Three Ways to Make Your Gift Basket Business Profitable

Like any other business product or service, gift baskets must be marketed. Those who promote their businesses do well, and those who don’t will be disappointed.

Three ways to make your gift basket business profitable.

1. Set up a way to capture the names and emails of visitors to your site.

You’ve no doubt been on many websites where a box floats into the page asking you to sign up for a free item.

You can do this by offering a free newsletter, free reports, tips or other item they may value. This list is very valuable. If you don’t capture this contact information, you may have lost the chance to sell to these potential customers forever.

But if you are emailing them announcements, special sales information, gift-giving tips and so on, they are more likely to return or call to buy a gift basket.

2. Sell more to your current customers

Once you’ve landed customers, stay in frequent touch with them. Encourage them to expand their purchases by adding a balloon or other added value for which you can charge an additional fee.

Your current customers are valuable because they’ve already shown faith in your company and product. One example of a company that does this well is Vistaprint. You probably know them for their free business card offer.

Each time I take Vistaprint up on an offer for free postcards, a free t-shirt, or other imprinted product, I must go through several pages of offers to upgrade my order or add additional products. I don’t mind going through these because I’m getting the product free.

How do they make money, you wonder? Well, they don’t offer everything free. And, you must pay to use your own image if you don’t want to use their stock images.

Each time I receive a shipment from them, there’s another little sales booklet offering more free items with the special access code to purchase from their website. They are smart marketers and know that waving the offer of free products in front of me works. Besides, once I receive the products and see the quality of their products I’m much more inclined to buy at regular price.

3. Hustle

The owner of a balloon supply store once shared with me that folks keep calling his store asking if they sell gift baskets. He had to keep turning them away. He said to me, “You gift basket designers aren’t doing your marketing.”

Unfortunately he was right. During the 18 years I’ve been consulting and speaking to gift basket business owners, I’m amazed at how many do very little to go after business. Putting an ad in the paper and putting up a website is not marketing.

To make your business profitable you must

• take advantage of every networking opportunity possible to ask for orders
• follow up on every person you meet at Chamber and network meetings
• keep up with trends such as putting updates on Twitter and Facebook to keep news about your business in the public’s mind
• modify your business to draw in more business. This may mean partnering with another company, raising your prices (some of you aren’t charging enough and people think you must offer an inferior product,) or changing your designs and offering to meet trends and current demands.

I recently heard a story about a sandwich shop that was in a busy shopping center. During the summer, people kept coming in the store all day long asking, “Do you sell ice cream?”"No,” the owner announced to each person. Finally, he got so annoyed that he put a sign in the window: WE DON’T SELL ICE CREAM.

What would have been a smarter thing for the store owner to have done since there was obviously a demand for ice cream?

Are you meeting current demands of customers, or are you turning away money?

This article courtesy of The Gift Basket Business World Blog.