My Monthly Charity for December 2008 is the Make-A-Wish Foundation.  The Make-A-Wish Foundation helps make wishes come true for children with life threatening diseases.  Founded in 1980 it started when Chris Greicius had his wish come true to become a police officer and from then on it’s grown worldwide, making wishes come true everyday.

“We grant the wishes of children with life-threatening medical conditions to enrich the human experience with hope, strength and joy.” – Make-A-Wish Foundation Mission Statement

The Make-A-Wish Foundation uses the power of a wish to bring hope in tough times for kids and the people around them.   Through a gracious group of volunteers of more than 25,000 people the foundation is able to provide services as wish granters, fundraisers, aids in special events and many other things that help make wishes come true.

In the spirit of the holidays I hope to help make a child’s wish come true by writing about the Make-A-Wish Foundation this month and making a donation.  Help make a wish come true at Wish.org.

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When you run a business it’s probably a good idea to monitor your competitors.  Direct competitors are out take market share from you and knowing what they are doing is important to stay competitive or take a competitive advantage.  If you’re not monitoring your competition you can bet your competitors are monitoring you.

What brings me to this post is a recent newsletter that we sent out for Detailed Image to push our gift certificate promotion we ran since November. The gift certificate promotion was that you get a 20% bonus gift certificate in January when you buy a gift certificate through Christmas.  As our final holiday season push we sent the newsletter exclusively promoting gift certificates on December 21, 2008.  I’m subscribed to a number of our competitor’s newsletters and the next day I received a newsletter from one of our top competitors, which I will leave unnamed, with a strikingly similar promotion.  Given that gift certificates are probably the last thing you promote for Christmas as an ecommerce store, it was the bonus gift certificate that they were offering with gift certificate purchases that made me think they ran the promotion because of us.

As far as I know the promotion our competitor ran was a new one they started the day after we sent our gift certificate newsletter. The similarities in the two promotions were uncanny.  The first similarity that I noticed was the newsletter title.  Our main title was “The Perfect Last Minute Gift” compared to “It’s not too late for the perfect gift!”.  Next I noticed the “Free Bonus Certificate for you!” in their newsletter compared to us calling it the “Bonus Gift Certificate”.  It could very well be that these promotions were just a coincident and that we just sent ours out a day earlier, but because we’ve had this promotion running since November makes me think not.

Part of running a business is knowing what you’re competitors are doing so you can take the necessary actions to stay competitive. There are times you must react to what your competitors are doing so not to fall behind. What our competitor did could very well be a reaction to what we did and that’s pretty cool that our 4 person company is being noticed by a leader in the industry.

This gives me confidence we’re moving in the right direction as Detailed Image has made leaps and bounds in progress in selling detailing products in just a few years and our competitors know we’re coming on strong.

Once again if you’re not monitoring your competition, they’re probably monitoring you.  Here are just a few ways that we monitor our competitors:

• Subscribing to competitors newsletters and RSS feeds
• Google Alerts
• Visiting our competitors site
• Staying active in forum communities

Of course our techniques are geared towards internet businesses but for the most part almost all businesses are probably online one way or another. The interent has made monitoring your competition relatively simple with  numerous portals to get your information.

They’re watching you.  Are you watching them?

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Last Thursday parts of the Northeast were hit by a nasty ice storm. There was an estimated 300,000 homes and businesses that lost power. Fortunately I didn’t lose power for a long. I only lost power temporarily while they shut down power to fix a power line in my backyard. I was actually outside when there was a huge flash of light in backyard when the power line went down. Anyways there were quite a few areas that were declared a state of emergency and the great Northeast winter is here to wreak havoc at a very important retail shopping time.

At Pure Adapt we weren’t able to ship that Firday but luckily the storm didn’t affect any Christmas shipping deadlines. There were many other businesses that didn’t fare as well. Especially during this peak of holiday shopping time, this has to be one of the worst times to have a power outage. I saw places like Kmart and Bed Bath and Beyond that went into the weekend without electricity. I don’t even want to imagine what the revenue loss would be to lose a full holiday weekend for a business that thrive a good holiday season. I’m pretty sure there are still places that still don’t have electricity and it’s been a week, so that’s got o really tough for those businesses bottom lines.

Mother Nature can be ruthless but the beauty of Mother Nature at the same time can be breathtaking. I headed to the warehouse that Saturday and I thought I was driving through a winter wonderland. The storm was over but it stayed cold enough where the ice stayed frozen on the trees. While I was driving I was like I got take the camera from work and snap some pictures. Check out some of the ice storm pictures I took.

It was a beautiful scene that the storm left behind but it was also disastrous for some. Mother Nature will always be a force to be reckoned with and sometimes it’s just a reminder of the things we take for granted. Have a safe winter.

