What’s better for marketing: email or social media?
Studies have shown that email is a stronger direct marketing tool than social media. Consider these numbers from OptinMonster based on research carried out between 2016 and 2018:
- 91 percent of people check their email daily compared to 57 percent who check their Facebook account.
- 77 percent of consumers say they prefer email for permission-based promotional messages compared to just 4 percent for Facebook.
- 66 percent of email users have made a purchase as the result of a marketing message from email compared to 20 percent for Facebook.
The most telling statistic though has to do with control of your message: Email will typically reach more than 85 percent of the people you send it to, whereas Facebook’s organic reach has declined to about 1 to 6 percent, depending on your total number of followers.
Social media sites, in general, are more casual and can help build brand awareness, reach very specific customer segments and foster and create communities. Social media is also a great of way building your database of email addresses through contests and other activities that require audience participation. With social media generating leads but not necessarily more business, it’s thus important to combine both email and social media marketing efforts to get the maximum return.
We spend a lot of time training staff. How do we ensure we’re keeping them in a competitive environment like the current one?
A competitive salary is obviously important, but employee longevity is often more about other issues like the friendships people have at work, the opportunities to grow, the challenge and satisfaction they get from their career. And sometimes it’s about the benefits. One of the best ways to find out what an employee wants is “stay interviews,” held periodically. Specifically, say: “Please tell me why you like working here and what I can do better.” (Employment website Monster offers a list of “stay interview questions here: petsplusmag.com/2192.) As you gain experience as an employer, you’ll develop better instincts when it comes to hiring the kind of people who will stay. But it doesn’t hurt to be upfront. Tell job candidates, “This is a long-term position for the right person. If you don’t see yourself here in three years, please tell me.”
I carry two competing brands in a fairly narrow, raw-food category. Now one of them is implying I should drop the other slightly-less-popular brand or it will cut off supply. Is this legal?
With a few exceptions, yes, the law allows a miffed vendor to cut you off cold. “In general, companies in the U.S. are free to decide when to do business and when to stop doing business with another company,” says attorney Barbara Mandell of the law firm Dykema Gossett, which focuses on antitrust law.
Is there a rule of thumb on using vendor displays?
There are times, says display expert Larry Johnson, when it makes sense to use vendor-provided collateral, such as when customers ask for the line by name, or when the display has some feature or information you can’t recreate in your own setup. But more often than not, you won’t get the seamless fit that top-notch visual merchandising demands, says Johnson, listing mismatching colors, overbearing logos and “displays that are too big for the amount of business you expect them to generate” as some of the problems he’s seen in such situations. Good display is all about balance, focus and restraint, and an ad hoc approach will rarely work. “Sometimes free can end up being very costly,” Johnson says.
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I just caught an error in the bonuses we paid out to staff for the holiday period. It comes to over $1,000. Should I ask for the money back?
Nope. Eat the loss. Even if you could collect, the impact on morale and productivity would be a killer. Instead, you could explain what happened and that you plan to treat the payments as interest-free advances against next year’s bonuses. That way, you should eventually recover most of the overpayments without demanding staff find money that’s probably already spent.
How do you know an online review is sincere?
We’ll assume you’re asking because you suspect a rival is padding its Yelp page, not because you’d ever consider doing anything so unethical (and illegal in some states).
Based on Yelp’s own data-driven research, fake reviews tend to stand out because of the following:
- The glowing testimonial belongs to a newly created account with no history of reviews.
- There’s an overabundance of first-person pronouns or mentions of who the person was with (“my husband,” “my family”).
- The review features strings of empty adjectives extolling the general unadulterated awesomeness of the store.
- The reviewer goes overboard with detailed descriptions of product or service features.
- There is the existence of terms and phrases that business owners, rather than shoppers, would likely use, such as “great customer service” or “their industry-leading prototype bridal display.”
Bottom line: It’s surprisingly difficult to fake sincerity.
