We are helping newsagents using our Point of Sale software to drive better ink deals by including this ad on receipts. Our customers have control over when the ad prints thanks to helpful tools in the software.  Including this ad, or any ad, on receipts is easy with our POS software. We have created a pack of professionally designed ads for use by our customers. This is a free service we offer to help newsagents using Tower Systems to drive better outcomes from their business.

We had a batch of premium water bottles labelled with our brand for use as a gift at trade shows and conferences.  They have been a real hit with sales prospects, customers and suppliers.

We have used the water bottles to promote our tag-line message of LIFE IS GOOD WITH TOWER SYSTEMS.

We went with water bottles because we wanted a gift which is valuable and genuinely useful.  Since many of our customers are on the go, a quality hot and cold spill proof drink container made sense.  They have been so popular that we have received requests for more.

We have used pens, pads, mouse mats, stress balls, cakes, chocolates and folders as promotional message vessels in the past.

This water bottle is the best on all fronts in my view and based on the reaction from happy recipients.

The image shows how one newsagent is using our receipt promotion facilities to attract customers back to sign up for a magazine putaway.  This image is printed on receipts for sales involving magazines - the software detects that and selects the image based on rules established by the business.

Using the receipt as a conveyance for promoting the business is smart.  We have offered this facility for years.  We’re happy to share the graphics with our customers for their own use.

Using our Tower Systems Point of Sale software, retailers can easily market based on customer’s birthdays.

An email, text mesage or letter can be used to provide a gift voucher or some other item designed to bring the customer back to the business.  The ability to harvest the marketing list is part of the marketing tools in our POS software.

In addition to providing birthday and other marketing tools, we help our customers implement campaigns to increase sales from existing customers.  The key to this is understanding what these customers purchase and to know touch-point opportunities.

Using the marketing tools of our Point of Sale software, retailers are able to easily extract mobile phone numbers from the customer database based on purchase history.  This database can be used by marketing services for mobile phone marketing of the business.

We have customers using permission-based text marketing as well as text servicing in a number of ways to increase sales.

Retailers selling special interest items are excellent prospects for the text marketing facilities we offer, especially if they record their customer’s interests and their sales patterns.  Text marketing enables them to notify their customers of opportunities - an important service when catering to those with special interests.

Text messages serve as instant messages.  They can include deals, promotions, coupons, and more.  They are green alternative to traditional forms of communication such as print advertising and flyers.

In addition to providing the marketing tools software, we will gladly help our customers in how to best setup these facilities and to execute campaigns.  We can draw on the experience of our broader customer community.  This additional business support is free and another example of the Tower Advantage^TM.

Email marketing is easy with our Point of Sale software.  Retailers are able to generate email lists based on customer history with the business.  This facilitates target emails around seasons, products or other criteria.

We have retailers enjoying considerable success today with email marketing thanks to the flexibility of our marketing tools nd their attention togetting the right customer data into the system.

We have published an advice sheet which explains how to quickly extract the email data from customer records managed by our software and how to use this for an email campaign. We can also provide advice on privacy obligations to ensure that our customers do not fall foul of the spam regulations.

Existing customers who have had a good experience are more likely to shop with you again.  Email marketing is a great, low-cost, way of communicating with existing customers, especially if you have a special deal to communicate.

We will gladly help retailers using our software to handle the technical, operational and marketing aspects of email marketing.

The free marketing tips available to anyone at our website generate considerable traffic through Google and other searches.  I checked this out yesterday following contact from a business owner in the US who has had success with some of the tips.  His contact was timely as I am putting together tips for Christmas 2009.  He asked for suggestions in a couple of new areas and showed me how advice I wrote for one type of business is useful in another a different niche.

We have published retail business advice and marketing tips for more than twenty years.  It’s something we enjoy and a way we add value to our customer relationships as well as relationships with the broader retailer community.

Our Christmas 2009 marketing tips should be on the site by Wednesday next week.

We are using our Web Ex online meeting platform more and more in handling sales opportunities.  Yesterday, we were able to demonstrate our Point of Sale  software to a business three hours away from our nearest office which wanted to make a quick decision.

Using the Web Ex tools we are able to demonstrate the software live and engage in free flowing discussion as if we are in the same room as the prospect.   The added benefit is that sales prospects get to experience an important delivery platform in our free user training program.

Our in-house creative team has created more new marketing collateral to help drive mobile phone recharge sales for retailers using our eziPass software to manage selling mobile phone top-up, phonecards and a range of other voucher based products.

The artwork for the poster is available free to our customers for local printing.  We have some stock of A3 posters available which we will mail (free) first come first served.  We will send this in response to an email request.

The Recharge Your Mobile Phone Here poster is another example of Tower Systems going beyond providing software and helping our customers more proactively use the software to the success they achieve with it.