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The holiday shopping season is a very important time of year for most retailers and some even solely survive off this time. This year at Pure Adapt we were prepared to take it head on and make the most out of it. Early preparation and research gave us a great start to the holiday shopping season.

With the vast amount information out there on holiday marketing, I was able to gather lots of great information to take into account and implement into our own holiday marketing plan. These are some of the most important things that I’ve learned.

Start Early
Stats from 2007 showed that an estimated 37% of people started their holiday shopping before the end of October. This makes it very important to plan your holiday marketing early and having it ready for implementation. We started our holiday promotions in mid Novemeber to push customers to shop early and save big by giving them 25% off with no minimum.

Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is very important to retailers because for the most part this is the official start to the holiday shopping season. As an online retailer we were able to take advantage of the being open for the holiday so it made sense to start our Thanksgiving and holiday promotions on Thanksgiving. The entire Thanksgiving weekend is also very important because consumers expect great deals that weekend so your holiday marketing should take that in account and have some of your best promotions running. This is a big retail weekend with Thanksgiving, Black Friday through to Cyber Monday.

Cyber Monday
Cyber Monday is known to be the online shopping day to get great deals like the Black Friday for brick and mortar stores. As an online retailer we made sure to differentiate this day and offer additional specials for our customers on top of what we were doing the rest of the weekend. Slowly as online shopping continues to grow more people are also aware of Cyber Monday, making even more important for the upcoming years.

Free Shipping
In tough economic times like we are in this year, free shipping is all the more important. Consumers are doing more and more research online before they buy and if they can get free shipping on the product at a comparable price they’re likely to buy. We prepared early for this through SEO and implemented a full fledge shipping promotion for the entire month of December with free shipping on orders over $150 and $5 flat rate shipping on all other orders of course some restrictions apply.

Email Marketing
Email marketing has become an important part of my job and our marketing strategy. We have been running thorough newsletter campaigns this year and it’s been paying off. Newsletters are very cost effective with your own in house email list and has become a top marketing strategy as businesses try to cut cost.

Mondays
What is so special about Mondays? Well starting with Cyber Monday and the rest of the Mondays until Christmas, it has shown significant growth in revenue for online retailers. Mondays have become the day to shop online so it’s important to take advantage of these days and plan your some of your marketing around Monday. We’ve taken the approach to getting newsletters and announcing promotions on Sundays to push sales on Monday.

Site Reviews
The internet is becoming all the more important to consumers for research before they buy. Reviews are a great way to keep customers active and on your site. We recently added our own review system that’s been working pretty well.

Gift Cards
Gift cards are great gifts but even greater for the last minute shoppers. We offer gift certificates right through email that you can print and this makes it the ultimate last minute gift that you can even buy on Christmas day. For us gift certificates will be the final holiday push before Christmas.

Last Day for Shipping
Being an online retailer it is very important to know when the last day for shipping is and let your customers know that. This year December 17th is probably the last day for standard shipping for most but we’re even going to take it one step further by providing a Fedex map to give customers a better estimate of the last day to ship based on where the package is going. This day is also important take into account because depending what day Thanksgiving lies on, this day will give the time frame which you need to squeeze the bulk of your holiday marketing into. Thanksgiving came late this year and based on the December 17th date, it comes out to 21 days of online shopping compared to 32 in 2007.

That’s a lot information that we were able to take advantage of and hopefully taking all it into account gave us a slight edge but we won’t know till we take a good look at the numbers when the holiday season is over. I’m optimistic that we did a good job on our holiday marketing this year, but we can always do better right. When we analyze the numbers we’re already taking our first steps in preparing for the 2009 holiday season and I already can’t wait. This holiday season is starting to wind down and we’re coming down to our final marketing push before Christmas and I hope to finish strong.

I also want to wish everyone a
safe and happy holiday season!

Sources:
http://www.getelastic.com/free-holiday-email-marketing-resources/

http://www.shop.org/web/guest/industryinfo/shoporgresources

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The biggest retail weekend of the year has just passed and we nailed it with a monster weekend in sales. Taking a proactive approach this year along with some research we were able to implement a quality marketing plan to seize the weekend. The numbers speak for themselves cause we shipped out about 120 orders today compared to our previous biggest weekend of 75. That was just the weekend, as Cyber Monday winds down we also killed it on this big online retail day. Check the picture out of how many packages we shipped out today.

This is just the beginning of the holiday retail season and we got a long way to go. Hopefully we keep the sales going and finish the year strong. I got to say it’s been one heck of a day today and tomorrow is going to be no different, I’m out for the night.

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