Increasing Sales In The Glass Industry Part 3

It's as simple as 1-2-3. This is the third part of the series to improve sales in your glass shop. You don't have the marketing budget of IBM or General Electric, but you can use their ideas scaled down to your business!

• Give Away With Purchase. Buy a car, get a camera, buy a dinner, get a free appetizer. You can do this to! With every windshield replaced or repaired, give a can of glass cleaner with your label on it. Give a can to every insurance agent you talk to, and tell them you will give their customers your "Super Clean" service. Do the same thing with every mirror job. Leave the can of cleaner there that you do the final clean-up with...be sure your label is on the can. Place a small ad in the paper saying "Need glass in your picture frames replaced," bring in two and the smaller one is free." It is not a lot of money, but it will bring traffic to your door! Maybe you can upgrade them to glare-free glass!


• Help a local charity. You see it on TV all the time..."buy my product and we will make a donation to the Cancer Society for each product purchased", or "place your order now and we will pay for meals for a child for a week". Hook up with a local, well- known charity, or the Boy or Girl Scouts, or a youth baseball team, and give them 10% of your sales for a day, if they send out flyers and promote the event to their membership. You can do this for multiple days...every Saturday in May can be a different local non-profit. Then call the local newspaper and tell them about how you are helping the community. You may get a great newspaper story!


• Hold a contest. Every body loves a free contest. Put a large sign in your window, take a small, repetitive ad in the paper and tell everyone to come in and register for a free flat screen TV. No purchase necessary. (A 19" TV is under $200 at Best Buy). Run this for six to eight weeks. Maybe you pull the winner's name at a local event, like a homecoming parade or a Little League Championship. You gain foot traffic, get names for a mailing or email list, and have a publicity opportunity when you deliver the TV to the winner. Be sure to call the papers or the local TV and hope they send a photographer.


• Call the Physics Department at the local High School. Offer to do a demonstration of the strength of tempered, lami and annealed glass. Call your fabricator, have them give some tempered 'mistakes' that you can break. Help the teacher prepare a lesson on the physics of glass. If you need help, give the teacher my phone number, 603-242-3521, and I will walk them through the differences and discuss surface tension and compression of the tempered. The kids will tell their parents about the really exciting glass company, and you will tell the newspapers about the lesson. You can't loose.

When you see a promotion on TV or in the newspaper...steal the idea. Scale it to fit your business and your budget. You can do anything on a very short budget if you use your creativity. Good luck.