In your marketing plan, you may need to start planning for a marketing event as much as two seasons in advance. Many of the signs that we show in this article can be printed from our web site. See Store Signs.

Valentine's Day
Even though many customers use the Internet to send gifts and cards, many customers still ship gifts through the major carriers. As long as we make certain that we have a great line of Valentine's Day cards, we still have good sales of these.

Other than ads and mailings, the only other idea that we've had for this and other spring holidays is to do seasonal displays. For example, for Valentine's you can show a box of candy in a box.

Easter
It has been our experience that Easter shipping isn't one of the best holidays for our business, but when we post signs, run specials, etc., we do bring in some extra business. What I have found to be most beneficial to increase sales is to do displays of a personal Easter basket or a fragile Easter gift several weeks before Easter Sunday. People then get the idea that it will be nice to send Sister Becky or Nephew Zachary a specialized gift for Easter.

Also, we usually put something on sale that is needed for Easter, whether it is packaging or colored transparent film for wrapping baskets.

Advertising Market Areas
Our experience has been that it takes some work to promote to colleges, but it is fun and can be fruitful, depending on the college. If most of the students are local, you probably will not get much business. If many of the students' homes aren't in driving distance, or better yet, if there are some international students, you can make some good money.

Following are our ideas for your College Ship It Home promotion:

• Advertise in the college newspapers
• Send a press release to college newspapers
• Ask the college for permission to post ads in their buildings
• Post a sign in your store
• Actively ship on college campuses

Ad
The promotion that we do is free pick-up service on certain days, a 10% discount, and we let students know that they can pay by check, too. If a student passes you a bad check or credit card, you can get them into trouble with the college, so this never was a concern of ours.

This is an example ad to the left.

Advertise to Students
There are several ways to get the word to students. The inexpensive ways require some manpower, and it can be fun for you and an employee to go to a campus to post or to pass out flyers to students.

At the University of North Carolina for which we worked several years, we got permission to post posters on bulletin boards and to hand-out flyers to students. The fact that we ran an ad in their student newspaper added to our rapport with the university office to get permission to do this.

When you go to the main office and ask where to get permission for posting or passing out flyers, don't forget to ask for a map of the college!

If you do a flyer to post on bulletin boards, try to use bright colors to get attention. Post these in the major buildings and in the bookstores. More importantly, post these in the student union halls and food facilities. Post these at eye level where students are likely to notice these. Carry thumb tacks for bulletin boards and strong clear tape for metal poles.

If you decide to pass out flyers to students, the best place to do this is outside of a union hall or eating facilities. I took our driver, who was a nice-looking, well-groomed young fellow, to the UNCC campus so that he could become familiar with the area for future pick-ups. As I posted posters on the bulletin boards, he stood in front of the major student union/restaurant area to pass out flyers. We did this for three hours during lunchtime to give info to as many students as possible (11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.).

Get to know the campus and learn where flyers can be left for students to pick-up.

Yes, it was profitable. The first year alone we got several orders, and two international students had us do packing, crating, and shipping electronics and clothing to the Orient.

Working On Campus
Another idea is to set a site on campus so that students can give you their orders easily. In order to do this, you need to get in touch with the college and tell them the services that you provide and what you would like to do. The college will suggest the best days to do this that coincide with final exams.

We did this several times at Queens College, which is a prestigious, elite, beautiful college near two of our stores. Many of the students are not local, so it was to our advantage to do this. Even though this is a medium-sized college, it was a fruitful venture.

What you need to keep in mind is that you need to be able to set up a booth to process orders and monitor the booth according to the college's rules. This is a quick list of what we did.

• We got nice flyers approved and posted these all around campus.
• The college posted a notice in their student newsletter about our services.
• The college told us where we could set-up our station. The college didn't have a table, so we bought a 6 foot by 30 inch table from Aaron's Rentals, a furniture rental company in our area, for about $20. You can probably find the same table at a wholesale club (Sam's, Costco, or B.J.'s) for about $35 now. The college told us that we could leave the table in the building that they specified.
• The college specified a space where we could store boxes and packaging supplies that students could buy. It was a room near our station that they locked at night.
• We took a printed price book, transit time charts, a calculator, order forms, a credit card imprinter, measuring tapes, etc. Now this can be simplified if you have your POS system on a laptop.
  
  We had room to store some basic packaging supplies, so I boxed unbreakable items when I had time. Items that needed special packaging at our stores were put into boxes in order to keep these separate from other items, and the paperwork was kept with the item.

Our driver came by at noon to relieve me for lunch, and he came again at closing (5 p.m.) to pick up the rest of the packages.

Yes, it did take some manpower, but the days that we worked Queens College, it was like having an extra store with good sales. We envy stores that have a large university nearby.

Mother's Day
This is the second best season for the majority of us, just after Christmas. Try ads, coupons, mailing, and perhaps a tip sheet to the press on packaging. In essence, do what you do for the December season, but adjust your budget for May. Because this is a small section of this article, by no means do we want to make it trivial. We could write a book on major holiday marketing for Mother's Day, but one can apply the same techniques for Mother's Day as one does for December.

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