Video
2024 Celerant Client Conference Retailers Success Story Panel – Digital Strategy and Solutions
During our 2024 Client Conference we hosted a success panel asking some our top clients details to their success in the retail space. Success is a journey with ups and downs so avoid the downsides by watching this video for any strategy and digital solutions that you could apply to your retail business.
Michele Salerno, Director of Marketing at Celerant
The purpose for today is to hopefully be really conversational.
So I have questions that I’ll ask. I have a wireless microphone and I’m going to walk around the room and if you have questions, raise your hand. I’ll come out, ask any questions you have.
Let’s learn from these guys. They’ve done tremendous success with online eCommerce sales and in-store.
Top Tier Retailers in Their Respective Industries
Corbett Ferrel, D&D Texas Outfitters
My name is Corbett Ferrell.
My brother and I own the store. It’s been around since 1974.
We sell everything from farm and ranch equipment to clothing, saddles, tack, animal health products, feed, and more.
We’re in Seguin, Texas. We have an eCommerce website, brick-and-mortar stores, and we do Amazon as well recently.
David Boyd, EcoChic Boutique
EcoChic has three types of stores.
- My Sister’s Closet: high-end women’s fashion
- My Sister’s Attic: furniture
- Well-Suited, men’s fashion
It’s a consignment business and they’ve been in business about 30 years. I went with Stratus from Command back in 2015.
Explore Stratus Enterprise: In-Store and Online Retail Software with Enterprise Power and Simplicity »
Kevin Chandler, Vance Outdoors
Vance Outdoors is in central Ohio. We have five locations; anywhere from an 80,000 square-foot facility to a 7,500 square-foot facility.
We use every part of Celerant, which makes us a little unique.
We have a law enforcement division that works in six states. We do sales orders through Celerant with that.
We have a warehouse distribution center and we have the five retail stores.
We have a shooting range, which uses Stratus and that part of Celerant. We’ve been on command. We’re now transitioning to Stratus, so we’re going through that whole piece hopefully to someday go to FastBound. We use a lot of different pieces.
We’re into a lot of things that a lot of customers aren’t because you’re a brick-and-mortar store and you’re processing sales on a day-to-day basis.
We’ve been operating probably five divisions of our company through Celerant for 15 years, and we just keep growing.
We sell boats as well, which is pretty much like a used car shop, which is a whole different unique thing.
Read Success Story: Vance Outdoors Unifies Stores and Online with Omnichannel Point of Sale Software
Mitchell Tyler, SafeSide Tactical
Yeah, good morning. I’m Mitchell.
Like Vance, we’re in the shooting sports outdoor. We don’t sell boats yet, but we’re looking at it now.
Also similar. We use a lot of different parts of the software. We came into the Command family for a very short period of time in 2015 and switched to Stratus in 2016.
We’ve been using it since then. And we use Stratus exclusively for our POS and back office range management.
And then on the eCommerce website side, we use the digital marketing suite; so SEO services, email marketing. We do targeted emails based on data that’s already in the system, brand usage, specific models. We will target people that purchase a Sig Sauer P365 and then send them a customized email with stuff for Sig lovers. And then we don’t bore them with pictures of Glocks.
For email marketing, we have a new app that we use, which is mirroring some of our website capabilities. Online range reservations, if you’re transferring in a firearm, FFL requests, the training memberships.
With having the website when you look and you think, “oh, I can get a website,” what we didn’t know at the time that we’ve worked with Zeke and his team, is that we have so many tools now that we can use that are built for our business needs specifically that don’t have to go through the standard software modification process. And so we’re able to create little dashboards, create easy tools.
During COVID, we got challenged to build lots of things that created customer-driven processes that were always staff processes before. So you can walk up to a kiosk, you can check yourself into the classroom, it’ll pop up and show you which room it’s in. And now there’s not a line with 30 people on it waiting for a concealed carry class.
Being able to leverage the same data for our POS customers, our web customers, all in real time has been super valuable.
Zeke Hamdani, Director of Web Services
I’m Zeke Hamdani, Director of Web Services at Celerant.
I’m here just to assist as I’m not a client and it’s a client panel. I’ll interject where I need to.
Which Strategy, Digital and Online, Has Been the Most Effective in Driving Customer Engagement and Loyalty?
Corbett Ferrell:
We sell farm and ranch equipment. It’s highly, highly competitive and there’s people in here that do the same thing and instead of putting the price online, we make a quote card because if you buy one T-post, it’s one price, but if you buy 10,000 T-posts, it’s another price and it sends an email to our salespeople.
And what we like from our company brand perspective is we want to touch the customers as many times as we want. So if they may put a quote in for three or four items, we end up selling them 16, 17 or 19 other items at the same time.
