02.01.09
Marketing your Gift Basket Business
The best part of a gift basket business is that everyone is a potential customer. But you have to get the words out. If people don’t know that you are making and selling gift baskets, how they will order from you. Let us divide the market in two segments: Personal and Corporate. As a start up your initial target will be personal consumption market. When one wants to give or send a gift basket for anniversary, birthday, get well wishes, house warming part etc. The most important first step is the word of mouth and customer satisfaction. Like building a house, a successful business is built up one brick at a time or more appropriately, one customer at a time. Therefore selection of the highest quality product, nice, professional design and finishing and highest customer service is very essential. It is also important to have a sense of pride in your business and baskets that you design. Ask yourself, if you will be happy to receive the basket yourself what you are trying to sell to others. There is no better critique than you yourself. These days most houses have a computer or lap top and digital cameras. If possible take some nice pictures of your baskets against a white background, edit the pictures in Photoshop or similar software and take the pictures in a disk to your local business depot or Staples and print a one or two page brochure. Make inexpensive color copies and give it to your friends and family for more business. Net working is so vary important for the gift basket business. Join the local chamber of commerce and attend the networking meetings. You do not have to spend lots of money on advertising to start the business. Try some local businesses and give them the brochures and ask for their business. Everybody knows some one working in some office. So why not use that contact to push for your business. Networking efforts like this will give you better results than advertising in yellow pages or newspaper advertising. You should seriously consider the avenue of internet. There are ways you can build a web site relatively inexpensive. Search Yahoo! or Google sites and you might be able to do it free yourself. (Google sites are free and have just been launched by Google). Once you have set up a web site, it will work as your catalogue and help you grow your business. We shall continue with our discussion on marketing in future. In the mean time, if you already have a web site, you can comment on this article and your comments will get posted on face book and other blogs on the net, giving you valuable links. We look forward to hear from you and how we can make this space more interactive and help grow your gift basket business www.ABasketSupply.com
