At our home décor and gift company, we realized that in order to be in the forefront of the exploding social media environment, we needed to develop a plan to effectively leverage that media. After researching various options to either do it ourselves or partner with a company that specialized in that area, we made the decision to partner with the leader in the gift industry. We were one of the first, if not the first, company in the gift wholesale industry to recognize the opportunity to leverage our systems, technology and graphic services capability to help our customers expand their reach with social media in a very cost effective way.
As a team we worked together to develop easy to use pre-built ‘graphic rich’ emails and social media templates with product images and other product merchandising photography. We placed our extensive database of product images in the electronic library of our strategic partner so retailers could literally ‘select’ the template and images of product to proactively market and communicate to their customer base through the various media of Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.
We were also able to systematically and electronically advise the retailers when their product shipped from our warehouse and the retailers could alert their customers that the hot new product would soon be arriving in their store. This allowed the retailer to create pre demand, improved cash flow, improved margins, inventory, and working capital plus improve customer satisfaction by providing advance hot new product arrival notice.
In partnership with our strategic partner, we were in the forefront of putting easy to use and cost effective tools in the hands of retailers so they could leverage the exploding social media environment.