We actually want to touch the customer, and I think they thought I was crazy when we did that, but they’re like, you don’t want to put the price online. I’m like, no, I don’t. It says you fill the whole quote out.
And we’ve actually had success doing that versus having a cheap website and another website. We wanted to do that. We just didn’t want everyone to know that it was us offering two different prices.
So we went with more of a quoting system because we sell trailers as well, and that is just different; it’s like buying a car. You can get three different prices from three different people.
So we had success with that and it’s getting redesigned now, so don’t look at it today, but it’s going to be really fun and interesting.
Mitchell Tyler:
We have one website and I would say that a majority of our web transactions are for local or regional customers, so people are shopping online and picking up in store.
We also get a ton of transfers from Sportsman’s Outdoor Superstore.
We are seeing the same thing as far as protecting your pricing for a local customer, but still having access to a nationwide audience for us or a global audience for some of you guys that aren’t in firearms.
During Covid, it was the opposite. We started an ammo website and we took about 20% of our ammo production and purchasing; tripled it in price and put it under a different brand website.
People that we never knew or would see again purchased ammo from that website.
That allowed us to keep our pricing in store for our local long-term customers. They of course saw an increase, but they didn’t see what was happening online.
And so we were sort of the opposite: we were racing to the top for our ammo website and it ran for about 12 months and then the need wasn’t there, but we’re using the same products.
We built some cool flags so that we could populate the same box of ammo on two different sites at two different price points and fulfill from the same place. And shipping in back office.
The whole process was managed all through Stratus.
Benefits of Manufacturing On-Site and Using eCommerce Websites
We had the benefit of manufacture ammo at our main facility. We had raw materials on hand to get us 6 to 8 months deeper into the ammo shortage than most retailers could because we were creating it.
With the range, we harvested our own brass. We were sitting on primers, bullets, powder, and so we thought we were gearing up for a 2020 election ammo push and it just dropped like eight months too soon, but we were already far enough down the road.
Then having that, but customer traffic’s down half closed or we’re short days. The ammo website that we were able to spin up really in about two weeks, it saved us on several weeks where if that ammo site revenue hadn’t been coming in the building that had no customers in it, they couldn’t get there.
The flexibility we had there was pretty awesome.
How to Use a Mobile Shopping App to Increase Customer Loyalty Both In-Store and Online?
We’re still trying to figure that out.
We have a new app, it can do really cool things, and the challenge now is not a technical one. It’s how do we get customers to engage on our app? What’s the benefit to the customer?
If you are on your phone all the time and you prefer apps versus going to, if you’ve got the Home Depot app and that’s what you always go to instead of the website, that’s what I want to happen for Safeside because then I can really not only collect good data about our customers and what they’re after, but you can literally, you’re already logged in as perpetual login.
If you’re a member of our range, you can go in and book a reservation at $0 and really four or five taps and no payment information and your reservation is in, and we’re working on notifications to remind you, “hey, you have a range reservation tomorrow, you have a class this evening, click here if you need a map, etc.”
We do some of that through the website and we’ve eliminated probably 50% of the phone calls and emails by automating announcements. There’s always that, “oh shoot, I forgot that class was tonight.” But they’re figuring out at 7:30 in the morning, not at five minutes to kick off. And so the app will be doing push notifications.
We’re also working on developing an employee side of the app so that our sales staff can use the same app and use it on the day-to-day to look up availability, to check pricing, leverage the vendor data that’s already in the cloud and in real-time be able to say, “yeah, I don’t have it here so I can get it here in a couple days and not have to take the customer journey.
We don’t want that customer journey to be bouncing between the POS and the gun case. We want the customer journey to be swiping a credit card.
Being able to do all that in our hand, it’s going to be really a powerful tool for our staff. Then the customer sees the staff use the app, “oh, you can do all that.”
That’s how we get the conversion.
I think we have 350 downloads, something like that, 400 last time we checked in just a few months.
We’re not doing retail because of the app store and firearm. There are some ways around it, but that’s not really our focus right now.
Using the Mobile App to Help Customers Make Purchases
Zeke Hamdani:
You cannot transact any firearms on Apple or Google. You can display them.
What we have done is if you want to have a mobile app for firearms, then you can browse and everything, get to the product, and then you have to finish the transaction on the website because they just do not want to transact anything in their platform.
Mitchell Tyler:
In theory, you could actually build the cart and everything in the app and then essentially transfer that package over to the website so it would already know who they are.
If they’re logged into the app, we can essentially fake a login to the website, take a cart and dump it into the cart on the website. To the customer, it won’t feel like you’re starting over and be compliant with the app store requirements.
But also when we get to that point where we want to leverage the retail products, and I think we would do that on a smaller scale, I think that would mostly be for buying the app pickup in store.
