Just before 1980, AT&T launched a very successful advertising campaign designed to encourage people to make more long distance phone calls. For those of you my age or even a little younger you may remember the catchy jingle refrain…”Reach out, reach out and touch someone.” Those commercials were so successful, in fact, that in 2003 they were reintroduced for a short period but abbreviated to “Reach Out”.

We live in an exciting time of seemingly daily advances in the technologies we have at our disposal and perhaps that fact may seem almost mind boggling or overwhelming.  But as a retailer it gives you wonderful tools, if you choose to use them, to “reach out and touch your customers”.

If you jumped on the Web site bandwagon of a few years ago you probably think that your Web site has done very little for you and you’re probably right. More than likely, your Web site was/is static and has remained basically unchanged during the period since its launch. Once a person saw the site there really was no reason to go back.

Move forward. Web sites of today can be written with CMS format. CMS is an acronym for “content management system.” This means that once your site is constructed you (or one of your staff) can go in and change the content just as easily as you would use a Word program. A dynamic site gets higher traffic.  You could even maintain a Blog which people could respond to and have their opinions “online”.

But wait it doesn’t stop there!  Imagine sending from your website a monthly newsletter, emailed, to those who have registered. Along with a tip about, let’s say, painting, you could have an active link connecting back to your Web site for a coupon for $$ Off on paint or applicators that the reader could print for additional savings. Now your Web site is even more dynamic and is actually fostering 2-way communication…your message going out…the customer coming back to your site for the coupon. There are actually some pretty high profile retailers using this method as their sole means of advertising simply because its effectiveness and low-cost.

There are other things that drive traffic to a site. A site must be Search Engine Optimized (SEO) and Search Engine Friendly (SEF). The spiders that crawl the Web indexing sites also look at bulk of the site and in-going and out-going links as well as other attributes to determine where the site is indexed on search engines. For example type in “hardware store layout” into Google and out of over 1 million possible sites listed, our site, www.discoverdbr.com comes up number 1.

If you’d like to join this facet of the digital revolution, give us a call at Discovery-Based Retail, (888) 292-6531. We’ll be glad to share more information and if you become convinced that a new Web site would benefit you, we’ll even design, host and maintain it. The times have changed, the methods are evolving, but it’s still a great idea to “reach out and touch someone.”

Parting shot: Tell your story whenever and however you can. Embrace new technologies that help you do this more efficiently!