Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

Instead of throwing a party that lasts one day, figure out how to endear your pharmacy to the community. For example: spend your advertising $ instead on donating to local schools or offer (free) wellness classes in-store (yoga, etc.).

I agree with Jay. Expanding on that, you could have a customer appreciation month where you hold drawings for gifts each week and match that gift with a like donation to the appropriate non-profit.

Being out in the community certainly helps. People like to do business with a reputable independent pharmacy that can provide them with the convenience and prices of a chain store but familiarity of a family friend.

It's not accurate to say a strategic marketing event is a one day "party". You can get mileage out of a single event by making sure you get press attention, foot traffic and collect names/addresses for a marketing list.

Have something like a health fair with the suppliers of your OTC items and the local blood bank or hospital/clinic. Invite them to park their bus or van in your parking lot or in front of your business to do donations or screenings. Have the OTC vendors set up nearby especially if people have to wait in line. Or, partner with a local church or charity to do a summer food drive (pantries are emptier this time of year).

Then, leverage it by running ads in the local paper, talking to the local paper about running a story or partnering with them to be a sponsor. Talk to them about a press release - sometimes it's a waste of time. They may write it up just by you calling them.

Talk this event up to every organization in town. Spread the word with flyers in your store and info on your website or Facebook page. Make sure you take photos that you can publish on Facebook and/or the web.

Make sure you do a drawing or a giveaway to collect names for future promotions and marketing.

Put a booth outside your pharmacy and partner with a doctor and offer free medical/physical check-ups/consultation. Distribute discount coupon booklets and fliers to the community. Offer free nutrition seminars. Do this once or twice a month. Advertise it weeks ahead so that many will hear the news.

Regarding the discount coupons booklet, print in each coupon the name of the OTC medicine which has discount. You may also want to write down the dates when they can avail of the discount.

Another promo could be: for accumulated receipts worth $$$, customers could avail of a freebie.

Offer a membership card for a fee. The membership card will also serve as a discount card. Or frequent buyer card that earn points every time they purchase in your pharmacy. Points can be converted into cash amounts to be used in purchasing items in your store.

Hope these suggestions help.

It is a good idea to have a customer appreciation day.

The best way to do is dig deeper. What are the customer pain points? The fact of course is that there are very less of pain points, but you will be able to harvest a lot of "peeve points" What do they wish you would do. It is amazing, how much customers can tell you if you are really interested?

We work for a 75 chain of pharmacy outlets. And we found that one of the biggest peeve points was the CRM program. The calls by the CRM team never coincided with the needs of the customers and so most customers were peeved. They liked the initiative but would have been thrilled if the alignment happened better. When we worked in cracking the problem, the results were astounding.

Don't look at ideas from outside. The best way to express appreciation is "genuinely" addressing one or a bunch of peeve points. Identify them. Create a mechanism for addressing them consistently. And then create the buzz for the program. And most importantly, put the metrics in place. Or else, you will end up creating more future peeves!

All the best.

Product bundling for certain products that are usually bought at the same time, feminine pads with feminine wash, vitamins and an energy drink, etc. you can request help from your suppliers to provide you freebies for this project.

Create a loyalty card for your customers, since it is a "town" pharmacy, the regular townsfolk should frequent your store more that the other pharmacies outside of town. If they increase their purchases and visits to your store they earn points that can translate to instant non-cash prizes for them after each visit with a purchase of 10 dollars or more.