That would be our target for that.
Can You Target Customers in the Shopping App Using Existing Data?
Mitchell Tyler:
The push notifications, not like announcements, have all kinds of cool filtering for push notifications.
If I want to send a push notification to just the range members who also have the app, or just customers who made a purchase in the last seven days, maybe it’s a great way for us to start to collect more reviews.
We know our app users are going to be a quality customer and so, much less risk asking an app user for a review because they’re engaged with us, they’re downloading a custom branded app for our store.
And so target members, target people you haven’t seen, target people that have the app but haven’t logged in. There’s a bunch of different ways to do it and then drill all the way down into me sending a push message just to my brother’s device to freak him out.
Branded Mobile Shopping Apps Bypass Email Spam Filters
Michele Salerno:
With the branded mobile shopping apps, everybody thinks about launching an app to sell more products, and that’s of course the goal.
But a really big benefit of having a mobile app is being able to get into your customer’s pockets. It’s getting harder and harder to send emails you can send them, but it’s getting harder and harder to actually get those emails in their inbox.
And so you can bypass spam filters, you can go right to your customer’s phones through push notifications. It’s great way to increase both customer engagement and brand loyalty.
Zeke Hamdani:
And another thing down the road, we are going to add more in-store aspects to the apps. I’m sure you guys have seen on Walmart, if you open up the Walmart app and you’re in the store, they know which you’re in.
And then basically, the app goes into in-store mode, so then you know exactly which aisle the products are in. You can search, you can scan, you can check price for that specific store. We are going to explore that in the near future.
How Does EcoChic Boutique Build Customer Loyalty and Engagement?
David Boyd:
EcoChic Boutique has a pretty long-time loyal customer base. They’ve been in the Phoenix area and in San Diego for about 30 years.
Every one of their items that comes in as consignment, they carry no purchased inventory from vendors. It’s all consigned. The challenge is the fact that every item is one and done.
So a woman brings in a Gucci bag and they set the price at $5,000 and that goes on the site when that sells, it’s done. So logistically that creates some issues, but they do have a very attentive email list.
I have customers who’ve been with them for 20 – 30 years.
Their biggest customers more often than not are their largest. So there’s something of a life cycle where someone will go to Neiman Marcus, spend $20,000 on clothes or jewelry, and then wear it for, use it for six months and then come and consign it and then use their money to purchase other items that other folks have brought in.
A lot of the promotion is around usually, monthly sales that occur to draw in traffic, but they have a marketing campaign that goes all over Canada and the United States and even Europe because many of their customers will not only buy online, but they come to Phoenix area for the winter, particularly from Canada, and they’re all headed home soon.
They have both a lot of online and the same customer is online, but then is also in person. And social media is a big thing. With Instagram taking, doing short videos of someone holding that $5,000 purse that would sell for 20,000.
Inman Marcus. It is a bit of a high-end treasure hunt, and the website literally refreshes every day because of the uniqueness of the items.
What Social Media Channel is Your Best Performing?
Michele Salerno:
We’re very active on social, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, we’re everywhere.
Since y’all are retailers and we have different audiences, where do you see the most performance and engagement on social.
Corbett Ferrell:
For sales or views?
Zeke Hamdani:
They don’t always translate.
Michele Salerno:
That was my response yesterday. If you’re looking at social media for lead and sales generation, that’s a different question than visibility and engagement.
Corbett Ferrell:
We do TikTok, we’ve gotten millions of views on six videos and we average a hundred thousand views, but it doesn’t always lead to sales. I’m younger and it drives me nuts.
One thing we did was to help our, we started with TikTok less than a year ago. We had like 50,000 followers. We have multiple videos to get a million views, but what we did was we bought a phone and we tie it to that personal cell phone’s number because on TikTok, if you open it as a business account, the algorithm blocks you and they want you to pay.
It’s how they’re going to make money and do advertising in that way. So we tied it as like it’s a personal person and our engagement way up. We’re a social influencer, but we’re not.
That was one thing I found that worked really well. Now you can’t link your businesses easily. Once we hit about 150,000, we’re going to switch it back to a business profile. That way we have the engagement and the followership there.
But that’s been a great lead driver for us on pushing them back to Instagram. We have more people actually check out via Instagram, but they view us on TikTok.
And like I said, I’m young, I don’t even have a TikTok, so I understand how it works, but I employ the people that do that, and it’s been shockingly really well for us.
Zeke Hamdani:
Corbett, on your TikToks, are you focusing on the clothing division or more like trailers and bigger things?
Corbett Ferrell:
No, it’s all shippable product. If we can ship it, we’ll put it on TikTok.
You can ship squeeze shoots and fencing posts, but we do smaller packageable products on there right now.
