Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about mom-and-pop retailers pulling the plug on their physical storefronts and running their businesses from home.
It’s easy to see the appeal: No more rent, no more utilities, no more sales staff, no more fines from the city for putting out your trash on the wrong day.
The downside: No more customers.
For all that I love the internet and all things virtual, I can tell you that getting people to shop at your online store is not nearly as easy as getting people to poke their heads inside your store at the mall or on a busy street corner. And it’s not free, either. It takes time, marketing savvy and, in many cases, the willingness to spend thousands of dollars on web design, software development, public relations and search engine sponsorships to drive traffic to your site.
Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal ran a story that profiled a California couple who decided to pack up their children’s clothing boutique and move it into their home. The bottom line: Sales are in the dumps, and the husband has taken a second job coaching high school tennis to pay the bills. He’s also started offering free local delivery in the hopes of keeping past customers loyal.
“Before, we could put a sign with ’sale’ on it outside our door, and it would drive traffic directly into our front door,” the husband told The Journal. “Now, we place ads on other websites and send out e-mail campaigns and wish on a star that people will click through.”
Back in September 2002 when I started my consulting firm, Axxess Business Centers, I opened a storefront in Lower Manhattan offering walk-in consulting services for small business owners and entrepreneurs. While the storefront attracted hundreds of customers and rang up lots of sales, we were never able to break even after paying the landlord, the light bill and our eight-person staff.
Two years later, I shut down the storefront and took Axxess virtual, hoping that optimizing our site for the search engines would bring in enough business to keep us afloat. My gamble paid off–but only because I supplemented our online marketing strategy with a heavy dose of networking, writing and public speaking.
So take it from me: Before you close your doors and kiss your storefront goodbye, put a plan in place that will keep customers coming in the door. Place a fishbowl at your checkout counter to collect business cards, send out an e-mail newsletter once a month, do your homework on search engine marketing and ask your kids to clue you in about Facebook and Twitter.
You’ll be glad you did.
This entry was posted on Monday, June 8th, 2009 at 1:13 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.Leave a Reply
