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Joel's Kindness Marketing Story
By Joel Issert
Contributing Writer
Article Date: 01.21.03
Garrett,
Hello, my name is Joel Issert. My wife, Angie and I own and
operate a web-site called The Tool Barn, www.thetoolbarn.com
We specialize in unique quality hand tools and have been on-line
selling since 1999. Below is our view on kindness marketing.
Angie and I offer a Five Year Satisfaction Guarantee, which I tell them in their questionnaire that they have over four and half years to figure out if they like their new tool. They get a charge out of the questionnaire and we get great customer quotes also.
As the gurus say. Do a follow-up and offer something at the same time to make more money in the back-end. Well we found out that you might make one sale if your lucky. Even when we gave a tool away free for filling out the survey. So we trashed that idea and went all personal and get great feed back. The latest quotes below:
"You guys always deserve an atta boy. You are top in my book.
I brag about your friendly business to my neighbors. The thing
that impressed me the most about The Tool Barn is that you have
made it a family business and you have a special knack for enjoying
your customers as well as they enjoying your business." Jane
R., Springfield, VA
On our home page we have some links to make visitors more at
ease. The "Customer Service" link top center of our home page
is for weary cautious potential customers. http://www.thetoolbarn.com/more.htm
Also we have a "Get to know Us" button under our family picture.
That is where so many sites get scared and don't want to put
anything personal on their site. We figure, why not. People
love to see faces especially from people they are doing business
with. Plus, we use it to intertwine people into the mystique
in our site. http://www.thetoolbarn.com/index2.html
We offer a monthly newsletter for our opt in list, new tools at wholesale prices. We also put personal home projects that we are doing etc. One time our son, Tyler, broke his arm and I mentioned it in the newsletter and got about 6 concerned well wisher emails back.
How's the sales you ask? Not enough to quit the day job. But...
Our yearly conversion ratio is 1 - 76, one sale for every 76 unique visitors. It would of been a lot better but our merchant account had a technical glitch (that you couldn't be duplicate) that blew our November and December sales! Like horrible!!! looking at all the monthly stats we lost 20% off yearly sales. Which would of pushed our conversion ratio around 1-50 + or -.
Keep in mind that our site, The Tool Barn is successful. But we bust our butts and brains to make it that way. We read different Internet guru books/binders, surfing different sites, going to tool shows to find unique, quality tools, customer service.
Then the winning touch in my opinion is, wrapping it all up with our personalities and being in touch with our customers needs on a personal level.
That is Angie's and my story on kindness marketing.
Take care Garrett,
Joel Issert - Owner
The Tool Barn
Wilmington, IL USA
The coolest hand tools on the Net! |