Women’s clothing does extremely well. If you sell women’s clothing, get on TikTok.
Using Facebook Live and Marketplace to Sell More Products
Michele Salerno:
One thing that we notice at Celerant is when we post from our main company account, we get less visibility of course, unless you’re paying.
But then when our team members share the post or engage with the post, that’s when it’ll get a lot more visibility when the people, the person’s account versus the company’s account, just like you said.
How about Facebook Live? Does anybody do Facebook live to sell in the store or anything like that? Any tips or anything?
David Boyd:
It is about presenting opportunity bias when things come in. Every set of stores in the company have professionally trained photographers, and so when we get consignment items in, they’re photographed at the store with good lighting, and we have a format with the presentation of the specifics of the item and all that.
When particularly high demand items come in, they hit Facebook live, and then we try to chase people to the site for the purchase, which is also a challenge. I won’t get into the back operation stuff is kind of my forte.
But it’s a challenge when we’re selling one item that’s actually sitting on the shelf in the store online and somebody in Canada buys it. We’ve got a whole logistical process where the stores need to be getting notified, need to go pick it before it sells in the store.
And if it sells in the store, then it’s a lost sale online. So there’s a bit of a, but Facebook Live helps kind of speed up that process of selling the item, which makes it even more exciting in the store.
Zeke Hamdani:
How often do you guys do lives? Or is it based on what merchandise you got in and if it’s worthy of a live or not?
Audience Member:
They could be YouTube Shorts, your Instagram Reels. We’re using TikTok.
TikTok, I don’t know if it’s driving sales, but like you’re saying, it’s getting a lot of followers and then the Instagram, the couple minutes, keep their attention span and go from there.
Michele Salerno:
We find it’s hard to associate social media with sales.
Corbett Ferrell:
Unless they’re directly checking out, which the whole Meta Pay thing that changed recently, they’re forced to check out there. They want their percent of that transaction.
Michele Salerno:
Even if they’re not making the purchases, you’re getting visibility. You’re in their mind. They’re always on social, they’re always scrolling too much all day, every day.
And the more you can be in front of them with your posts and your videos and your live, that’s the goal. Even if they’re not buying right now, they’re going to buy and you want to be top of mind.
Audience Member:
It was social media that kept us afloat during Covid. Arizona wasn’t quite as locked down as the rest of the country, but we really use that as an opportunity to get in people’s homes and get them into the showroom and sell.
Michele Salerno:
It’s a great way to connect with your customers and build your audience and your network and then you post things. They share it and it makes social media a powerful marketing tool.
Business and Staff Management in the Back Office Software
Audience Member:
Can one of you guys talk about the staff side or the backend side the website, order pullers, someone doing images, descriptions, you’ve got somebody in sales, you’ve got somebody doing the marketing on whether you say TikTok or Facebook or emails.
What’s worked for you or if you’re just getting started, what’s the first thing to hire someone to do or to help you get past just having an eCommerce website out there and doing some Google AdWords. What’s the next step after that?
Corbett Ferrell:
We’re smaller. We’re not as big you want to say. The way we structure it, the people I have, what they do and stuff like that.
So we’re small because I’d rather do, before I tell you, I’d rather do 15 million in sales and make one and a half than do 20 million in sales. Making 800,000 volume sometimes is insanity. And I know when you’re on a growth path, you have to go through that next plateau.
We have two people that upload products all day long. They use some AI image enhancers and they put it instantly on a white background, so it saves us time. We will rip photos from vendors and then throw them through an AI simulator that’ll make them more ours than theirs, and I’ll share that with you. It’s actually really cheap and very, very fast.
So they upload products, they write descriptions or they’ll use ChatGPT to write descriptions and that’s what they do all day long. Those same two people will also pull the previous orders in the morning.
So they spend about two and a half hours pulling orders, packaging it, and then they spend the rest of the six hours of the day putting up it online. I have three buyers for the retail division, shippable goods, but they’re also responsible for uploading products to Amazon in order to save me time.
We just went to doing Amazon realistically about 90 days ago, and that shame on me as a business owner because as the passion can’t stand Amazon, but at the end of the day I have to make money. So we did that and so then we have one person that receives the product in.
And so that’s kind of the flow and we’re just now going to start hiring just a picker and puller that ships products all day long.
That’s just the past 90 days is when we really started doing Amazon and that’s where most of our online sales are coming from now.
Audience Member:
Are you fulfilling them?
Corbett Ferrell:
No, it’s FBM and we just we’re testing FBA products, like this one SKU in kids, this one SKU in footwear, because they just take so much from you. We’re testing it for a longer period of time to see if that ROI is there.
