Daily Jewelry Retail Tips from Jewelers of America

Sell like a Kindergartner

More than two decades ago, Robert Fulgum’s popular book of essays, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, got adults thinking about the importance of those early life lessons. Echoing Fulgum’s philosophy, Jewelry Information Center’s Helena Krodel notes that in this economy, with all the worry, it is easy to overlook basics of good business.

Krodel offers tips on how to sell jewelry like a kindergartner:

Represent Your Brand In the Best Light On Camera, Part 3

Over the last couple of days, we’ve discussed how to look the part when it comes to television interviews. Today, we offer tips on how to convey your message (your brand or store, the beauty of jewelry, and your main points) in the most compelling way. Jewelry Information Center’s Amanda Gizzi says that before you utter one word, think about how your style of speaking can impact an interview.

She provides the following suggestions for a smooth interview:

Represent Your Brand In the Best Light On Camera, Part 2

When you have the opportunity to appear on television, what you wear -- from your wardrobe to your jewelry -- is critical, but the wrong body language can undermine even the most carefully prepared outfits. Today, in part two of a three-part series on TV appearance preparation, Amanda Gizzi of Jewelry Information Center shares tips on how to enhance your appearance with body language.

Gizzi provides the following tips for the best onscreen body language:

Represent Your Brand In the Best Light On Camera, Part 1

Taking part in a television interview -- whether for a local, regional or national program -- can provide great exposure. Showing your store or brand in a positive light is all in the presentation. Jewelry Information Center’s Amanda Gizzi says you must consider what you wear, your body language and how you speak.

We’ll break down all three, starting today with Gizzi's suggestions for camera-ready wardrobe and appearance:

Give Customers What They Really Want

Even in good times, knowing what your customers want is a key to your success. When the going gets rough, it becomes critical.

In the New York Times “Tool Kit,” Paul B. Brown shares expert ideas on how to get inside your customer’s minds, like:

Custom-Made Events: Part II

In a recent "Custom-Made Events" Tip, we featured creative event ideas from “Running Successful In-Store Events,” an America’s Best Jewelers workshop held during Jewelry Market Week in Las Vegas. Jewelers on the panel session also shared ideas on promoting and tracking events.

Take the following tips from successful retailers to get the most out of your in-store events:

Print Advertising 101: Design Your Ad

In "Print Advertising 101," Jewelers of America’s Associate Director of Marketing and Communications Molly Fallon gave expert tips on how to make the most of your advertising budget in print publications. She continues her advertising tips with advice on how to make the most effective ad design, while watching costs.

Use these tips to design a professional, and profit-making, advertisement:

Print Advertising 101

Print isn’t dead! In fact, print advertising can be a very effective marketing tool when properly executed. Plus, it’s more affordable than other types of traditional advertising, such as radio or television. That’s key when you’re watching costs but still want to get your message out there.

Molly Fallon, Jewelers of America’s Associate Director of Marketing and Communications, offers some basic tips for buying print ads to help increase your brand awareness and boost your business:

Custom-Made Events

Events are great way to get customers into your store and build relationships, but how can you make your events stand out? The America’s Best Jewelers workshop “Running Successful In-Store Events,” held during Jewelry Market Week in Las Vegas, provided ideas for unique in-store events. The overriding message from jewelers was to tailor events based on brands, a store’s location and their own interests. 

Use these custom-made events from the seminar as inspiration for your next customer-centric event:

Get Started on Facebook 101: Put Your Best Face(book) Forward

More and more retail jewelers are capitalizing on the Facebook  phenomenon, as the social networking website continues to grow faster than the speed of light. In “Retail Jewelers Can Sell on Facebook,” JCK Magazine Senior Editor Rob Bates shares insight from jewelers who are making the most of their Facebook Pages.

Use these tips, from Facebook-savvy retailers, to market your store on Facebook and reach more customers:

Get Started on Facebook 101: The Terminology

As jewelry retailers look for ways to reach new customers, online media must be a focus of their marketing efforts. The recent tip, “Get Started on Facebook 101: Build Your Company Page,” showed retailers how to set up a business-friendly Facebook Page. Once you’ve entered the Facebook  frontier, there can be a language learning curve.

