If you have ever visited Las Vegas you may have come across Harrah’s casino — it’s hardly a standout against the palatial Venetian and the Wynn buildings. But it has consistently been one of the top earning casinos on the Stip. So how have they managed to keep up business in an era of billion-dollar competition and what can a florist learn from them?

The secret of Harrah’s success has been its Total Gold loyalty program. The program was launched in 1997, against the backdrop of tremendous investment, spurred by more relaxed gaming laws. Harraha’s was about to be made obsolete by huge competitors with deep pockets creating glitzy buildings and luring in brand name celebrity performers.

Harrah’s realized they could try to invest in infrastructure to lure in new customers — or they could invest in their existing customers. Instead of following the lead of the competition, they developed a loyalty program powered by sophisticated IT. The results? Billions of dollars in extra top line revenue over the subsequent five years, and hundreds of millions in additional profit.

Every local florist has thousands of customers — but what are they doing to lure them back every month? Carefully targeted marketing emails and loyalty points should be at the heart of any small businesses arsenal to compete against larger, better funded competitors. When thinking about customer loyalty, think about how they do it in Las Vegas.

Reader’s Digest interviews florists across the US for things they don’t often tell their customers. What is the number 1 suggestion? Find a local florist! But they admit it’s harder than you think, with order gatherers:

“Number 1: If you want more flowers for your money, find a florist in your recipient’s town and call him directly. But it’s harder than you think: some florists in the yellow pages and at the top of your Google search are national businesses masquerading as local ones. They even buy local phone numbers. So make sure you look for a physical address in town.”

How do you help your customers find you more easily? Get your site more visible in search engines by getting a good site. Once you have a site that is built properlty to be found by search engines, make sure you have plenty of incoming links from other sites — local newspapers, Yelp.com, Yellowpages.com.

Reader’s Digest Article: Things a Florist Won’t Tell His Customers

Keeping track of your store’s purchases, sales, and other data is the key to good planning and healthy margins.

The Holiday season seems like the one when a florist can least afford to be distracted from the day-to-day managing of your store — taking orders and making arrangements. However, although it’s very busy, holidays are precisely the most important time to keep good records, ideally using an easy-to-use program like Microsoft Excel or Google’s free web-based spreadsheet program (for a tutorial take a look at this video)

Here are some ideas that will help you next year at Christmas. Some of these records can be gotten from your computer and others you will have to keep track of.

1. Weather – this will affect sales and deliveries.

2. Customer count – number of walk-in customers, also weather related.

3. Sales – what you are selling and what is not moving.

4. Stock Purchases – you purchases of supplies, flowers, and plants

a: poinsettias and other plants b: cut flowers and greens c: vases and containers

It’s also a good idea to keep track of pre booked plants and the date you purchase additional plants. Next year don’t pre book the additional plants you ordered.

5. Christmas Greening - Know how many greens, labor, container and other accessories are put into the the pre greened container. This will give a designer a base to start pricing, no guesses it’s the correct price.

When you buy the latest Harry Potter bestseller on Amazon, you know the intimate details of the order process, from the day and time it leaves the warehouse to the exact moment it is hand-delivered by FedEx at your door. So why isn’t it the same for the flower business? Actually it should be. Why do Amazon and FedEx offer this service to customers to update them on the status of their order?

1. Because it is a good way to advertise their brand.

2. Because it’s good customer experience.

3. Because it stops customers from calling to check up on their order.

So why don’t florists do the same? Well most of them are not set up on the scale of an Amazon or FedEx, so they don’t have the tools to give customers the same kind of experience that the big guys do. But the reality is that it’s not so difficult to offer this kind of service if you are set up with the right ecommerce infrastructure. The advantages of keeping customers informed about their purchases are clear. Florists can use these tools to give their customers a better experiece – which will bring them back a second time. Update emails serve as free advertising. And, especially at busy times like Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day, these emails can stop the customer from calling in to check on a delivery – and prevent the prospective customer from getting a busy signal rather than a live person.

Floranext started out its life as a solution for our own family-run florist. We experimented with solutions from Yahoo and other providers, but ultimately were disappointed by these generic ecommerce solutions. We also looked at solutions from FTD and Teleflora, but their ecommerce solutions are seriously lacking. None of these solutions seemed like it was built with the small florist in mind. We understand that most florists don’t have the time to spend many hours every month updating their website when then have a business to run, employees to manage, and customers to serve. So the Floranext solution takes the hard work out of running a floral ecommerce site, while still giving you the flexibility to make changes to pricing, delivery charges, and featured seasonal FTD and Teleflora products. Get in touch and we will give you a walk-through of the features.

On June 1st, FTD will roll out new charges for flower shops that do not promptly reject orders – charging as much as $20 for a florist to reject an order! Yet another blow to the harried, underpaid florist. On its FAQ page, FTD couches this in terms of the benefit to the fulfilling florist: “The goal of the Delayed Response Program is to increase the level of quality in the industry by proactively asking for quicker response times from our network of filling florists.” So when do rejected orders happen most often? It is during busy holiday seasons like Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day, when FTD is advertising unreasonably priced items. Florists are too busy to check orders every thirty minutes to see if they entail reasonable pricing. Make no mistake, the burden should be on the order gatherers like FTD and Teleflora to offer reasonable pricing and ensure that fulfilling florists actually deliver to a given area. Below is the pricing penalty structure from FTD’s website. Still more evidence that FTD is succeeding in squeezing the margins of local florist.