Girlie Girl Parties Update: Kerry and I started advertising the business in the local family-focused magazine 2 months ago. Immediately we saw more visitors to the website and started getting more calls, but we weren’t really booking any parties yet.
Potential customers needed proof that we were a legitimate business and provided a good service.
We knew that the advertising was doing the job of getting the word out, but it wasn’t resulting in sales so we started thinking about other alternatives and ways to provide social proof. We were offered a booth at a local kid’s event where we could do a give-away, sell things, and promote the business. The event was free for families to attend and featured a lot of inexpensive/free activities for the kids.
The booth fee was fairly steep, but we figured if we could book two parties and sell at least $100 worth of inventory we would break-even. The event had over 5,000 people attend the year before, so it didn’t seem hard to imagine.
We decided to buy some inventory just for the event, and also try to move some product we didn’t have much use for with the parties. We wanted to make sure we didn’t run out of inventory, but at the same time didn’t load up on stuff that we couldn’t sell. We decided that $500 worth of inventory was probably the most we could sell, but didn’t hurt us too bad if we didn’t sell it, so that’s how much we had.
One primary goal was to collect e-mail addresses of potential customers in order to advertise our specials and company news directly with little to no cost.
The day of the event we sold over $100 worth of inventory (but well short of $500), and two days later we booked a party with one of the mom’s that stopped by.
Unfortunately, we failed to consider what types of people attend a free event like this. There weren’t many people willing to pay for much merchandise or for our services.
We did manage to get about 75 e-mail addresseses of “potential customers”. Many may not be in a position to pay for our services right now, but the cost of maintaing the e-mail addresses is basically free, and gives us a pool of potential future customers.
Ultimately, the benefit of a free event is to help familiarize people with a new busines and provide social proof - even if it doesn’t directly produce a positive ROI.
Another benefit was meeting other Entrepreneurs that could help us, even though they weren’t potential customers. One of them used to own a related business and offered to sell us some of the supplies, which might be a good way for us to get quality goods very inexpensively. The other gentleman we met provides direct-mail advertising, which we will be testing out shortly.
Although only one person that stopped by the booth at the kid’s event booked a party, since the event we have booked almost an entire month’s worth of parties. Coincidence? Doubtful.
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