The number of recent active customers (who bought within the last year) had been declining for the past 5 years. Competitive pressures had been building and customers perceived us as a high-priced specialty catalog, certainly not their main supplies source. The institutional sales had also been declining significantly in the past few years. I’d say we were a bit discouraged and looking for ideas on retaining our customers – getting across that while we are very high end we are very competitively priced.
John Miglautsch came in and looked things over. He helped us implement a competitive pricing analysis system. We found that we needed to adjust, especially in some of our core purchased products while showcasing our manufactured products.
John also thought of a way to offer and package our products as samples at dramatically lower prices than we normally offered. He walked through our manufacturing plant, the warehouse and suggested a way for us to dramatically lower our production costs on a few items. John insisted that from day one, all the sample orders must make a profit… this could not be rolled out if it were simply a loss leader. The results were dramatic, it gave us a great up-sell to steer customers into our core manufactured products. Prospects responded in the thousands to our space advertising. In the first six months our recent buyer file increased by over 75%!
John Miglautsch has been involved in virtually every phase of our company. His expertise in creative has been invaluable. He reviews our mailing pieces, ads and even store flyers. Often he gives us just the little tweak that makes all the difference. We’re working with him on refining our space analysis. His years of experience in B-B helped us shore-up our outbound telemarketing and we experiencing a great growth in this channel. John is truly a marketing expert – his understanding of how business functions and with providing numbers and meaning to those numbers is exponentially different then an advertising department that performs “spray and pray”. John is truly a professional in every way.
Daniel Smith is now positioning for increased growth and profits. Work has become much more exciting with John’s involvement.
John Cogley President, Daniel Smith Artists’ Materials
To contact Miglautsch Marketing, send E-mail to John Miglautsch, phone us at 262-369-3900.