Fall 2020 PCA Magazine

PREMIUMCIGARS.ORG AUTUMN 2020 | PCA The Magazine 55 were brand evangelists, loved the store and made a commitment by signing up for the card when, in reality, all we did was stick some brochures somewhere and hope they were seen. How could we use our friendly, customer-service-driven branding to generate more sales? People loved our brand, but we couldn’t pay the mortgage in handshakes and hugs. We decided that since our customers loved the branding and interacting with our teammembers, the team would be best suited to drive what we now considered to be the key performance metric: conversion. If we saw 2,000 customers in a day, we wanted 3 percent to convert and get a Redcard, no matter what. Managers won and lost bonuses over conversion (and their jobs, at times) and the entire company pivoted to selling Redcards almost more aggressively than we tried to sell merchandise. What happened? It worked. Stock price shot up, sales increased and we grew. We leveraged people’s love and trust for the brand toward a selling tool we knew worked. In the cigar business, the “Redcard” could be a number of things. What do you want your customers to do? Buy more? Visit more? Come to more events? Try different T H E I N D U S T R Y SKUs? Buy more accessories? Get a locker? Decide what it is you want to use, what service you’ve developed in building your brand, and come up with an easy-to-understand, incentive- based “ask” that you can get out to the customers and push relentlessly until you achieve the results you were looking for. If you want them to buy more during their visit, for example, have you done everything to leverage your branding toward getting them to buy more? Are the boxes labeled with single cigar price AND box price (with a discount reflected and called out in bold on the label)? Is there visible signage calling out the box discount and even a better discount for multiple boxes? Is your staff (a huge part of your store’s brand and the biggest part of communicating that message to every customer) trained AND incentivized to upsell every customer? The list goes on. Look at your situation and think: What do my best customers have in common and how do I incentivize other customers to mirror that behavior? If your top 10 customers visit the shop five times a week, maybe your key metric is visits. Create a plan to drive visit frequency (loyalty program, social media “Customer of the Week” shout-outs, daily specials, punch card, etc.) that may seem small or inconsequential but moves the branding message toward pushing customers to visit more frequently. If you don’t know what your branding is doing to grow your business, it’s time to step back and think about asking your customers to do what it is you want them to do. We don’t achieve this by sending out an email or having a couple meetings, but by driving at and incentivizing one or two key metrics in every part of our routine and strategy until our customers and staff have been converted. Real branding yields real results—you just have to ask for them. If you don’t know what your branding is doing to grow your business, it’s time to step back and think about asking your customers to do what it is you want them to do. ”