Online Marketing Plan or How Teddy Bears Pay $30000/month Rent

I just came back from a family vacation in New York.
Ahhh, New York at Christmas is wonderous. And it was snowing and everything so we had a great time.

Mind you, flight travel with 4 kids that can’t sleep on flights is not the best way to start off a vacation (not by a long shot) but it was all worth it.

I’ll leave the flight story for another time.
What I wanted to share with you is a story of a couple of days before Christmas while we were just showing the kids the great fun stores in Manhattan.

You know, the M&M store, the Disney store ….

In the midst of all the excitement I found myself with all 4 children and my father in law on 5th Ave. in a huge store that sells teddy bears. They sell all sorts of stuffed animals actually but teddy bears are their main thing.

Now my father in law runs a local business in Manhattan so after a while he says to me ‘I don’t get how they manage to pay rent for this place selling teddy bears. The rent is probably $30,000 a month at least’.

I’m not sure how much rent they actually pay but seeing the size of the store and since it’s in a prime location on 5th Ave. I’d bet they pay a huge sum, maybe even more than $30,000.

So how do they do it and what’s it got to do with online marketing?

Well, their marketing funnel is so good I think you need to hear all about it and create one just like it for yourself.

So as we’re walking through the store I notice that at the counter no one pays the $10 or so a teddy bear costs. What I could here were things like ‘oh that will be $69 sir’ or ‘that’s $85 madam’. It seemed no one left the store with just the stuffed animals. They were upselling all the time.

But there were no sales reps anywhere to be seen. All the staff was there to entertain the children and help if asked. No one pushed the sale.

And then my eldest boy, Tom, asked if he could pick a teddy bear just to play with while at the store. The minute I said yes I entered their marketing funnel.

I didn’t realise it yet, but I was knee deep in their buying process. Even though not a sales rep was seen, they had these signs everywhere that steered you along the sales process.

Here’s what the signs in the store steer you towards:

1 – pick an animal
2 – go to the stuffing machine and have a friendly staff person help you
3 – name it and register it so they can have a birth certificate ready when you go to the next step
4 – adopt it (aka take it home and let dad take care of the bill)

But the real marketing genius happens once you stuff the animal.
Next to every stuffing machine there’s a box of small hearts. Just a simple small heart made of cloth.

Once you get to the stuffing machine, the person there stuffs your kid’s animal, takes a heart and asks them to rub it against their own heart so as to give it a pulse, they ask them to kiss it and also to make a wish.

They then take the heart and put it in the animal.

I remember smiling and saying to my father in law that it’s genius – they make an emotional attachment between the kid and the stuffed animal. I remember thinking those poor parents won’t know what hit them.

Because once there’s an emotional attachment, price will be irrelevant.
Once there’s an emotional attachment, the sale has already been made.

It’s a small thing easily missed if you’re just browsing and not taking part in the stuffing.
But that small thing is HUGE.
I was looking at the other parents thinking this, not realising that I was one of them!

Boy was I floored once we decided to get going.
Once we were ready to leave, Tom would not budge without his teddy bear. It took me 15 minutes of convincing to make him let go of all the other merchandise he had for his new teddy bear. We only ended up paying $10 for it, and not $70 with all the merchandise.

But the thing is, he would not budge.

What started as just browsing, looking and having fun, was sealed as a deal when that little cloth heart went into that stuffed teddy bear.

OK OK I had fun too. Their sales process was so amazing and it was so much fun, that I had a really good time.
Yeah I know, it sounds real lame, but I learnt a lot and you should too.

Imagine tweaking your sales process so that when someone gets to your site just to browse, they end up as a customer more times than not.
Imagine tweaking your sales process so that you create an emotional attachment with the people that come to your site.

When you do that, you can charge almost anything. Price will be irrelevant and your sales figures will shoot through the roof.

In many ways, going into that store and seeing the sales process first hand was my Christmas gift.

And now you too understand how they can pay so much rent selling nothing more than teddy bears

I suggest you take a minute next time you buy whether online or not, and try to look at the marketing funnel the store puts you through.
Your online business will thank you for it.

So that’s my Christmas story. How about you? Anything interesting you found out that will help online business? Put your thoughts and comments below