Long before I read Free Prize Inside by Seth Godin, I believed in the power of attracting interest by giving something away. In this, and future, blogs, I will write about using Free Prize Marketing to generate buzz.
The first story I would like to tell is a personal one. In 1995, when I was twenty years old and very new to business, my mother and I opened a consignment shop. It was the first business I owned. We were in a poor location, in a little 900 square feet unit of a seven unit mini mall. There was not enough parking and everyone raced their cars to beat the red light directly in front of the shop.
On Saturday’s we normally made about $200 – $300 dollars. We often ran sales with no real measurable increase in profits. Somewhere along the way we started to get customer’s names and contact information. We called it a preferred customer’s list.
One day we decided to send a letter to one hundred people on the list. In the letter we thanked them for their patronage and invited them to come in on the following Saturday and get a pair of sterling silver hoop earrings for free. We hand wrote the letters ( I’m not sure I would do that again) and mailed them with a flyer for a 20% off sale on the same Saturday.
The next Saturday we gave away thirty pairs of earrings and made almost $700. This was almost double our highest collected on any given day. The key? We gave something away that was targeted to our group. The earrings only cost us thirty cents per pair (they were small hoops, but everyone was very pleased with them). The mailing cost us something like $40. So, for fifty dollars we were able to more than double what we usually made.