consolidation instructions. For example, you might instruct them to ship your orders once you have a pallet’s worth of product or ship it at the end of each month. Once your account has been enabled for consolidation you will see your consolidation instructions at the check-out stage. You will not be charged shipping for each order while they are being held for consolidation. Once the consolidated order is ready to ship you will be charged one shipping amount.

Here at Book Depot, we realize that shipping costs continue to rise and eat into your profits. Each year we negotiate with our shipping companies to get the best rate that results in shipping savings for you. Our shipping department is diligent to get you a reliable delivery service at the best possible price. Combined with the fact that Book Depot has the largest bargain book selection in the industry, consolidation is a zero cost service we can offer you today to help lower shipping costs and add more dollars to your bottom line.

If you have any more questions please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Bill Van Vliet

CIO

Book Depot

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