I was thrilled to get this email from Brian Staebell, marketing director for Roxy's Music, and wanted to share it. Brian clearly gets what we're trying to do with Shop Batavia.
I was very excited about Shop Batavia when you showed it to me and even more after getting in and seeing how easy it is to manage your products and business listings. I’m looking for ideas where we can help each other promote our businesses together. I think if Shop Batavia is successful, we’ll be successful. We’ve already seen sales through the site. We received one direct order for a music stand and another customer saw our guitar starter pack on the site and decided to stop in and buy it. Reaching out to the the local market through shopbatavia.com is an additional avenue to promote our business in conjunction to our existing website. Being able to drive sales both online and in store is very important to us, this service does that and more. So far, Shop Batavia has been successful for us.
As I said before, when Shop Batavia came along, I felt like it was an unexpected gift -- a great chance to create a new revenue avenue for The Batavian so we can continue to grow the business. But I also was excited because Shop Batavia brought to local businesses some really powerful marketing tools -- tools that through other avenues can be difficult, confusing and/or expensive, but here they were in one place, affordable and accessible.
The real power of Shop Batavia, though, will be realized when we have widespread participation from local businesses. The more businesses using Shop Batavia, the more local residents will want to use it as a shopping guide, restaurant guide, community bulletin board, business directory and online shopping mall.
All boats will rise together -- for local businesses and for local residents.
It was great to read Brian's email and see that he understands the success of Shop Batavia isn't just about success for a business venture of The Batavian's, it also means a success for his business, for all the local businesses it serves and for the people who use the site to shop local businesses.
If you haven't checked out Shop Batavia yet, click here. Nearly 100 businesses have already signed on for accounts and there are new products, services and savings available every day.