We pull it because like David said, we have a 60,000 square foot store and that is our warehouse. There is no back thing.
So if it sells on Amazon or online, we have to run and go pull it really quick. If it’s the last one left, I’m going to piss the customer off either online or in store. So I hope that, I mean that’s kind of like elementary, my example, but that’s how we do it right now.
We run really thin. I don’t know what else you want me to tell you really, but yeah, that’s how it works.
Selling Firearms and the Intricacies of Online eCommerce Marketplaces
Mitchell Tyler:
Even the part of our catalog that we could sell on Amazon is either high fraud potential, high knockoff potential, or we’re in the soup with everybody arguing over a few pennies, right?
It is a race to the bottom on Amazon for firearm-related accessories. That’s how we all shop on Amazon. And so there isn’t customer loyalty to an Amazon merchant if you’re selling the same thing as everybody else.
And so we met Amazon here last year and went through the process of getting our merchant system set up and we’re going to actually use it for something else.
So the other side of our lives is that we have an axe throwing venue. We’re starting to import axes and the imported cost to landed cost is about $8 and the average cost on Amazon is about $59 for a similar product
That’s one of those things where, it’s just like you asked, the nickels always holding up the dollar. So whether it’s you need a full-time staff member for uploading products or you need to buy 3000 axes when last year you sold 48 axes or whatever it is, you have to decide this might be a good idea and we’re going to take some risk here.
And the margins on that are such that we can do Fulfilled by Amazon. And so it can run. And if it takes a year to run and we run out and we made something that we’ll do it bigger and if not, then we know that’s not a big part of our future.
I think all of us up here, and most of you in the room, are risk takers and the educated risk. I wouldn’t have started it by myself knowing that I can bring that into our existing system, receive those items, sell them at our 3 axe throwing locations, and then also do the Amazon tie-in.
That was the reason we were willing to try it. And I’ll just say for social, I mean I love it and I hate it. I’m so frustrated with society, like the quality of society sometimes.
We will do amazing artistic posts of super cool things happening on the range and our reach will be nothing. And then we’ll reshare a meme of Pete Davidson and we’ll get 200,000 reach over 10 days.
And it’s so frustrating because we really want our cool gun content to be what’s out there. But on the flip side, that does bring us followers.
About one out of every four posts that we make gets flagged for firearm content, and then we have to through an appeal process. That’s a weekly thing.
At some point, our followers, our Facebook followers are just going to disappear overnight. That was the other part about having the app now is that Facebook has been a really core communication tool to our top maybe 2000 customers. And getting them over to the app means we will still be able to reach them on a daily basis when Facebook Meta pulls the plug on firearms on Facebook
Utilizing Google Ads and Facebook Meta Advertising to Expand your Online Reach
Zeke Hamdani:
So Neal, I got a couple of suggestions for you. You were asking where to advertise.
What I have seen is Google shopping feed. I’m sure you’re doing that, but actually putting money into that, as in buying some ads there, that works really, really well. Some of our clients have gotten tremendous results, like 20 fold on their investment and it’s not as saturated as your plain ads.
So maybe explore that and then I will say explore ads on Meta Facebook and Instagram. Based on your business, Neal is in the party supply business.
There’s no restrictions. So you could do everything in there, but I would say those things probably will work.
Google Shopping Feeds and Using eCommerce Integrations for Direct Uploads
Michele Salerno:
And we have a new integration coming with Google. Can you speak to that, Zeke?
Zeke Hamdani:
Michelle and I are working with Google to enhance how you have right now, Google product feed. Most of our websites have that, but they’re bringing in the local element into it.
If you search for something and your store is close by, it’s going to say this product is available 1.2 miles away and in stock. And then from there, basically customer can buy from there online or they can do BOPIS from Google. So it’s really cool. It’s new and we are right on the cutting edge of that.
Michele Salerno:
It makes it so much faster for your customers to even be able to put products from their Google search in your shopping cart. It’s really cool and new and even firearms dealers can use it, but Google’s going to automatically not push those products in. But all your other products will be pushed into the feed and it’s really cool.
We should have it in a couple of months.
Zeke Hamdani:
If you sell firearms, you can send it and you will not be penalized. They just won’t show it. They will filter it out.
We will also filter out firearms. We have a flag for firearms. This is Google’s push to get into the local marketing and things like that. I think it will be very beneficial.
Michele Salerno:
We spoke to Google at length for our firearm dealers, too, to confirm that’s how it is going to work.
Zeke Hamdani:
And the way it’s going to be is it’s not going to require you to have a website.
So for example, if you’re a business where an eCommerce website is just not something you are willing to do or can do for different reasons, you can still take advantage of it through our system where it’s going to push your local inventory to Google and all of these things will be there.