We have released new marketing collateral for our gift shop and homewares software to coincide with the two gift related trade shows in Brisbane and Sydney starting this weekend.

The new collateral includes the new design poster to the left - pitching our gift shop software, hardware, installation, training and support package for $7,995 including GST.  This is a very popular package with gift shops as it provides a low-cost entry point.

The gift shop software package includes: point of sale, lay-by, loyalty marketing, hamper management, gift cards, integrated eftpos, stock reordering and business reporting. Fror customers we provide professional receipts,  account management and the ability to answer queries quickly.

Our gift shop software has been developed specifically to serve the needs of Australian gift shops and homewares retailers.  We understand that we have more gift shops using our software than any other specialist software.

We are proud of our new collateral.  It speaks to key traits of our business of which we are proud: strength, consistency, trustworthiness and value.

Check out our stand at the GHA Home and Giving Fair which starts on Saturday at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition centre at Homebush Bay.  We setup our stand yesterday and took a moment to get this photo before leaving.  It is a proud moment to see so many parts of our company come together for events like this: marketing, support, sales and management have worked on creating a new look for Tower Systems for the gift shop marketplace.  This will be on show this weekend from ouur stand.

As the biggest supplier of software to gift shops in Australia, we use events like this GHA show to meet with existing customers and to pitch to prospects.  If the trade show is like others so far this year it will be tremendously successful for us.

We especially like gift trade fairs because of  the diversity of the businesses of attendees: gift shops, jewellers and newsagents.  Three markets we know well and like.

We are making our final preparations for our stands at gift fairs in Brisbane and Sydney.  Next weekend, we will be at the GHA Home and Giving Fair in Sydney and the Reed Gift Fair in Brisbane.  It has been a challenge to double our trade show equipment and collateral to ensure that we look 100% at each event.

Trade shows are proving to be very successful for us this year, leading to excellent supplier relationships and new customers.

If you find yourself at either of these trade shows please be sure to stop by and say g’day.

Newsagents using our software are able to easily promote the OzLotto jackpot, the largest ever in Australia, automatically on their receipts thanks to a free facility in our software.  Advice sheet G32 at our website advises how to use this facility.

We are helping several retailers analyse sales by postcode for their businesses. The results are truly fascinating.

In one case we are tracking the success of external marketing - for the first time this business can see results directly tied to a recent consumer focused letterbox campaign. This is enabling an accurate assessment of the return on investment in marketing.

In another case we are tracking the word of mouth spread relating to a new product being carried by the business. They are able to track sales and geographic spread of this new product compared to another new product introduced into the business.

Postcode sales data, laid alongside basket and other sales data from a retail business can provide a more useful of the performance of products and categories. We are grateful for opportunities to work with our customers to help them unlock the value of this data.

These experiences add to our understanding of what we can achieve through better data cultivation.  They also show that postcode data is tremendously valuable to retailers.

We are offering ten free movie passes with systems sold as part of our June promotion in the lead up to the end of the financial year.  Last week we mailed details of this offer to sales prospects along with details of other bonus offers to welcome new businesses to the Tower Systems community.  The free movie passes and other offers are our way so saying welcome!

The idea behind the movie passes is that they can be used by business owners to reward employees and to acknowledge that thanks to our software, everyone saves time … which can be used for going to the movies!

The prepaid Visa products which we offer exclusively in our channel directly through our point of sale software are being promoted by 3 Mobile at the moment in newspaper advertisements.  This promotion extends the reach of the prepaid Visa offer and helps our retailers sell cards and top-up services.  The deal we have negotiated is that there is no stock cost for our customers and no setup cost.  This means that the prepaid Visa offer is a great bottom line booster and another way Tower Systems is adding value to the relationship we have with our retail partners.

We operate four gift shops through the retail arm of our business.  They provide a live testing ground for gift shop software development as well as other business initiatives.  Below is a copy of the latest customer newsletter we have produced for our Sophie Randall business.

This has been developed out of our Tower marketing department. This talented team, through their work with our retail businesses, is honing their skills and is therefore better equipped to help our retail customers build their businesses.  The newsletter speaks to the professionalism of Tower Systems and reflects what our customers can expect from us.

Click here to download a print ready copy of the poster the Tower Systems creating team has developed for our retail partners to use to promote consideration of spending the federal government’s stimulus package locally.  Click on the image for a larger copy on your screen.

If there is other material our creative team can develop to help connect your business connection with the stimulus package please let us know.

We are grateful to have the resources and creative capacity to help our customer community in this way.  As retailers ourselves, we understand and appreciate the value some suppliers bring to a relationship by going the extra mile.

Feel free to share the poster around. 

