In today’s digital age, consumers crave convenience first and foremost. This is the age of “I want it now.”

For real estate, the value of a property is determined by three things.

Location, location, and you guessed it, location.

Yet, the online world doesn’t seem to care about that as much. Location only factors into the logistical thinking for delivering or shipping the order.

Today’s virtual ecosystem for selling is akin to the Quickie Mart on the corner. It gets the heavy traffic because of convenience.

This week’s blog article is about that world.

No, not about the Quickie Mart. About making your customer’s happier by putting an emphasis on convenience in your business strategy.

Are you set up for not just operating in this environment, but thriving in it?

What is your customer experience like?

Let’s take a look at a few factors you should be conversant in so that you can dominate in this financial arena!

The Convenience Strategy

Simply put this is focusing on your customer’s two main pain points. Time and effort.

Convenience is problem-solving.

When I was sixteen I used to drive down to a convenience store every two days to buy four gallons of milk. Basically, it was how I learned to drive. As the oldest of five boys, we guzzled that stuff constantly, to the point we even had a refrigerator in the garage dedicated to housing our milk supply.

Why didn’t I drive to the grocery store that had the same product? I mean they sell milk too.

Convenience.

It was just easier to pop in and out of that corner store. In fact, that store was actually cheaper in price than our nearest grocery store usually. So, that was two reasons to make the trip.

Plus, they had Icees.

The pain point here that I wanted to illustrate was my time. People as a whole, just want things easier. As humans, we’re naturally kind of lazy.

For your customer, what are they struggling with that you could immediately solve? You need to find out what is their “pain”.

Have you ever asked? It’s the easiest way to find out, and that information is gold.

Your business strategy should be based on solving this pain point.

Usually just wanting shirts screen-printed or embroidered isn’t a pain point. Any cheeseball shop in town can handle that.

You need to dig deeper into the challenge to make these orders sticky to your business.

Example: The High School

So what’s the pain point for local high school shirt orders? Thousands of apparel decorators produce these every day.

Yet, they commonly don’t have much loyalty to their local print shop.

Why is that do you think?

Is it because they see that shirt order as a commodity? When there is little value in who handles the production, the lowest price is what wins the order.

Until of course, you solve their pain point.

Which is that they want to spend more time teaching or coaching. Or they have lots of annual turnover by the PTO moms, and they need some consistency with the spirit wear.

For this type of customer, the pain challenge is usually both time and product knowledge.

You can solve both by doing two things.

The first is building an online store for the school, where all the clubs, teams, spirit wear, and event merchandise is offered. Who wants to deal with paper order forms?

Nobody.

The second is producing the orders, and handling the leg work and simplifying the distribution for orders.

It’s the distribution part of the equation that most shops ignore.

Make it easy for the school.

Here’s How:

Either ship these directly to the end customer, or polybag and label with the students name and box up by homeroom teacher.

This makes teachers and coaches happy because they don’t have to deal with a distribution headache. They would rather teach or coach, than worry about how they are going to hand out the shirts.

Nobody wants to disappoint students. Those PTO moms don’t want to goof around with this stuff either. They have better things to do.

When your order delivery experience is laser focused on your customers, your sales effort is aligned with the convenience strategy.

Customer Loyalty

These days customer loyalty may be based entirely on what is easiest.

Think about it. Isn’t that how you shop?

I know I do. Practically the only time I’m in a mall is to go see the latest blockbuster movie, just because that’s where the best movie theater chain is located.

Not to shop.

Do you think your customers behave any differently?

The elephant in the room is obvious. Are you still operating your decorated apparel shop like it is 1989 and nothing has changed?

Old school might be the old fool.

The battle lines are being drawn right now. Convenience is king, and the kingdom is online.

Why?

Well for starters, there are too many awesome tools that can help your customers. That experience is online and mainly mobile. People order from their phones or tablets at any time from everywhere because it is convenient.

Click.

Bam.

Cha-ching.

In your customer’s mind, why schlep all the way to a store for that t-shirt, when you can order one from the couch?

That is the customer experience that you need to thrive today.

Get Dialed In

One of the first steps in this process of making things easier is to limit the choices.

I know that sounds like I’m cutting off your sales effort at the knees, but bear with me. Convenience has also a lot to do with speed.

When you offer too many choices, it just bogs everything down in the sales process. Have you ever been in a restaurant and the menu just had too many choices? For me, The Cheesecake Factory is an example of having so many choices it actually turns people off from going there.

The expert solution is to really know your target market. Don’t offer what YOU like. Offer what THEY want.

There is a huge difference. Narrow the choices down a bit.

One great way to do things is to simply offer three choices.

Good.

Better.

Best.

Some people might like the least expensive option. Call that the “budget choice”.

Others might want all the bells and whistles and will happily pay for the higher end choice. Call that the “top choice”.

Where most sales live is in the middle. They don’t want the super cheap, but they can’t unlock that wallet for the most expensive either. The “middle choice” will be the bulk quantity of your orders.

