Driving Demand For Gemstones All Year Round

It is a common characteristic of the gemstone and jewellery business that some times of year are far busier than others. Christmas and Valentine’s Day are two of the biggest holidays, along with Mother’s Day. These holidays offer plenty of opportunities to attract customers and increase sales, but that’s not enough to keep your small to medium size business afloat for the entire year. What you need is to find a way to drive demand for gemstones all year round.

Something new for each month

Start by looking at the calendar year in a month by month way. For each month, take a look at any holidays you might emphasise (even if they are small or specialised). Build a plan around what you find, being creative in how you combine coloured gemstones with traditional white diamonds to attract customer attention and promote the purchase of fine jewellery.

For example, let’s look at January. This tends to be a slow month thanks to the post-Christmas let down from consumers who have spent a great deal of money on presents for that holiday. To help keep business moving in January think about promoting events such as:

• New Year Inventory Clearance – Making way for new gemstones and jewellery means you can entice customers to come in looking for good prices on existing inventory
• Twelfth Night Celebration – Celebrate the new year and traditional midwinter festival with a brightly coloured gemstone necklace, bracelet, or earrings. Make your window really shine

Another great way to drive demand each month is to celebrate birthstones.

These are just a few examples of ways to look at each month and find reasons to promote and encourage gemstone purchases of all kinds, whether big, small, or somewhere in between.

Birthstones and seasonal celebrations

Birthstones and the seasons of the year are two other terrific ways to promote gemstones and attract business year round. With the creative use of coloured gemstones and other interesting jewellery pieces you can keep customers coming back for more.

Birthstones are a really good fit for monthly promotions; let’s look at January once again as an example. The traditional birthstone for January is garnet, but the zodiac birthstone for Capricorn is ruby. Later on in the month comes Aquarius, which also has garnet as its birthstone. Take advantage of opportunities to present both garnet and ruby as birthstone options in jewellery such as earrings, bracelets, necklaces, or rings. While there may not be huge numbers of people with birthdays in the month of January, with the right kind of promotion you can make your business the “go to” place for gifts for those who celebrate a January birthday, or any other month for that matter.

Another way to promote demand year round is to take a seasonal approach. Use various shades of coloured stones to go along with the seasons of the year. For instance, emphasise yellow and orange sapphire, and opal in spring and emphasise aquamarine, and sky blue sapphire during the sunny months of summer. Follow the same pattern for autumn and winter, choosing combinations of coloured gemstones and diamonds that reflect the dominant colours of the season.

Please leave your comment below or read other peoples’.

Building Customer Relationships One Gemstone At a Time

There are lots of ways to attract customers and make sales, if you have an unlimited advertising budget and are willing to spend it freely.

Relationship-based sales

As a small to medium sized business you have a tremendous advantage over your larger competitors and that is the opportunity to build customer relationships and create long term customer loyalty. You see, instead of just being a “number” walking in the door you have the ability to spend more time with each customer, getting to know them better and learning more about what they like, dislike, and are interested in knowing more about.

The more you get to know a customer, the more you can personalise the gemstone buying experience for them. You can offer specific gemstones that match their preferences (and their budget), and you can also offer suggestions for gemstones and combinations they might not otherwise have considered. The goal is to satisfy each customer so completely that they leave your business with strong positive feelings about the entire purchase process.

Even if the person decides not to make a purchase at that time, the time and attention you pay to a customer (and the personalised service you provide) is well worth it. Why? Because when that customer eventually does decide to make a purchase, the friendly and personalised attention they received from you makes them far more likely to come back to you to make their purchase.

Relationship sales is a long term investment

The most important thing to remember about relationship sales is that it is a long term investment in your business. The goal is to make the ongoing relationship a priority, building it up and strengthening it one gemstone at a time. If you can capture the loyalty of a young customer buying their first gemstone, as they move through life they’ll tend to come to you first the next time they are in the market for a gemstone. And each time they buy from you it’s a fresh opportunity to strengthen that loyalty further, thereby increasing your long term prospects for keeping them as a long term customer.

The key to successful relationship sales is to find ways to strengthen the relationship between sales opportunities as well. For instance, make it a policy to provide free cleaning of rings and other gemstone jewellery, anytime and with no questions asked. This encourages your customers (and even non-customers) to visit your store often. They appreciate the opportunity to keep their jewellery clean and sparkling, and you have the chance to treat them in a friendly, helpful manner. What’s more, they have a chance to browse around the store for a few minutes while their jewellery is being cleaned.

The bottom line is that relationship sales is a long term investment, serving each customer one gemstone (and one encounter) at a time. Each customer should be treated in a friendly and personalised way regardless of whether they are there to buy an expensive or inexpensive gemstone, or simply to browse and look around a bit. This is the kind of investment that will set your business apart from your competitors and keep it going strong for years to come.

What strategies have you put in place to build relationships with your customers that work? What have you tried that didn’t?

Please leave your comment below or read other peoples’.

Visit at the Aqua Ruby Mine, Tsavo, Kenya

Guillaume Soubiraa and Philippe Brunot returning from the deep of the Aqua mine ruby mining trench using the mine crane. Video courtesy: www.fieldgemology.org

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JigBhqvtXJA

FEWER BETTER THINGS

‘Our lives are full of things. Disposable distractions, stuff you buy but do not cherish, own yet never love. Thrown away in weeks rather than passed down for generations.

Perhaps things will be different now. Wiser choices made with greater care.

After all, if the fewer things you own always excite you, would you
really miss the many that never could?’

Cynicism aside De Beers have finally put out a message that resonates.  If we implement this philosophy in what we do and how we do it, the jewellery trade can rise out of the mass produced, over inflated, poorley made mindset that has got so many into trouble recently.

Have pride in your work, choose quality gemstones and craftspeople to make your jewellery and  pay attention to detail.  Sell better things and more will come.