Please send us your marketing idea as well as comments on those ideas posted by hitting your reply button or emailing to editor@mccurryassoc.com. You may offer free subscriptions to your colleagues by sending them this link: http://photoimagenews.com/mccurry.htm - Ask them to include their name, store name and city in the body of the email - privacy is protected, see below.

Please Enjoy, Consider and Profit from these ideas.

All the Best,

Bill

We tried something new that worked very well this year.

We keep all announcement card and senior wallet orders on file during the year in case the customer wants more prints.

In April we sent a letter to all the H.S. seniors who had ordered senior wallets and/or announcement cards during the past year.offering an April reprint special. The deal was nothing more than the standard price minus the normal setup charge.

The letter went something like this:

Graduation is a very big milestone in life. Congratulations on your upcoming graduation ceremony next month. As a little perk for you, please find enclosed two gift certificates created only for seniors.

Not only did this generate a lot of reorders, we had requests for enlargements, DVD programs and other family and graduation related products. And since many customers procrastinate, orders are still coming in during May.

So we are up to issue ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY SEVEN of the ideas exchange, therefore there are at least 450 ideas sitting percolating in the archives. I know when I joined up I took the time to go through each and every one of them (about 100 at the time) I picked up many many ideas. I eagerly looked forward to the next week's edition with the hope that there would be another gem I could put to work in my workplace.

But time is a funny thing, there's heaps of it when we have nothing to do and almost none when we are in a hurry. We put in place some ideas, they may work they may not, but we never find the time to get all of them up and running and they slowly dissapear into the background.

So with a little time on my hands late this Friday afternoon I felt it was time to visit the archives for a bit of fishing and what did I find? Ideas that I thought were worthy of incorporating but had let slip, but far more importantly I found new ideas. It is not that they were there before and I had simply missed them - it is because in the 12 months since I joined the archive my business has changed, and is continuing to change, and these 'not-so-new' ideas are now relevant to some of the things I do where they weren't before.

So I figure I don't need to reinvent the wheel everytime we want to do something new, I just have to remember to use the resources I have at hand and the Information Exchange is definitely one of those.

P.S This email is in no way paid or bribed out of me by anyone with the surname McCurry

Written and Typed by:
Glynn Lavender

Hi Bill,

Phil Gresham (owner of Fotofast in Australia) sent me a note about our email for the Memory Suite Grand Opening. His comment was that we should focus on how the 'younger' generation seeks moments, not memories. It is a valid point, but I thought we should also keep our mainstay demographic in the front of minds. What I mean is similar to Mike Worswick's (president of the PRO group and CEO of Wolfe's Camera in Topeka) comments about not giving up on services such as film processing. Mike is very accurate, at least in my mind. We still do a great volume of film processing.

While we are looking to capture Jennifer, we can't forget about her Mom. Given the focus on kids I keep thinking of an interesting point - every child has 2 parents who will spend money on items for the kid - but they have 4 Grandparents who are possibly in a better position to spend money on the kid. Since the baby boomers hitting a peak time in the US it seems like another opportunity to increase business, with best of all a group who already values and appreciates service over the lowest price... We're trying to figure how to represent a grandparent in some of our ads, and have it come across well. We don't want to fragment our existing message, but I do think if we focus too much on the generation who is harder for us to capture and not enough on those who do value us, we will not be doing ourselves justice.

Just some thoughts for the Idea Exchange.

Thanks,
Mike

It's no use saying, "We are doing our best." You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary."
Winston Churchill