Help Customers to Know You and Your Product
As part of developing your marketing and advertising plan you should be dedicated to how you will establish your greeting card niche and how to find and define your target customer.

A niche can be described like this; instead of advertising yourself as a greeting card designer why not target a specific niche like dog and cat greeting cards.

You could specialize in these areas and cater for all the dog and cat lovers out there. This means that you will define in your marketing and/or advertising plan how you will marketing or sell to your target customer.

By creating a plan to sell, you not only gain focus in knowing your target customer, but you also gain knowledge by creating a baseline plan from which all of your sales can be measured and the plan adjusted whenever it needs to be.

• Some of the most important methods for establishing your niche in the marketing are by:
• Keeping a list or database of potential customers, referrals, and customers.
• Regularly contacting your potential customers, referrals, and customers of new releases, specials, or new services.
• Regularly updating your customer list or database whenever a potential customer, referral, or customer enters the shop, logs in to your web site, or gives his/her mailing address information for a catalog.
• Send customers a newsletter or catalog by mail or Internet showing new cards and coupons they can use in the store.

Let customers know of seasonal sales and events.

Keeping a List or Database of Customers

A list, spreadsheet, or database of customers does not have to be very difficult to put together. It really depends upon how often and for what reasons you want to contact your customers.

For instance, if you want to send birthday cards to your customers, you will need to collect the month and day of their birthday.

In the meantime, keep it simple. In your physical storefront, provide a guest sign-in book where the customers can sign their name and specify if they want information mailed or emailed to them.

If you want to have a little more discipline in seeing who accesses your web site or online catalog, you can have your web site created allowing access to several user roles.

All customers would have to log on to the site with their user role logon ID and password. The user role logon ID would define the areas of the site to which the customer has access.

For example, the user roles could be potential customers or guest logons, customers or member logons, and referral customers or temporary member logons. In your online storefront, referral customers would be given a link to the site, which has the logon ID of the member who referred them to the site.

A frequent customer wanting to refer a potential customer to your web site would simply send the potential customer a link that you give him.

The potential customer would see everything that a regular customer would see on the web site. When the potential customer accesses the web site using that link, all orders placed are tracked to the referring customer.

This is often a good method to use when you want to provide incentives to existing customers who bring in new business. You can track the number of orders they bring in with new customers and reward them later.

Perhaps give them a percentage off their next order or even a free order. Providing a defined reward structure is the key.

This kind of work is a little more difficult to add to a web site, but, with the right help, it can really add professionalism and a variety of incentives to your customers.

Just want to finish up by leaving you with a great animal video greeting card. Enjoy.

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