For the last five years, Heather and Jayson Waits have owned and operated Bloomtastic Florist in Columbus Ohio.  The couple sells their products at a retail location through special event services like weddings and funerals, and via their eCommerce site.  Jayson is also an avid network marketer who Blogs at his Go MLM Biz Blog.  Capturing their share of the market in Columbus is always a challenge against competitors  like Flowerama, Columbus Florist and Desantis Florist all battling for customer dollars.

But Heather and Jayson are sharp competitors.  Aside from building and optimizing their own eCommerce site as well as doing their own local directory submissions, the couple is  using social networks to drive paying customers to their business.

See for yourself:

This is the letter Heather used to reach out to a targeted group of 500 male LinkedIn users living in or around the Columbus Ohio area.

Heather’s message hit a home run.  Here’s why:

• The approach was brief, respectful and readable – less than 10 seconds.
• It references the common group connection between her and the end recipient.
• It directly explains why the timing of her message is relevant.
  
• Rather than pushing her products, the message makes an exclusive offer to the group.
• The message provides a unique LinkedIn promotion code for order tracking and to apply the discount.  The code also gave Heather and Jayson the ability to track phone and walking orders.
• Heather completes the conversion process with a strong call to action and a link to her eCommerce site.

ROI

• 871 unique visits on bloomtastic.com week of Valentines Day 2009.
• 59 site visitors came from Twitter.com.
• 44 site visitors came from LinkedIn.com.
• Overall 6% increase in sales from Valentines Day 2008 while industry sales were down 20% due to the holiday falling on a Saturday.
• Overall web orders thus far in 2009 are up 79% over the previous year.
• Bloomtastic received 20 tracked orders through the LinkedIn message generating a total of $1169.00.
  
• Other than a few hours time, total cost of the promotion was $0.00, cost per customer acquisition was $0.00 and the average order per customer was $58.45.

I want to thank Heather and Jayson for sharing their success story.  The most important point they make is that they will do this again, and leverage the local network to gain residual ROI again, and again, and again…

Now think – how could you use LinkedIn to do something GREAT for your business?  Get creative and give it a try and tell me what happens.  I’d love share your story as well.

nateriggs

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