The Flower Shop Birthday Club – Running Your Own Shop Advertising Tip

By Debra Cary

 ***This is the seventh article in a series of 100 articles on floral designing and how to run a flower shop.

Join our Birthday Club! The club is open to all ages. All you have to do is stop in the shop and fill out a birthday club application. This is how it usually begins. This gets a prospective customer in your shop maybe for the first time. When it is their birthday and they must come in to pick up the free gift; that gets them in the store for the second time. This is a great opportunity to promote other store offers or just get them to explore your shop while you are getting their flowers ready. 

A birthday club in a flower shop is an advertising technique that need not cost a lot of advertising dollars; although, this probably will work better in small town rather than a large city. I suppose in large city giving away a free flower vase for every birthday person that signed up could get out of hand number wise. In a large city you would want to have a drawing for a daily winner of the birthday flowers. A florist will always have three carnations, greens, filler flowers and a ribbon to spare; or maybe a vase of daisies. This is an opportunity to show some shop creativity. 

Have people come in and sign up for the birthday club. Buy a spot on your local radio station. Call it “The Birthday Club”, sponsored by your shop. Once a day, or once a week, submit to the radio station the names of the birthday recipients. On your radio spot, preferably at the same time every day, the DJ will announce the lucky birthday people or person. The lucky person will then have to come to your shop, usually they bring friends with them (great for advertisement), and pick up their flowers. 

The flower birthday club is a very social and up close personal to build your business. You may feel you would like to do this type of promotion with balloons or a balloon bouquet. Your radio spot will always be a chance for you to promote a seasonal holiday as well. People will tune in to your radio spot to see if they won or hear their name or their friends name on air. It’s a great community thing!!