The JA Report: News, Tips & Trends from Jewelers of America

Understand Email Marketing: Build the List, and They’ll Come

To fully capitalize on the power and importance of email marketing, you must have a current customer email list. Without it, even the best content will vanish into cyberspace.

David Peters, Jewelers of America’s resident education and management expert, offers the following tips to build your essential email list:

Understand Email Marketing: Good Content and Design

Nowadays, email is the preferred method of communication for many consumers. In terms of reaching your customers, it is also cost effective, immediate and measurable, says David Peters, Jewelers of America’s resident education and management expert. Rather than being intimidated by the technology, he says you must use email marketing effectively reach out -- through newsletters, invitations and special announcements -- and grab the attention of both current and potential customers.

Peters shares the following tips on effective newsletter design and content:

Use Customer-Centric Marketing

The game has changed and, unless your business is able to adjust to the times, you’ll find yourself on the sidelines -- or worse -- out of it. Today’s consumer is more knowledgeable. He or she expects more when it comes to information, service and convenience.

Your marketing must be customer-centric, according to Deloitte , you can achieve this through:

Build a Twitter Presence

More and more jewelry companies are discovering the power of Twitter, the social networking site that embraces brevity (messages are limited to 140 characters). But if you’re just getting used to the Facebook phenomena, getting started on Twitter can be disconcerting. Over at JCK Online, Robyn Hawk shares tips to help you establish “Twitter Gems”.

If you've set up a Twitter feed, take these tips to get started:

Analyze From the Inside

In looking to where your business needs to go (and grow), outside factors like the economy can have an impact, but you also have to look within. As we've noted earlier, identifying your strengths and weaknesses is a critical component of success. David Peters, Jewelers of America’s resident education and management expert, says you must put your business under a microscope.

Peters recommends taking the following steps to analyze your business:

Increase Your Diamond Inventory, Not Your Overhead

In this tough economic climate, retailers have found that offering customers a “virtual" inventory of diamonds and finished goods is becoming a key component in keeping their doors open. It’s especially important as suppliers set stricter and stricter terms -- dictated to them by the banks – which force retailers to come up with new ways of doing business. This often means having fewer diamonds and diamond-heavy memo products on hand  -- which can mean less sales.

The good news is that technology can offer inventory alternatives to retailers.  For example, retailers now have the ability to include the endless diamond inventory available on the Internet on their own websites. Consumers can view these diamonds at their leisure -- or in your store with the assistance of sales staff. This new technology offers you a complete diamond business without the overhead of carrying a sizable diamond inventory.

Larry Chasin, President & CEO of Ideal Diamond Solutions, offers the following tips on selling diamonds the “virtual” way, without sacrificing personal relationships:

Update Your Store's Information Systems

In this time of accelerated change -- where information goes global in a blink of an eye -- you need to be sure that your business' information systems can keep pace. Jewelers of America’s resident education and management expert David Peters notes that technology -- while critical -- is not the only component to a store's successful information system. He says information systems are made up of any process that involves the gathering, screening, analyzing and use of information that may affect your business.

Peters shares the following tips to update your information gathering processes:

Selling Luxury in a Recession | BNET

Great insight into luxury marketing strategies from BNET.com:

These are the worst of times to be marketing a luxury brand. So how do you keep your customers paying top-shelf prices when they’re thinking through each purchase more carefully than ever before? Starbucks, the Morgans Hotel Group (formerly Ian Schrager Hotels), and Mercedes all believe they have what it takes to be one of those three. They are rewarding their most loyal customers with free products, continuing to advertise when their competitors are cutting budgets, and avoiding the worst temptation of all: discounts. In this economic atmosphere, they’re finding, appealing to people’s logic rather than their emotions seems to work best. You have to help your customers work through their fears and find clear intellectual reasons to spend more for your product than for anyone else’s. That reason always exists; the art of downturn marketing is getting consumers to see it.

Click here for full tip: www.bnet.com

Boost Diamond Sales This Holiday

Diamond jewelry sales will be a key component for jewelry retailers this holiday season and all of 2009. While the tail end of a recession doesn’t promise huge numbers, in “How to sell diamonds during a down economy” National Jeweler’s Michelle Graff shares expert tips on how retailers can “shake off the ghosts of holidays past and focus on what it is going to take to sell diamond jewelry.”

Graff spoke to both retailers and experts including Jewelers of America’s David Peters, to come up with some key tips for boosting diamond sales this season. Among the advice offered:

Analyze Your Website

To make the most of your website, you need to measure its effectiveness. Knowledge of things like what’s working, where your visitors are coming from, and what they view, can help you maximize your return on investment, writes Mikal E. Belicove in “Analyzing the Analytics.”

Web analytics -- applications that collect site data and present information in an easy-to-understand format -- provide valuable insight. In particular, Belicove says you can use web analytics to identify and fix any obstacles to converting visitors into actual customers.

He offers the following tips to help you start using web analytics to improve your website ROI:

Meeting Motivation

It’s the time of year to prep your staff for the all-important holiday season. Do your staff meetings motivate your employees, or are they a dull waste of time? At MyBusinessMag.com, Karen Haywood Queen shares ideas on how to make your meetings matter.

Use these meeting tips to most successfully prepare staff for holiday selling season: