The Campaign Isn’t Finished When You Launch It

Years ago, I was a sales rep for a large firearms distributor, and like every rep there, I had my own group of firearms dealers that I was responsible for taking care of and growing. Some of the reps around me had been there much longer, knew their dealers extremely well, and had relationships that had been built over years. They could pick up the phone, call one of their customers, and have the kind of conversation that I simply had not earned yet, so I started looking for other ways to stay in front of the firearms retailers I was responsible for.

Technology seemed like one of the obvious answers. If I could spend some time putting together an email showing dealers what was available, highlighting something allocated, or pointing them toward products I thought they could sell, that email could keep working while I was doing something else.

I made short videos for the same reason. Instead of telling one dealer about a product, hanging up, and repeating the same conversation with the next one, I could make a video once, send it out, and hopefully get several dealers looking at the product while I moved on to something else.

I even paid for an SMS service because texting customers seemed like another way to keep the conversation going, although that turned into enough of a nightmare that it deserves an article of its own someday.

What I really wanted from all of these tools was much simpler: I wanted to know whether any of this was actually working and whether the time I was putting into it was producing enough business to justify doing it again.

The service I was using had some of that capability, but like a lot of software back then, the useful information lived behind higher-priced plans. I could afford to send the email, but getting access to the reporting I really wanted cost enough that I could not justify it.

That meant I could spend an hour building an email, send it to my dealers, and then go back to work with only a vague idea of whether that hour had been productive. Maybe we sold a bunch of the product I featured, but I had no reliable way of knowing whether the email had anything to do with those sales.

One of my dealers may have bought because the email put the product in front of him at exactly the right time, or he may have already planned to order it and would have bought the same amount if I had never sent anything. He might have ignored the email completely and placed the order after a conversation we had later. I could see that product moved, but I could not confidently connect the sale to the hour I had spent creating the message.

Looking back, investing that much time without knowing whether it contributed to the result seems almost foolish, but it was simply how things worked. My dad used to say, “We all walk in the light we’re given,” and sometimes we do not know better until better information becomes available.

Today, we know better.

A lot of firearms retailers still market the way I did as a sales rep. They create an email, hit send, make a Facebook post, change a banner on the website, put up a sign in the store, and then move on because the next customer is already standing at the counter and there are ten other things demanding attention.

A few days later, somebody asks how the promotion went and the answer is usually based on feel. The store seemed busier, a few customers mentioned the email, some of the featured products sold, or the social post appeared to get a decent amount of attention.

None of that information is useless, but it does not necessarily tell you whether the campaign worked or which part of it deserves to be repeated.

A good campaign should produce sales, but it should also leave the retailer knowing more about his customers than he knew before it started. You should have a better idea of what gets their attention, which channels actually produce buyers, what products cause people to take another step, where they lose interest, and what you should change the next time around.

When all you know at the end is that an email went out and some guns sold, you know something about your sales but very little about what caused them.

Marketing should not be a series of disconnected attempts. Each campaign should give you information that improves the next campaign, which means the work is not finished when the message goes out.

In many ways, that is when the useful part begins.

Business owners naturally think about the money they spend on marketing. They know what the ad cost, what they paid for an email service, how much they spent boosting a post, and what it cost to print or mail something, but the hours spent creating all of it can be much easier to overlook.

That was the question bothering me when I was selling to dealers. I might spend an hour creating an email, and if I did that several times a week, I was investing a meaningful part of my working life into something I could not confidently say was producing a return.

That same hour could have been spent calling dealers, working another account, learning more about a product, or doing something else that might have generated more business.

A firearms retailer faces the same tradeoff every day. Someone is photographing products, writing emails, creating social posts, changing website content, putting together a promotion, or deciding what to advertise next.

None of that work becomes free simply because an employee is already on the payroll, because the time used on one activity is time that cannot be used somewhere else.

If email consistently produces buyers, spend more time improving email. If a certain type of social post generates attention but almost no business, you can decide whether that effort deserves the same amount of time next month. If something repeatedly produces nothing, you have enough information to stop doing it.

Time is one of the few resources in business that you cannot replace once it has been spent.

I would start with email because it is still one of the simplest ways for a firearms retailer to stay connected to people who have already chosen to do business with the store.

When a customer buys from you, that person has already walked through the door, trusted the business enough to spend money, and given you an opportunity to earn the next purchase. If the only time he hears from you again is when he happens to remember that your store exists, you are asking him to maintain the entire relationship.

His inbox is not empty while you are silent. Manufacturers, national retailers, competing dealers, training companies, ranges, and businesses outside the firearms industry are all competing for his attention, so a retailer who never communicates with existing customers gradually creates distance between those customers and the store.

That does not mean every email needs to be a giant promotion filled with products and screaming discounts. You can tell customers what came in, explain something useful, let local hunters know that a season is approaching, promote a class, highlight a product and explain who it is for, or give people a reason to remember why they enjoyed doing business with you in the first place.

There is also a larger customer-acquisition problem when communication stops after the first sale. Getting someone through the door for the first time can be expensive, but maintaining a relationship with someone who already knows where you are should be easier.

A retailer that constantly chases new customers while barely communicating with existing ones is repeatedly paying to create relationships it does very little to maintain.

The internet makes it easy for a firearms retailer to start thinking nationally before fully developing the market around the physical store.

A website can theoretically put a gun store in Louisiana in front of a buyer in Oregon, Maine, or Arizona, and there is nothing wrong with building that kind of online business, but I would make sure the people living 15 miles away know who you are before worrying too much about the person 1,500 miles away.

Your physical location is probably one of the largest expenses in the business. You are paying for the building, utilities, employees, fixtures, inventory, insurance, security, and everything else required to unlock those doors every morning, so your marketing should be helping that investment produce.

A hunting-season email aimed at customers in your area can bring them to a landing page, but it should also give them a reason to walk into the store. A social post can support the same campaign, a QR code inside the store can connect customers to more information, and a postcard can reach a valuable local customer who ignores another email.

The channels can change while the purpose stays connected. You are trying to get the right local people interested enough to take another step with your business, and that step may be visiting the store, coming to the range, signing up for a class, asking about a product, or making a purchase.

Once that local customer base is strong and the physical operation is producing, expanding further online becomes a much healthier growth strategy than trying to use the internet to compensate for a store the people down the road barely know exists.

Local customers also give you opportunities that are difficult to reproduce in a purely online relationship. They can handle the firearm, talk to an employee who knows the product, visit the range, take a class, come back for ammunition and accessories, and eventually become the person your employees recognize when he walks through the door.

That type of customer relationship can be far more valuable than a single transaction shipped across the country.

Clicks, email opens, website visits, and social engagement can all tell you something, but none of them should be where the analysis ends.

If you send a hunting-season email to 2,000 people and 300 visit the page, you know the message created some interest. If 100 of those visitors look closely at products, 30 add something to a cart, ten begin checkout, and two complete a purchase, you now have a much more useful picture of what happened after the email did its job.

That information changes the questions you can ask. The email may have worked perfectly well while the problem appeared later in the customer journey. Perhaps the products did not match the audience, the offer was weak, the pricing was off, or customers encountered friction before finishing the purchase.

Instead of reacting to mediocre sales by sending an even bigger email to even more people, you can begin looking at the point where interest turned into hesitation.

The same approach works across the rest of the campaign. Social media may produce a lot of visitors but very few orders, while a much smaller email audience generates most of the revenue. A QR code on an in-store sign may outperform something that took far more time to create, or a postcard may surprise you by bringing valuable local customers back into the store. A reminder sent two days after the initial promotion may produce more business than the first message did.

At that point, you are no longer arguing about what you think worked. You can look at what actually happened and decide what deserves more attention the next time.

Another mistake is assuming that every customer should receive every campaign. If you are promoting hunting products, your best audience may not be every email address collected since the store opened, because your own customer history can already give you clues about who is most likely to care.

Someone who has purchased hunting rifles, optics, ammunition, or related products has given you useful information about his interests. A range customer who repeatedly signs up for training has told you something different, while a customer who has spent several thousand dollars with the store over several years has a different relationship with the business than someone who made a single inexpensive purchase four years ago.

Using that information allows the retailer to stop treating every customer as though he walked into the store for the same reason.

This is also where a campaign becomes much more useful than sending one disconnected email. A customer might respond to email, another could find you through social media, someone else may scan a QR code in the store, and another person may add several products to a cart before leaving without completing the purchase.

Those interactions tell you something about interest, timing, and where the customer is in the buying process.

Even an abandoned cart can become useful information. If a known customer puts $3,000 worth of products into a cart and leaves, you may have an opportunity for someone in the store to pick up the phone and ask whether he needs help.

The technology does not have to replace the human relationship. Sometimes the most useful thing it can do is make sure the right human knows when there may be a good reason to reach out.

If you are not doing this today, I would not start by building a giant marketing strategy for the next year.

Pick something that makes sense for your local market right now and run one complete campaign around it. Choose a group of products or an offer, create a place online where customers can see it, send an email to the people most likely to care, promote it through the social channels you already use, and give people inside the store a way to reach the same information.

Then come back after the campaign has had time to work and study what happened. Look at where people came from, what they clicked, whether they bought, how much revenue the campaign produced, which channels created actual customers, and where people stopped moving forward.

Compare the results with the amount of time you spent creating each part of the campaign and use what you learn to decide what the next one should look like.

After several rounds, something important starts to happen because the marketing becomes less dependent on guessing. Each campaign teaches you something about the audience, and that information makes the next campaign smarter.

A campaign that performs poorly can still be valuable if it clearly shows you what customers ignored, while a successful campaign becomes even more useful when you understand why it succeeded well enough to repeat the parts that worked.

That is what I wish I had all those years ago when I was sitting at a desk building emails for my dealers. I did not simply need another way to send an email because I already knew how to do that. I needed a way to know whether the hour I spent creating it was an hour I should spend again tomorrow, and I needed enough information to know what I should stop doing, what I should start doing, and what deserved more of my time.

Coreware now gives firearms retailers that kind of visibility without requiring the complicated, disconnected systems I was trying to piece together years ago. Retailers can build campaigns across multiple channels and see visitors, clicks, orders, revenue, channel performance, and the customer's journey through the campaign, while targeted audiences can be created from customer information and abandoned-cart recovery can help identify opportunities that stopped before the purchase was completed.

What used to be expensive, clunky, and difficult to connect can now be managed in one place, giving a retailer the information to spend more time on what works and less time guessing.

We all walk in the light we're given, but once better information is available, there is no reason to keep working in the dark.

To learn more, visit coreware.com.