Five smart and inspiring tips

Garden Connect’s Edwin Meijer shares his top five smart and inspiring tips on using the advances in technology to increase retail sales.

We’re living in an ever-connected world: the number of smartphones and tablets sold to senior citizens is still increasing and the youngsters have been addicted to their smartphones for years. How can you inform & inspire customers on the go? And how can your staff use smartphones to be more productive?

Smartphone or plastic card?

A lot of garden centres run loyalty schemes and are using plastic cards. Integrating schemes into smartphones enables a new range of features. Customers can register via a smartphone, enter their details and automatically get their digital loyalty card. Your benefits: all customer details are processed automatically while the process at the tills remains unchanged, just scan the bar code from the screen.

What plant do I have?

Good question! Avid gardeners probably know but the average Joe hasn’t got a clue after throwing away the plant label. Having a feature in your app which tells customers what plants they have might make their life easier. It’s easy to use: just take a photo of the plant and the app informs them what plant it is.

Coupons

Forget those expensive paper coupons you send out, send them to your customers mobile. Apart from an annual or quarterly voucher, you could send them time-based offers like Groupon: only valid for a few days. By using customer data you could send a coupon for accessories to everyone who bought a BBQ the last 7 days. Rocket science? Nope, we’re doing it already for a handful of garden centres with impressive results!

Apart from the 3 tips above, which are focused on your customers, Garden Connect also develops apps for garden centre staff and B2B customers. The primary goal is to make existing processes more efficient.

Price & stock check

Chances are highly likely that you don’t have stock control in place (epos system). If you’re one of the few who have, we can provide you with a simple app to scan products and to check stock levels in your garden centre. Easy & simple and even your part time staff can do it just from their own smartphone.

Even more interesting: we show online prices every time you scan a product. So if your customers are complaining about the fact online prices are lower than in store you can just scan a product and match it to dozens of webshops to see what your price level is. It may be too high but chances are yours will be lower. This is a very powerful tool to check if your price level is still ok.

Ordering app

More and more wholesale nurseries want to get rid of all those paper forms their customers complete. By introducing an ordering app multiple nurseries have smoothed their business process. Orders are entered on the smartphone by customers and then sent digitally to the accounting software to be processed. The result? Fewer errors, happy customers and a significant staff reduction saving a lot of money.

All of the above isn’t based on long term trends or ideas: it’s what we do at Garden Connect every day and they are already up & running for multiple garden centres.

Should you wish to have chat don’t hesitate to contact us via www.gardenconnect.com, info@gardenconnect.com or call 0203-4755541.