Instead of finishing the order on the website, it will just say, you can pick it up in the store.
Corbett Ferrell:
If it’s going to be on Google, it’s just going to show a picture. But if say I don’t have a website, does it use some generic photo from someone else?
Zeke Hamdani:
You have to submit the picture, even if you don’t have a website.
Google gives you repositories where you can put the pictures and Google also gives you a special page. So you click on let’s say a widget, and then it goes to a page where you see the bigger picture and it’s going to show you, this is D&D Texas.
Here’s either stock inventory, store hours, address, and that would be the page. Okay, that’s the end of the journey.
But if you had a website where you sell that product, then you will actually go to the website and finish the sale.
Michele Salerno:
It even drops that product right in the cart. So it’s all about reducing friction and making the sales faster.
Zeke Hamdani:
It’s good to see Google is pushing local business and not just eCommerce.
Ensuring Consistent Customer Experiences in Stores, eCommerce and Mobile Apps
Kevin Chandler:
I think that’s what we all struggle with. You want to send the same message.
For us, it’s always customer service. My customers don’t always agree, but at the same time, we’re always striving to provide the best customer service possible.
Whether that’s them checking out through our brick-and-mortar stores or checking out online, whatever the hang-up is that you’re dealing with, that’s what I do on a daily basis.
If I get a customer complaint, I write it down, why did it cause this customer a headache and how can I fix it?
If it’s website related, that’s when I call Zeke. If it’s my cashiers, that’s when I call my store manager. But at the same time, the flow of that customer and understanding when they walk in your door, how do you get them out the door with the least amount of resistance possible, hopefully with a bag full of stuff.
Corbett Ferrell:
I think that the customer experience online, I mean it’s all going to end up being the same. Me and Zeke have talked about this. It’s all going to be the same and you just check out.
I think you can really do a whole lot more in store. And we saw that during Covid, our business did, website went up, but our in-store traffic was huge. We took a stance and we never closed. We never made you do anything regardless if that was right or wrong.
We hired some really good managers and we let them run with it and we’d let them live and die by their own sword. And if we thought it was wrong as ownership, we’d write it down, discuss it and say, no, we’re going to do this every time.
But we really leaned on them. And for me and my brother only in the store, we got out of our own way.
We used to micromanage being a medium-sized business and we finally said, all right manager, you do it. And if this is the thing that we want done and this is how we want it, it’s great. And I mean, my headache is way less now.
We spent more money on a manager, but it was the best thing I could have ever done. And it’s just hard to let those dollars go. But I think people is a huge part that we just forget because right now everything’s about AI and online and everything else, and it’s like you can’t do it without people.
Maybe one day we can, but it’s huge. A personal factor is huge. And for eCommerce, we hand write every note. So that’s our only way that we are different. We hand-write a handwritten note to, “thank you, David for buying these pair of boots, etc.” And then someone from the eCommerce team signs it and they leave their personal touch.
Otherwise, it’s in-store. Even if you don’t buy anything and you have a good time, we’re in-store, you’re going to come back.
And that’s what we’ve really focused on recently is that as well as Amazon, because I can control that. And if they have a good time, they don’t buy anything, they’re going to come back every time.
Which Online eCommerce Strategy has Brought the Best Return on Investment?
Mitchell Tyler:
Abandoned cart emails for us. It is something we can physically look at.
I keep thinking it’s going to change, but we have done abandoned cart emails on products for six years, but we also went back and integrated it for our range reservations.
And so someone that adds a reservation to the cart but never confirms it, they’re getting the same kind of abandoned cart email for their reservation. “Hey, you’re almost there.”
And we get to be a little more cheeky on those because we may have already lost them. And so it’s less formal, less professional.
At that point it’s kind of like, “okay, well we almost had you.” But the normal things we’re doing didn’t close the deal. We’re going to just have a little fun and see if maybe humor or not unprofessionalism, but just less polished.
And I think that’s cool with different socials too is there’s a type, there’s some great memes about the type of users on Instagram and Facebook and TikTok and LinkedIn.
I was at a conference in November and there was a guy who spent two hours just talking about LinkedIn and if you’re a business and you serve any B2B and you don’t have a LinkedIn, you should start looking for another job.
Agreed. I mean he was pretty sure about himself with that. But we went back and looked and we are slowly building LinkedIn because we do a lot of corporate gatherings, so I don’t know if you guys do that for your range between the axe rowing and the range, a wide swath of humanity can have a good time with what we do.
And so on the LinkedIn, we’re really focusing more on the B2B for events. And those are high ticket, high margin. Team building, bachelor parties with machine guns, divorce parties.
We had a lady come and hang up her wedding dress and they did throwing at the dress. It was very therapeutic.