Use our Facebook Terminology Primer for key terms to help you find your way as you explore Facebook:

Get Started on Facebook 101: Build Your Company Page

You want to reach more customers, faster and stay connected to them once you’ve found them. Facebook, the ever-popular social-networking website, has become a go-to web venue for businesses looking to expand their brand. Yet even for the most tech-savvy business owners, getting set up on the site can be daunting at first. Over the next few days, we’ll share Facebook tips to get you started without breaking a sweat.

Your timing couldn’t be better. Facebook recently made it even easier for brands and companies to connect with their target customers through their “Pages” feature. According to Inside Facebook, the updated version of the Pages feature has “the potential to … [reach] your customers in a very authentic, powerful, and extremely targeted way.”

Jewelers of America’s Communications Manager Lauren Thompson provides a simple seven-step process to set up a business-friendly Facebook Page:

Marketing in a Recession

Like most companies, you’re still dealing with the realities of the economic turndown, even if things may be on an upturn. In “In a Recession, Put Everyone in Marketing,” Rosabeth Moss Kanter notes that when you can’t cut anymore, you have to leverage the creativity of your employees. 

Use these tips, from the article on Hardvardbusiness.org, to find creative ways to continue making savings in your business:

Speak Effectively for Your Brand

Becoming an effective spokesperson for your store takes work, but the effort can be worth it when you garner free and positive publicity for your business. But before you step in front of the cameras or give a pithy quote, Jewelry Information Center’s Amanda Gizzi says you must prepare.

Use these rules from JIC to prepare as you get ready for your “close-up”:

Heat Up Sales in Spring and Summer with Rubies

Often referred to as the “King of Gems”, ruby is one of the most popular colored gemstones today. It’s certainly the most popular red gem among consumers.  Spring and summer months bring an increased opportunities to sell this beautiful stone: ruby is a favorite alternative gem for the center stone in engagement rings; and July babies are lucky to be able to claim ruby as their birthstone.

One of the most successful approaches is to combine romance and lore with product knowledge and gemological information. The technique will almost always lead to increased sales of rubies.

Take these tips, from David Peters, of Jewelers of America, to help raise your customer’s awareness and desire for rubies:

Turn Trends into Transactions

The economic downturn has meant jewelers must buy smarter and better than ever before. At her JCK Las Vegas session, “JCK Style: What’s Hot and Why You Should Care,” Jewelry Information Center spokesperson Helena Krodel will provide much needed insight on how to turn hot trends into transactions for your store. 

To prepare to buy right, and for the right trends, Krodel says to consider key fashion influencers, such as:

Get Featured in Gift Guides

It’s not too early to start thinking about the holiday selling season. One way to gain traction during the holidays is to get your products mentioned in Gift Guides. From major media outlets to local newspapers and blogs, consumers turn to these guides for ideas on what to buy during the season.

Over at Small Business Trends, Margie Zable Fisher says many media outlets have early deadlines for gift catalogues, so now is the time to start planning.

Small Business Trends offers these tips on how to get free publicity from these important gift guides:

Put Your Jewelry Store Online

Today’s consumer is more open to the buying online than ever before. Consider this statistic found in a survey by Forrester Research and Shop.org: U.S. online retail sales rose an average of 11% in the first three months of 2009. That trend is sure to continue, as people choose to shop in ways that are most convenient for them, whether in person or on the web.

Whether you’re just getting started -- or want to revamp your existing site -- Jewelers of America’s resident education and management expert David Peters offers advice on entering the e-world of opportunity:

Don’t Complain, Create Jewelry Sales!

Are you and your staff being proactive and creating sales opportunities, or standing around complaining that business has dried up? In his “At the Counter” column for National Jeweler magazine, Doug Fleener asks, “When sales are slow, do you complain or create?” Fleener says the days of the easy sale are over.

You and your staff need to step up to the plate and create sales in the following ways:

Protect Your Reputation Online

In the jewelry business, reputation is everything. As you expand your business online, are you doing enough to protect your reputation in the world “wild” web? You need to be certain that the same high standards you apply to your store are being applied to your online business.

In Small Business Trends’ “Top 10 Ways to Save Your Online Reputation in 2009,”  Janet Meiners Thaeler offers of-the-moment insight on how your online reputation can be fragile -- with web features like negative customer reviews that spread quickly and can live online for years. “Today one angry customer can tarnish a company’s reputation for years,” she writes. 