The JAA trade show in Brisbane yesterday and today is proving to be an excellent opportunity for us with plenty of prosopects and existing customers talking with us.  Business at the show has been good.

Nathan Morrison (pictured) from our Sydney offfice and Luke La from our Brisbane office were both kept busy talking with jewellers and other retailers at the trade show who stopped by our stand.

While there are differences in between the marketplaces we serve, retail is retail.  We learn tips and techniques at tradeshows like this which can have application in all marketplaces when implemented in our software.  This is why we are grateful of the opportunity to participate in so many trade shows.

We are proud to be a financial supporter of the NSW Newsagent of the Year Awards to be held later this month.  Hosted by NANA, these awards recognise initiative and success by nretail and distribution newsagents and their staff.

With around 600 newsagents in New South Wales using our software, it was appropriate that we support the channel which has been and continues to be so good to us.

The Awards night will be held on March 25.  We will be there with bells on as they say!

The first two days of the Reed Gift Fair in Sydney have been very busy for us - as was the Melbourne Fair a few weeks back.

We have met plenty of gift and homewares shop owners as well as newsagents.  We also met several newsagents with two shops - a newsagency and a gift shop.

The mood of the fair is upbeat.  Suppliers and attendees are talking about good results being achieved in their businesses.

I am glad we made the decision last year to participate in so many gift fairs this year.  They attract quality attendees from several retail channels.  This makes the event efficient for us.  Unlike other trade shows, attendees at gift fairs tend to stay for two or three days and this helps us close business at the event.

The photo shows Tim Batt adn Nathan Morrison, part of the team we had on hand at Gift Fair to asnwer questions and demonstrate our software.

I am in the middle of a trip around the country this week covering six capital cities in five days. This kind of trip is as valuable as a retailer spending time at the counter serving customers. Outside of the formal workshop presentations there are conversations about business, our software and our services, what exists and what could be – with customers and with people who use other software.

I am grateful for the opportunity of these conversations which are invaluable in shaping our business. The experiencing is demonstrating the value of dialogue between software and existing and ponential customer.  But not formal business meeting dialogue - no, this is dialogue about business with software in the background.

Even though the sessions I am running are not about our software, in the first two days I have already picked up some excellent ideas on how we can enhance our software to add more value.

The other aspect of this contact which is exhilarating is the opportunity to bridge the software and the business in which it serves. The sessions, like others we have run, connect some dots and show how software backed by a passionate commitment to the user community can leap out of a user manual or a technical training session and become genuinely useful and relevant for a business owner.

This is what unlocks the reverse opportunity and it is through this that we unlock opportunities for more points of difference.

Loyalty marketing is back in vogue with independent retailers like newsagents, jewellers and gift shops – our marketplaces.

For the last couple of years we have seen retailers dabble with loyalty marketing but nothing like what we are seeing in 2009.  This year, loyalty marketing is serious.

In 2009, loyalty marketing in retail is about real rewards for real loyalty, adding real value. Not the fake added value of FlyBys and some other corporate loyalty programs. Small business owners I have been talking with recently are keen for innovative value based programs which really help drive their businesses.

These retailers, the small business owners looking for real value in their loyalty marketing programs, are the retailers I really like dealing with. They want to redefine their businesses around and exciting and innovative value proposition. They want to push what our loyalty marketing software can do. It is exciting to see and be part of.

We have excellent loyalty marketing facilities in our software but they can be better.  This renewed focus in 2009 will help us achieve that.

We are two days into the four-day Reed Gift Fair in Melbourne, our first trade fair for a busy 2009. The first two days have been excellent for us – plenty of new leads as well as meeting with existing users.

The mood on the trade show floor is very positive, many business owners we spoke with talked about good trade through Christmas and since.  People are certainly at the fair to buy stock and other products and services for their businesses.

We have seen plenty of gift shop owners at our stand as well as newsagents. This dual market coverage underscores the value of the fair for us and makes our investment worthwhile.  We are also appreciating another opportunity to talk with suppliers as we extend the reach of the EDI standards we have established with others in the gift and homewares channels.

The fair runs until Tuesday this week - if you are in today or tomorrow be sure to drop by and say hello.

I have organised 5 WAYS TO KICK START YOUR NEWSAGENCY, a two hour workshop packed with business building ideas for newsagents for 2009.  The workshop will run in central locations in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and Canberra early next month.  It is free to attend.   No sales pitch, just good business ideas. 

All newsagents are welcome regardless of the marketing group to which they belong or the software they use.   This session is about neither - it is about providing practical business building initiatives any newsagent in any sitaution can implement today. 

Click here to download the flyer with dates and details.  Alternatively, book online at the Tower website - plus you can have the website update Outlook calendar.