Michele Salerno:
That’s a good target. Your liability insurance loves it. It has to the high.
What about those abandoned cart emails? They’re automated, right?
Mitchell Tyler:
They’re automated. And so there’s a few different triggers that may have you get one and then we’re showing the products in your cart or the reservation for the lane type or location that you chose and that does really well.
I have a technical background and we can fix all of these technical problems. So if you have a button that doesn’t work or a part of your site that doesn’t work, those can all be fixed, almost without exception.
But the human factor is so interesting that you can have a stellar employee that has a bad day matched with the perfectly wrong customer who’s having also a bad day and you can blow up a long time relationship quickly.
And so I think one of the things is that we try not to get bogged down in all of the technical details all the time and make sure that we’re still smiling, greeting people, baseline stuff.
When you’re in a room like this, we’re talking about all these automations and all these processes, but are you hiring people that smile when a customer walks in? That is just a basic thing.
Those are things we’ve said from the beginning. We can train people about how to sell guns. We can’t train people on how to be a good person or someone that you want to have a conversation with.
And so we are constantly having just to remind ourselves that all the processes and integrations, it’s all wonderful. But our business was built with my brother and I behind the counter selling guns.
And now I haven’t sold a gun probably for three years behind the counter, but hopefully my people are doing it the same way that I did it when I started and that we ask them to do it.
And most of the time they are.
David Boyd:
It sounds a little bit old school at this point, but the emails through Constant Contact going to establish customer base. We do term sales probably once a month and then 2 unveiling events that they’re not sales, but they’re the release of either the spring consignment items or the fall, and they’re a big deal.
We get three or 400 people at the door ready to come in and buy the latest and greatest. So I think a big part of EcoChic Boutique’s success has been Anne building a culture around the entire experience with my Sister’s Closet.
When you come in for the first time and you find a pair of shoes and you’re buying them, you get encouraged to bring stuff into consign. That creates a cyclical relationship where not only are they a client or a customer, they’re also a provider of inventory and they end up getting money back on their account that they can use to buy other things. And so that’s a really important part of their relationship.
And then of course I go in and find a great pair of shoes at Well Suited. Then I tell Zeke, “hey, next time you’re in Scottsdale, you got to stop. By the way, they’ve got a pair of your size online.” And off it goes.
And you can buy something that would cost $10,000 or even a thousand dollars and buy it for $300. And it’s in brand new condition. As long as you treat people right, it becomes a cash cow in that way.
Mitchell Tyler:
A question for consignment. Since you’re consignment heavy, do you guys leverage your consignment rates as promos? So the other side of the equation, not like a term sale, but do you have times where I could bring in items and get a higher percentage payout or it’s like a category you really need and so you’re being more aggressive on trying to recruit those?
Or when people cash out, do they have a benefit to use those dollars in the store, a financial benefit versus cashing out?
David Boyd:
There’s a few questions there.
First of all, we don’t do currently, really, any ad hoc type of promotions. Like get an extra 5% for this time, but we do pay more for certain classes of goods. We’ve built some stored procedures in that recalculate that.
And one of the things that we’re working on is we move to Stratus is to build a dashboard that will allow you to do a term sale thing for consignment, and ultimately for by trade or whatever it is you’re doing.
So that’s a great question. And there are things that are incented. They tend to be things that particularly women hold onto for longer. So try to get them to turn them loose and sell them back, and that’s going to be a great feature when that can happen.
Mitchel Tyler:
We’re doing that with gun buying for frequent consignors. So we have a rate, a tiered rate system, not based on just the overall value, the value of the item, but the overall value of the person bringing stuff in. And that has helped us.
We really shifted last year from buying used guns primarily to consigning used guns. Primarily, we get terms from everybody else, we have time to turn, but a used gun goes in the case, it’s essentially prepaid. And so it’s tied up.
Consignment is it’s just a payout at the end and the customers get a little more, but our carrying cost goes to zero. And so that’s been something that we’ve changed this year. But we play with rates dynamically based on the value of that customer as we know there’s more in the closet, more in the safe, and we’d like to get those too.
David Boyd:
And certainly there are consignors in this world that if they can sign $50 or a hundred thousand dollars a year in merchandise, they’re going to get a better rate. So it’s sort of on a case by case basis from that standpoint.
Those are just numbers I threw out. I don’t have a number in my head, but if somebody comes in with a cache of Gucci bags, there’s going to be a conversation.
Michele Salerno:
That’s a good customer.
Using Automated Emails and Mobile Push Notifications to Expand Customer Reach
Kevin Chandler:
Email is easy. I would love to say that there’s some secret to sauce to the success.
You start off with emails and you start off with a thousand emails and before you know it, it’s 10,000, 20,000 and you just keep growing that.