Here are some of her top tips to help you proactively protect your jewelry-business reputation online:

Drive Online Visitors to Your Off-Line Location

Do you make it easy for customers to contact you through your website? If users need a degree from M.I.T. to figure out how to email, call or visit your store, it’s time to rework your “Contact” page. There’s no point in investing a lot in your Internet presence, if customers have a hard time reaching you through your site. In “Make Your ‘Contact Us’ Page User-Friendly,” Megan Morris of MyBusinessMag.com shares ideas on ensuring your information is accessible.

Tips on how to improve customer accessibility to your store online:

Celebrate Mom

Mother’s Day is just around the corner and what better way to celebrate then by holding a “Mom’s Appreciation” event in your store.

Tips to hold a Mother’s Day event that thrives:

Tips in Action: Retailers Who Thrive

Increase Exposure and Sales with Cause Marketing
Jeweler Debbie Fox, co-owner, Fox Fine Jewelry, Ventura, CA, shows how

The news of job layoffs, housing foreclosures and the overall economic downturn dominate the media. But some jewelers have found a way to address those realities in a positive way. Jewelers of America-member store Fox Fine Jewelry in Ventura, CA, has led by example. Over the Valentine’s Day holiday, owner Debbie Fox assembled a group of 46 independent jewelers nationwide -- through Independent Jewelers Organization -- to give away 200 sterling-silver necklaces to people who lost their jobs or homes.

Wish Upon a (Customer) Wish List

One of the best tools a jeweler has in their arsenal is a customer Wish List. It not only enables targeted marketing, but couples it with customer buy-in, a huge advantage in the sales process. In “Customer ‘Wish Lists’ Prove Versatile Tools,” Joseph Dobrian of National Jeweler explores the ways that jewelers use lists to drive business.

Dobrian’s ideas on how to gather and use wish lists:

Reach Out to Customers on a Personal Level

A study of the last recession found that sales people reduced time spent contacting customers by 38%. David Peters, Jewelers of America’s resident education and management expert, says that drop off was a huge missed opportunity for retailers. Those who continued to reach out to customers were able to outperform their competitors.

Peters shares the following insights on why you should reach out to customers now more than ever:

Research Your Customers for Optimum Outreach Results

Your business success depends on the customer and fulfilling their needs. It’s critical to keep this in mind, despite the downturn. “Improving customer focus is the key to achieving the kind of efficiencies that the current economy demands,” says David Diamond, president of strategic marketing consultancy David Diamond Associates. Diamond’s marketing strategies are covered in the Smart Reply Benchmarking Series White Paper, “5 Success Strategies to Grow Your Business Right Now.”

In order to develop a marketing profile that predicts customers’ needs, Smart Reply suggests mining your customer data to uncover:

Strengthen Your Brand

According to Interbrand Design Forum’s report on “The Most Valuable U.S. Retail Brands 2009”, brands are even more important during a recession. The report states that the brand accounts for 25% of the decision to shop at a particular store, and the trend toward large and impersonal retail spaces has been upended by stores with “more emotion, creativity and community.” As a retail jeweler, you have a distinct advantage when it comes to all three; it’s just a matter of capitalizing on them through your branding efforts.

David Peters, Jewelers of America’s resident education and management expert, says you must work hard to brand not only your company, but also its products and services.

Peters suggests the following action items to achieve successful branding:

Use Marketing Ideas from America’s Best Jewelers

The next wave of holidays (including Easter, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day) and milestone events (like graduations) will be here before you know it, so it’s important to keep your marketing in front of existing and potential customers.
During a panel session on marketing during National Jeweler’s America’s Best Jewelers (ABJ) Retail Benchmarking Symposium, jewelers shared ideas on getting customers into their stores and buying.

Try these successful marketing ideas from ABJ panelists:

Don’t Focus On Price -- Increase Your Value Proposition

It’s tempting in the current environment to focus solely on price. While it’s wise to offer your customers choice, make sure your business remains value-driven.

Jewelers of America’s resident education and management expert David Peters notes that when you sell for price, your customers respond by buying for price. These clients won’t be loyal to your store; they’ll be loyal to your discounts.

Peters offers the following ideas for keeping the spotlight on value and increasing your personal value as a professional:

Keep Marketing on Target

Since you can’t be everything to every customer, Tom Shay of Profits Plus says it’s essential to define your target customer. While it may be tempting right now to cut back on targeted marketing, Shay says that strategy is short sighted.

He offers some ideas on how you can continue thriving with your target consumers: