Case Study: Grand Re-Opening

Sunnyvale Central Computers store reopening

BACKGROUND

After our previous Sunnyvale store burned down in April 2019, the Central Computers team wanted to reopen a new location by the end of the year to continue to serve our customers. We found a new location and worked hard to organize and get the store up and running. The Grand Opening event was on December 13th and the sale lasted throughout the weekend.

PROBLEM

The new Sunnyvale location is across the city from the old store location. This meant that we had to reach a new geographic audience while also promoting to our existing customer base. Additionally, the new store was much smaller and had a smaller item selection than the previous store.

SOLUTION

DIGITAL ADS

We had a short time to prepare between Black Friday and the Grand Opening. We decided to put our energy into driving organic traffic through social media (capitalizing on press releases and interest from the original Sunnyvale store fire) and put our money into hyper-local Facebook and Instagram ads.

• Store Traffic: targeted all potential customers with technology interests within 20 miles of the store.

• Event Responses: we created a Facebook event to show our promotions and reminders.

• Reddit Posts: we posted to the Sunnyvale community subreddit about our Grand Opening and engaged with the people who responded.

STORE PROMOTIONS

We had event specials to drive customers to the store. We created mystery boxes, a business card fishbowl raffle, a prize wheel, and doorbusters for our new and returning guests.

We found that most of our customers saw our Facebook event page and website landing page. Our funnel moved customers from ads or social media posts to the Facebook event to the store landing page. We chose this funnel because when people respond to the Facebook event, they see additional messages and reminders on the day of the event.

BLACK FRIDAY

How a computer retail chain achieved measurable results from a multi-channel marketing campaign.

BACKGROUND

For a computer retail chain of 5 stores like Central Computers, Black Friday is a high traffic day and weekend. A small business cannot afford to skip a holiday like this. In 2018, the stores felt that many customers were drawn away by e-commerce stores and 2019 needed to change that. Central Computers needed to show customers that brick and mortar retailers are still alive and deserve their business.

CHALLENGE

The 2018 year was low profit compared to the years before and the number of walk-in customers was steadily declining. Central Computers was losing customers to e-commerce stores like Amazon and Newegg. The team had to decide where they could compete, how to get new customers, and where to compromise.

SOLUTION

PREVIEW LANDING PAGE

Black Friday customers are notorious for price shopping ahead of time to compare prices, deals, and plan out their shopping route. On Black Friday through Cyber Monday (11/29 - 12/1), the purchasing team decided to push hardware bundles, loss leaders, service discounts, and high margin products as stocking stuffers, tech gifts, and impulse purchases. By posting our deals on subreddits, digital ads, and social media, the hardware bundles and loss leaders drove new customers to our site to find deals and explore the website to look at what else was available.

TRADITIONAL & DIGITAL MARKETING

In 2018, Central Computers only used newspaper, b2b display ads, and Facebook ads. In 2019, the team used local newspaper ads, Facebook ads, social media (including Reddit, a new channel), digital display ads, and email marketing.

• Organic social media, display banners, and email campaigns drove potential customers to the Black Friday Preview landing page.

• One Facebook campaign retargeted every customer that viewed the preview page and showed them the hottest deals. The other campaign targeted each individual store location to target every potential customer in the area.

• We hired an SEO agency to optimize our e-commerce pages to drive additional traffic and exposure to local customers.

IN-STORE DISPLAYS

The marketing team made a strong emphasis on the importance of impulse buy areas, in-store displays of balloons, tags, and signs, and posters. This way, all customers who visited the retail stores would be drawn to the bright colors, posters with sale information, and signs directing them to the best deals.