We do all the different lines of communication. Now, I’m not the computer geek or the social media expert like he is.
Now, my IT guy there was going and I was like, okay, but at the same time, you do all those things and something takes off.
Zeke Hamdani:
Kevin has a very large email list. Now, over the years, like you said, it grows.
Basically the list is very large and we had to split the list into pieces because you don’t want to send a million people a message and it hits million inboxes and they hit the website at the same time. You don’t want to do that.
Michele Salerno:
Or they’re opting out. Spread it out. It’s not towards everyone.
Mitchell Tyler:
We do have a Super Bowl ad for a free 30 minute range visit in 2019. The website lasted for about 32 seconds, and then it took about six minutes to reboot.
And then we got the rest of them. But we were just, to be fair, we were self-hosting. Okay, but it’s our server.
Yeah, next time I’m going to use yours. But those are real things. We got a smoking deal on two 15 second bookend spots in the fourth quarter of that Super Bowl, and it was just a visit and we had a custom domain that went right to an email signup page, and it was just one of those things like everything, it was a great idea and it was great execution.
However, there was that one little thing. So email list is that big. Same thing.
We get a few hundred, maybe a thousand users at a time, no problem.
But you hit 15,000 visitors within 10 seconds, and most of us are not set up for that spike.
Kevin Chandler:
I know Zeke’s going to call me this afternoon because the app is the biggest thing because we all, and especially us in the gun industry, is we know we’re going to lose our access to our customers at some point in one form or another.
I’m already like, how do I get to their phone? Because look around, people are looking at your phone right now, right?
We’re always doing that. So how can I push to that to their phone.
Michele Salerno:
And that’s the thing with the mobile app, yes, it’s to sell more, but just to be able to communicate with your customers. Whether you’re emails are being delivered or not, whether they’re even checking email anymore, but their email marketing is still super successful.
Of course, it’s the most cost efficient way to market. And when you personalize it, like we said yesterday, that success jumps six times. But if you can get in their pocket on the phone and then they say yes to push notifications one time, then you can send them those same messages as push notifications.
You can do mass messages, you can do one-to-one, you can do triggered automations. There’s all sorts of things you can do. And it goes right to their phone.
Zeke Hamdani:
Another thing, email is pretty inexpensive, but text messaging is very expensive, especially if you want to buy that six digit code; that’s like $1500 a month just for that number.
So push notifications are free. Send ’em to all your users all day long. You don’t want to do that, but you can. It won’t cost you anything.
Biggest Takeaways and Tips for Retailer from the 2024 Client Success Panel
Corbett Ferrell:
I was a B student my whole life. I found people that had been there before me and I asked them, what did you do? And so they tell me what they did and I take that and write that down.
I asked another person, what’d you do? And I took that and I wrote it down and then I tried this or we’d try that.
Then we would slowly morph away. I heard a guy explain it to me 1 time that way he is. I was like, that’s genius.”
It’s not that you cheated, you just took a little idea from this person and a little idea from that person. Amd I always wanted to find someone who’s done more than me or is doing more than me. And that’s what we’ve done.
Mitchell Tyler:
One is that omnichannel is the only channel, right? I mean, there are just so few businesses in the current market or this time of our lives that you can just do one thing and reach the customers that you need.
Everything costs more to operate. Overhead is out of control. Payroll’s out of control to get the good people, you’re paying more.
And so you have to have the email, the website, the app, the in-store, fulfillment, the ‘buy now, pay late’ plugins. I mean all those things.
And what I do is I’m looking at the big websites and the big retailers probably at some of you guys in the room that have huge footprints, but what are they doing?
What widgets are being added to their website? What’s a little feature that now shows up on every page that I’m starting to find myself use as a consumer?
And then we talk to Zeke and we say, how can we do something similar? And that’s how a lot of our features have developed, is they’re big companies with teams of people sitting here thinking stuff up all the time. And we should do this and try it.
And if they try it and they keep it, that means it tested. And so I don’t want to do the testing. I want them to do the testing and then we’ll take it, do some version of it that fits our store.
So looking whether it’s mentors, whether it’s big companies, and then if you’re not on Stratus, I’ll just plug every year I’m here and I’m meeting you. Find people on Command. Like I’m eight years in on Stratus.
David Boyd:
I think consistency in the way you message to people. So that there’s an expectation in them that you’re constantly fulfilling, consistency in how you promote product, whether it’s through term sales or other things you like to do.
Buying club we haven’t really talked about, which is huge consistency in the culture. When I walk into, I buy, people tend to buy from stores they like and then don’t prices. Sometimes secondary because they like how the interaction occurs and they’re familiar with it.
And that is really the lifeblood, I think, of the consignment business, knowing how to operate and what to expect.
