Stan Golomb died a few ago but his ideas, energy, enthusiasm, and stubbornness still inspire me. Stan worked with drycleaners for many years, helping them through incentive programs, games, postcard mailings, and innovative marketing techniques to “Find, Capture, and Keep Customers” (the title of one of Stan’s books).
I was reminded of Stan recently while watching Elizabeth Edwards describe how she would continue to campaign with her husband despite stage 4 breast cancer. Stan Golomb battled heart disease much of his adult life (he even had a heart transplant at age 63!) but despite poor health he always made business fun, exciting, and profitable.
Here are a few of the marketing lessons I learned from Stan Golomb:
• If you have a bricks and mortar business, think of your market area the way a farmer thinks of his fields:
1. Calculate your yield (of customers) per acre. Find out how many people live in the neighborhoods surrounding your business and how many of those people are potential customers.
2. Do some test marketing to decide which fields best support your product.
3, Use mapping and demographics to find your best customers and continue to advertise to those customers.
• People love games and gimmicks. For drycleaners, Sam ran “jackpot” programs, “blackjack” programs, and “silver eagle” programs. In the blackjack program, when you went to the drycleaner, you rubbed off a spot on a postcard you received in the mail to see what hand you had. Various hands had different discounts. An 18 received 10% discount, a blackjack a whopping 40% discount.
• Stan counseled drycleaners to collect birthday information on all their customers…and then reward their customers on their birthdays.
Stan constantly would find new ways for his clients (and drycleaners throughout the country signed up for Stan’s programs) to keep in contact with their customers through direct mail and in-store advertising.
The incident that most touched me was a plan Stan concocted for keeping in touch with people after his death. About a week after Stan died, I received a letter. The one line letter said simply, “Thank you for being my friend.” It was signed “Stan Golomb.”
Stan was an inspiration, a mentor, and one heck of a friend. Of all the books I have in my personal library, my most treasured book is the autographed copy of Find, Capture and Keep Customers by Stan Golomb. For those of us who knew him, we were blessed. For those of us who were able to work with him, we were fortunate, for those of us he taught, we were very very lucky. We miss you Stan, and thank you for being our friend.
Sounds like Stan knew what all great marketers know and something I enjoy helping folks develop…the critical importance of an effective ‘keep in touch’ campaign. See, you guys are still talking about it even now.
I love how he shared his creative marketing ideas with others in his industry all over the country…that’s leverage! That’s something we all can do.
I’m frequently amazed as I find how many small business owners really know their own ‘stuff’ but they don’t know marketing. It’s fun to see the light bulbs come on when we talk over some very simple but powerful ideas!
I read Stan’s book “The Entrepreneurs Club” about a year ago and I really enjoyed it. I work with retailers a lot and like Becki Maxson says in the comment above, the ideas are so simple but yet so profound to most retailers.
It amazes me how many business owners get excited about the concepts of keeping in touch with their customers etc, but fall down completely when it comes to the very first part – capturing their customers names, addresses and email.
Has anyone any suggestions or ways to get them to do this?
From reading Stan’s material I would say he was a really nice guy.
Regards
John
I own a small Christian bookstore in northern New York. I have a computer with point of sale software in it. I have gotten customer names a few different ways.
1) I ask them when I make the sale if they are in my computer datebase. If they say “no” I ask them if they want to be. I haven’t had anyone refuse yet! Adding customers to my particular point of sale takes only a minute.
2) Years ago I had a guest book. I had a sign that said if you wanted to be on my mailing list, you should sign the guest book. Many did.
3) I get customers names and addresses from those who pay by check.
4) I ocassionally hold drawings for free product. Customers filling out the entry form put their name and address. I also ask them for their phone number so I can call them if they win.
There are other ways I’m sure to capture peoples names and addresses, but these few have worked well for me. In addition I also send out a thank you card to everyone who is a first time customer in my store. People have called or come in just to thank me for the card. Hope these few suggestions help.
In reply to Jon from Ireland, here is a link to a download from my web site for you.
http://www.dcadshop.com/tinyurl/1n
The download is for a new customer form I used in my own drycleaning shop to capture contact information from customers. I trained my staff to use form whenever we created a new customer in our point of sale system. When the customer returned to pick up their order, we captured the rest of the contact information we needed to complete the customer file. This led to my fascination to data mining and customer relationship marketing, and a 16 year relationship with Stan himself.
Another method we use is encouraging customers to fill in a form on out web site. You can see an example of a web site designed to build an email list at http://www.reginadoc.com
Feel free to contact me via the web sites above if you want more methods to gather customer contact information, I have more techniques to share.
Hi Wendy and Darcy. Thanks for your help. I will certainly try some of the ideas you mentioned and I’ll vist your website Darcy.
I’m a bit busy the next few days as I’m getting ready to attend the 2007 Marketing & Moneymaking Super-Conference in Chicago, but I’ll give you feedback after I return.
Thanks again.
John