Helping the Garden Industry Thrive
Most catalogers are familiar with square inch analysis, commonly referred to as SQUINCH. Calculating the percentage of space each product occupies on the catalog page and comparing it to the percentage of sales generated provides many marketing insights. For instance, SQUINCH analysis points to:
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One last thought from the book on business blogging that I’ve mentioned before, Naked Conversations. From authors Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, thoughts on whether blogging is a revolutionary phenomenon for businesses: (Click headline for more…)
Being an entrepreneur can be a lonely business. Small business owners need to know a lot about many things – not just producing their product, but marketing, advertising, bookkeeping, financing, customer service, fulfillment, and more. It helps to bounce ideas off other entrepreneurs who have some understanding of your business, but few business owners have that luxury. (Click headline for more…)
The October 2008 issue of Catalog Success carried an interesting profile of Peter Cobb, the founder of eBags. (If you’re not familiar with eBags, have a look – it’s an impressive website selling 36,000 handbags, totebags, briefcases, backpacks and more.)
Four years ago, eBags tried expanding into the shoe business, only to find that it took them too far afield from their core competency. After selling the shoe portion of the business, they recognized that they could still take advantage of a synergy with that industry. They teamed up with Shoes.com to produce a joint catalog. Half the book offers eBags products, the other half offers Shoes.com merchandise. Customers of eBags receive a catalog with eBags on the front, Shoes.com on the back. For Shoes.com customers, the covers are reversed. A remarkably clever idea, I thought!
The idea reminded me of Kip Creel’s suggestion mentioned in our July 23 blog post for online nurseries to team up with garden centers.
What companies does your business have a synergy with? Is co-venturing a way to cut your costs and expand your business?
This morning, as I was preoccupied with a problem that had sprung up, an email came in. I didn’t recognize the “from” name. The subject read DON’T FORGET!!! Never mind the fact that it was totally blind and offered no benefit, the caps and exclamation points added to my pre-existing annoyance. I opened the email anyway, and the bold red and black graphics and huge type shouted at me. Not finding an opt-out option, I hit “Reply” and shot back Take me off your mailing list!!
No sooner did I hit “Send”… (Click on headline for more…)
I was just asked a question about the difference between blogs and enewsletters.
Enewsletters help nurture relationships by give customers and prospects positive reinforcement for opening your emails by giving them something of value. Blogs are more effective as a prospecting tool because of the way they help boost search engine rankings.
Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, authors of Naked Conversations, explain it this way: (Click headline for more…)
When I launched the Let’s Grow Blog just over 3 months ago, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was anticipating a steady, gradual increase in search engine traffic, and that’s indeed happening. What I didn’t foresee were other benefits, both for Evergreen Marketing and our clients. For instance: (Click on the headline for more)
While working on the next snail mail edition of the Let’s Grow newsletter, I did some trolling for good examples of email signup boxes. They were surprisingly difficult to find. Here were three that stood out:
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For a while now, I’ve been enjoying reading The Blogging Nurseryman, which Trey Pitsenberger of Golden Gecko Nursery Center in Garden Valley, CA has been writing faithfully for the last three years. Trey recently started an interesting discussion group on LinkedIn titled Garden Centers, Nurseries and New Media. While the group is geared more towards independent garden centers than the catalogers and online merchants we work with, many topics affect all of us in the gardening industry. Discussion threads include Scotts’ desire to sell Smith & Hawken, the role of big box stores, and what we can learn from Hines Nursery’s recent bankruptcy, among others.
The discussion group is just a couple months old, and membership appears to be growing rapidly. Members include a wide range of professionals, including garden center owners, catalogers, wholesalers, editors, writers and service providers. To learn more about, read Trey’s description or jump right in and join the LinkedIn group. Hats off to you, Trey, for opening the lines of communication among industry members!
I called a client early one morning last week, and was greeted with “I can’t talk now. We had a break-in last night and they took a load of computers.” Not surprisingly, what should have been the easiest part – restoring the data – turned out to be much harder than replacing the actual computers. Even with insurance, the cost in both time and money is pretty huge.
For some time, I’ve been using an automatic online backup system called backup.com. At midnight every night (users select the specific time), it automatically backs up whatever files I’ve specified on every computer that is running. More than once, I’ve used backup.com to recover files that I’ve inadvertently modified or deleted. And even if there’s a fire or theft, data is easily retrieved since it’s off-site.
Rates vary depending on the amount of storage required, but are quite reasonable. A friend recently recommended a similar service, Carbonite, which may be even more affordable for some users.
