Hi there

We are a Sydney (Australia) based rug shop with 3 stores. We have been in operation for 10 years and like other businesses during this economic period have felt a rapid decline in our sales.

I want to try some marketing initiatives as we have only invested in print ads that require a lot of money with very limited success.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to attract customers to the store? Especially anything creative?

As a customer what would bring you into the store? We used to focus on exclusivity and specialised service but now everyone is only interested in the lowest price and checks out all the competitors before doing their shopping so we have had to change our focus and have many sale and discount signs like our competitors to draw attention.

I was thinking of sending letters to our past customers....do you think this is worth the investment? How many letters would you need to send before receiving a response? What should the letter entail? What will make that customer (a) open the letter, (b) read the letter, (c) come to the store?

Does anyone have any suggestions???

Any thoughts/ideas/marketing strategies would be greatly appreciated!!!

How about these:

Make some videos of some of your rugs and post them either on your site or online with local targeted keywords.

How about some kind of a contest?

attend local networking meetings

sending letters to past customers may or may not pay off, I would try some other things first.

You may want to consider the rent-to-own (RTO) model for a while. Some people are always looking for rugs, but others only need it for a short period of time. Once they are used to it in their houses....they tend to keep it, and pay the price to do so.

You could charge a cleaning fee if not returned clean. You can also sell them as used. If you sell used, I would be very clear how many days they were used. Customers will be able to tell if they're in good shape or not.

Michael
oxmg2005@yahoo.com