Marketing Your Retail Store in the Internet Age is the sort of business book we at Retailing Together are thrilled to find because, like The Profitable Retailer, this book teaches core marketing principles in a format that any retailer can understand and use immediately. Bob and Susan Negen don’t name those principles, probably to ward off the stench of academic textbooks, but RT is less prudent: this is a book about the Acquire-Convert-Retain model of customer relationships, with specific tips on how to use the model online and in-store. While Retailing Together can give our readers an overview of the Acquire-Convert-Retain model, the Negens offer the best collection of specific tactics for retailers. 

Acquire-Convert-Retain is the process of turning people into lifelong customers, and, as its name implies, there are three steps:

• Acquire: Get people to come into your store.
• Convert: Get people in your store to buy something.
• Retain: Encourage past customers to be continuing customers.

It seems dull when described that way, but the Negens have packaged this critical concept into a readable book with a twist for the modern Internet age: all of the business tips come in traditional “Low-Tech” tactic form and Internet age “High-Tech” tactic form. The combination of market best practices, traditional tactics, and sound advice for Internet marketing make Marketing Your Retail Store an important guide to modern retailing. 

Throughout the book, there are so many little bits that we love:

• A chapter on why advertising doesn’t usually work for independent retailers.
• Advice on writing marketing copy.
• The “Key Concept” sections.

As social marketing and new media junkies, the staff of RT gets a bit choked up when consultants from an ancient industry like retailing so thoroughly demonstrate their comfort with the changes that interactive media and other aspects of moden life have made to marketing, such as the notion that consumers want more personal, two-way relationships with businesses:

One of your challenges is to find genuine, authentic reasons to communicate with your customers. . . . This is why you must become a broader resource for your customers. . . . Become a trusted expert.

Becoming a trusted expert is the most important reason for a retailer to start a blog or add tips to a website: people buy from people they like and trust, and the Internet makes it very easy for retailers to demonstrate their knowledge of a set of products and deliver that information for free to potential customers. 

While the book is based on solid principles, there are some minor weaknesses. The high-tech tips are dead-on in spirit, but readers should not assume Marketing Your Retail Store is actually about online marketing. The book really excels at a more fundamental level, so while the high-tech tactics are generally all true, they aren’t the tactics that a dedicated Internet marketing expert would have chosen as the most important. 

For instance, the section on “14 Points to Consider When You’re Building Your Website” is true"all 14 points are good advice"but the points aren’t really the best places to start. Having your contact information on every page and using common words are fairly minor points and would not make the list of most Web marketers. The same deficit is true in other sections, resulting in little information about blogging or search engine optimization. 

The book has one other interesting omission. While it covers how to promote a store to attract potential customers, and it covers how to get existing customers to purchase more items and purchase more frequently, it does not address the task between those poles: how to get a potential customer to make the first purchase. Of course, making that first sale is a matter of salesmanship, which arguably is not an appropriate subject for a book on marketing. Since sales is a topic covered in great detail elsewhere, the omission may be interesting but also entirely sensible. 

These deficits are very minor relative to the quality of the book and don’t detract from its value to retailers, who simply need to look to other information that is dedicated to Web marketing to get a complete picture. Marketing Your Retail Store is, however, an excellent place to start, covering a broad collection of the best tactics in Internet marketing. We certainly can’t fault the Negens for being retailers first and Internet marketing advisors second. 

As a final bit of praise, we should admit that while writing the Retailing Together Marketing Primer and Guide to Building Customer Relationships, we spent a lot of time with Marketing Your Retail Store, particularly with the table of contents, trying to understand how the Negens packaged some sophisticated marketing concepts into a very readable book. Because of that, you’ll find that Marketing Your Retail Store and the Retailing Together guides fit together very nicely as an overview of core marketing concepts and a set of detailed advice on how to use those concepts to develop a profitable retail business.