Working with small and medium-sized retailers on a daily basis, a reality has occurred to me regarding these people: Most of them don’t know how to effectively market themselves or their business, so they can be more competitive with stores. bigger. in their respective areas.

With more and more of these heavily funded box stores popping up around the world, the small retailer must be more creative in their marketing efforts if they hope to survive, let alone compete. A steady state of inventory clearance should be the goal of every window display retailer.

A tenet of retail that remains timeless is to have a relationship with your customers, and unless you have an unlimited marketing and advertising budget that allows you to spend money seamlessly to simply rate your business, whether it is profitable or not by a time. Then you had better change your mind or soon you will be planning a store closing or closing of business sale.

One way to do this is through email. You could easily write an entire book on ecommerce website development and all that that entails, but that’s not the purpose of this article. The purpose of this article is to offer advice to small and medium storefront retailers on how to quickly drive traffic to their storefront with minimal advertising budget through a series of simple emails and constantly liquidating inventory.

Even for the most technically inclined retailer, whether you currently have a website or not, building a large mailing list of loyal, eager, and even anxious customers can easily be developed over the course of a couple of months with nothing. more than just a website. site, an autoresponder and an email tracking system.

Sound complex? It really isn’t.

First, the simple website. If you don’t have a website yet, then all you need for now is a very simple one-page site that has your business logo, maybe a photo of your store, and an area where your customer can provide their name. , last name and primary email address.

But people won’t give you your personal information unless you give them a good reason to do so, which is why it’s important to have a great headline followed by a great offer. There are many books available on how to write great headlines and create attractive offers for this purpose, so I won’t go into here, but a good place to start would be Dan Kennedy, probably the best in the business.

However, before you can have a professional website, you must have a domain [address] where your site can rest. You want to have a domain address that is simple, but as close as possible to your line of business or business name. A great place to get a domain is Dynadot (www.dynadot.com), which also offers hosting that starts at $ 1 a month.

To create this simple website, if you don’t know how to do it yourself yet, you can do it quickly and easily by going to Elance (www.elance.com) where you can explain the above to them and have your website ready. to go in less than a week for less than $ 250.

You will also need to install your autoresponder and email tracking system on your website form, which your developer can do for you as well. The best company for this is Aweber (www.aweber.com), which provides you with a feature-rich email system that is also extremely easy to operate.

A truly amazing tracking system will mature naturally over time, but to get started quickly, these are the basics you’ll need. So now you have your simple website up and running for all your customers and prospects to see, your email tracking system is ready to go, and now you are ready to build your mailing list to increase your sales and customer loyalty. Your clients. .

One strategy that has always worked well for my clients when conducting high-impact retail closeouts for cash flow or even wall-to-wall out-of-business sales is to have professionally designed and printed paper signs to post throughout the store with a short version of the headline and offer used on the website followed by the website address.

Follow this with miniature versions of the signs (4 “x 6”) to hand out to each customer while they are in the store or while making a purchase.

This strategy alone won’t produce a large mailing list very quickly unless your store already has a steady stream of customers viewing the signs. However, combining this strategy with direct mail could explode your retail sales, liquidate large amounts of inventory, and create a large customer base with which to build strong relationships.

Direct mails can take many forms, from postcards to general sales letters, and while both have proven effective in many different circumstances for my clients over the years, there is a common denominator with the success of both: a powerful title and a very attractive offer.

If you are looking for new ways to drive traffic in front of your retail store, and the traditional tactics of running a few ads just don’t work for you, then you should consider growing your business using ‘click and mortar’ tactics as well.

I provided you with some ‘click and mortar’ retail basics from our advanced marketing systems for retail settlements and cash flow sales, but imagine these basics as a fully mature retail marketing system. Things like being able to self-produce video commercials that you could provide to your mass mailing list that will personally and interactively inform them of your offering. It all starts with the basic fundamentals that I have provided here.