California retailer Brian Hill is a keen advocate of digital marketing to help stores create a buzz among customers.

While helping reduce costs of hard mailings, using e-mail and social media allows him to be more nimble in coming up with promotions and helps foster the increasingly important sense of connection for which many consumers are looking.

Hill began seriously gathering e-mail addresses of shoppers at Lighthouse Christian Store in Dublin, Calif.-which he co-owns and co-manages, with his mother-about four years ago. Those who provide their e-mail address are enrolled in the store's rewards program.

The monthly e-newsletter the store puts out is "something that is fairly inexpensive" that allows him to keep in touch more regularly than with physical mailing, he said. In addition, the lead time is much shorter. With traditional mailings, sometimes "by the time you got your piece together, it was too late to send it out," he said.

More recently, Hill has grown his store's Facebook friends list fourfold by posting almost daily messages and offering specials for different holidays. One zany promotion brought people in to compete in and vote on a chicken-dance contest.

"It gives people a reason to talk about us," Hill said. "It's pretty hard to compete with Amazon on price. Even with something on sale, someone isn't likely to go home and tell their neighbor or someone at church about that, but if they come in here and compete in a chicken dance, they are probably going to tell others at the Bible study about it."

Read more in the "Store Strategies" report in the October issue of Christian Retailing magazine.

• Prev
• Next