But you need to offer all three. You’ll sell them, trust me.

When you offer twelve choices for the same type of item?

It just gets too confusing.

The hard part is going to be determining what might sell the best for the customer demographic you serve. Chances are, you probably already know though.

Proving the Point: The Middle Choice

Here’s a fact that might help you. I was looking up some statistics about InkSoft sales in our system the other day. To date, the most popular t-shirt blank sold on our platform is the Gildan G-5000 with over $62,0000,000 worth of shirts sold.

That’s the middle. The “Better” option.

Sure, there are shirts both cheaper and more expensive on the market. But this is by far the best seller.

Will the G-5000 make sense to your target market? Odds are, it might.

But then again, your target market might prefer a different shirt blank. That’s ok too.

Don’t offer things on your store your customers don’t want.

Sell the Emotion

One of the biggest reasons why people are interested in the convenience experience anyway is the emotional charge of “getting it done.”

It’s crossed off the list.

Onto bigger and better things.

This idea is one way you can market your online efforts:

  • “Need to design a shirt for your family reunion?” – Design your own t-shirt! It’s easy!
  • “Easy company store platform for your staff shirts!” – Make it simple for your staff to get their gear!
  • “Fundraise with T-shirts!” – Raise money without any inventory!

There are unlimited ways you can market and drive this emotional connection. But what is going to close the deal is how you present your brand.

Know, Like & Trust

People like to buy from companies that they know, like and trust. When you connect this emotional checkpoint with how your present your company, it makes a difference.

It is not enough just to throw up an online webstore and wait for the sales to roll in. You need to connect emotionally with your target audience and convince them to ignore the noise and choose you.

This is a constant effort.

Yesterday’s marketing doesn’t matter. What are you doing today to attract tomorrow’s customer?

Sell the emotion of getting things done. Sell that convenience.

Final Thoughts on Speed

One gigantic differentiator in the decorated apparel space, which is gaining momentum, is speed.

And when I say speed, I mean turn times for the order.

When, how and where will I get the order will outplay any other companies that may offer a better product. Maybe even a better price.

For this industry, it used to be common to have seven to ten business day production turns. In the last few years, that seems to have dwindled down to five to seven days as the norm.

The way things are looking now, many decorators are positioning themselves to offer one to three business day turns. A few are even investing in same-day workflow turn times.

Crazy!

In the convenience based online community, this aligns with how other industries ship too.

What is the average production turn time for your shop? Do you even know? Why not?

Speed kills the competition.

You definitely need to be thinking about this in your business. Talk about a market dominator!

What would you need to do to be able to cut your average production turn time in half? Forget about rush fees for a moment.

Consider that consumers want things now. People don’ t have much patience anymore.

All things considered, what if your production order ships before your competition can even get started on a similar one?

What impact do you think that might have?

When you make things more convenient for your customers and do things your competition can’t even dream about doing, you can own your marketplace.

That’s how you dominate the landscape.

How Do You Build That?

For starters, the more efficient all of your processes become, the faster your shop can move the order through the pipeline.

In your shop, how can you trim down the time it takes to do any task? More automation? Better trained staff? Standardization? Technology?

Every time someone touches something it takes a finite amount of time to handle that task. Now compound that problem with waves of orders coming in, and their day quickly fills up.

Therefore, anything you can do to eliminate a step or a chunk of time from the process can have a domino effect throughout your workflow process.

Have you ever analyzed the time and effort it takes to process an order in your shop? This type of continuous improvement effort can have a huge benefit for you if you start measuring activity and timing the processes.

Solving Your Problems

Here are some things that I know can get you on the right path:

  • Identify all of your key processes in your work. How are things routed? Map your processes and rank them in importance for both in terms of customer significance and internal friction. What is holding things up the most? Work on your biggest problems first.
  • Measure the time each step takes along the way. Document this information. Time includes pre-work, production, rework, and even those minor steps that don’t seem to matter.
  • Establish goals to try to reduce the time it takes to do each step. For example, let’s say it takes you ten minutes to register a screen on your press. Can you drop that to five minutes? What would you need to handle that?
  • Work to build procedural changes that reduce friction in your processes. This includes adding quality control steps in the workflow to eliminate do-overs, organizing your floor for faster work, and by standardizing steps in the process. Train your staff and hold them accountable.
  • Can you add any technology or automation? For example, an automatic screen coater is more efficient and produces better results than a person doing the same thing with an emulsion scoop coater. This one device can help speed up that department and add quality to the work simultaneously. For every department in your building, there are similar choices you can make.
  • Measure your results.
  • Tweak.
  • Repeat.

Not A Magic Bullet

Yep. I know. Not a magic bullet. It’s work.

The goal though is to make things more convenient for your customer. A frictionless ordering process is a convenience. Getting their order delivered earlier than your competition is convenience too.

That’s what matters. The strategy of the immediate.

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“Opportunity is missed by most people as it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” – Thomas Edison

“Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” – Thomas Edison

“There’s a way to do it better – find it.” – Thomas Edison