Foursquare provides several ways for jewelry stores to engage with mobile customers. Each method requires that you claim ownership of your jewelry store's venue before the business tools are unlocked for you. Please go back and read yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget if you don't yet have jewelry store venue on Foursquare or don't know how to claim ownership.
In today's Nugget I'm giving you some specific examples for using the various Foursquare marketing tools. Casual users of Foursquare won't immediately recognize Foursquare as an advertising vehicle, instead they will view it as another social media platform where they interact with friends, check-in to places, and occasionally get fortuitous rewards for their check-ins.
For you Foursquare is a way to casually expose customers to your store or brand in a non-direct marketing approach.
In the past Foursquare limited your marketing ability to check-in based rewards. Check-in rewards are specials you can offer users simply for checking into your venue from their smartphone. Today you can employ Tips and Updates in addition to more flexible check-in rewards.
Let's cover a few of these...
Foursquare currently has 5 different types of check-in specials: Swarm, Friends, Flash, Newbie, and the normal Check-in Special. Each of these are designed to attract new customers. They also have check-in specials to reward existing customers through the Loyalty and Mayor Specials.
As a jewelry store it would probably be pretty difficult to attract enough check-ins to take advantage of the Swarm and Flash specials.
For jewelers in a high foot traffic area, like a shopping mall, you could try using the Friends Special. This check-in type requires at least 2 people to check-in together.
On the other hand the Newbie Special is good for a customer's first check-in. Customers can see all the specials nearby when they explore through the Foursquare App. This Newbie Special could work to attract extra foot traffic into your store with a simple offer of a free jewelry cleaning and prong inspection. This one is good for the first check-in only, then after that the consumer would be eligible for a different special if you set them up.
You could create a simple Check-in Special that's available with each check-in, but my feeling is that, for a jewelry store, this one will have little benefit for you because you don't want to give away your store with continual specials.
The Loyalty Special could have some value for you because you can set the reward to activate after a certain number of check-ins. This one can be repetitive. The basic setting allows you to unlock the reward with every 3 check-ins, but you can also set it to unlock only on the 3rd check-in, or when a customer has checked in 3 or more times in the last 7 days.
An example of a Loyalty Special would be an offer of 10% off a purchase for that day. You can apply any restrictions to the offer to protect certain branded merchandise, like Pandora Jewelry.
The Mayor Special is popular on Foursquare with many venues, but I think you should stay away from this one. Customers won't check in enough times to claim the Mayorship of your store, and if any of your employees check-in they might inadvertently block this special, so just skip it.
Once you create a special it will stay hidden in your Venue profile until you activate it. You can pause it and rerun it again at a later time too.
Another feature I like about Foursqaure is the ability to create Tips. Normally Tips are created and posted by users of Foursquare, but savvy venue owners can tap into these as well.
You should create a tip for your venue on a regular basis. Tips could announce each time you get a new jewelry style. The tips with dates and deadlines are most intriguing because they represent current events that someone could take immediate advantage of. You should also upload a photo to go along with the tip because it adds a sense of reality to the tip and shows the user what they might miss out on.
The final marketing idea I have for you involves sending out Local Updates to take advantage of people who like your venue. Foursquare provide 3 different ways to identify users who like your page: those who like your venue through the app; those who like your venue through the website; and those who check-in multiple times to your venue.
Once customers actively start checking into your venue you should publish regular Local Updates. The Update will appear inside the Friend Feed of the app. Foursquare's Friend Feed is like the News Feed on Facebook and the Stream on Google+; it shows all the recent activity from your friends.
Through a Local Update you can announce limited "Foursquare Only" specials that offer something good in exchange for coming to your store this week and checking in. Very few people will take advantage of the offer, but those who do should be considered as extra sales that otherwise wouldn't have happened. Don't be afraid to experiment with extravagant offers.
Foursquare represents their likes with a little heart icon (like Tumblr), rather than a thumbs up (like Facebook). It's not very obvious for the user to find because it's not clearly labeled in the app. If you're going to send out Local Updates then you need to tell your customers to like your venue. You can put a sign in your window, behind your counter, tell customers in person, and of course, create a Tip through your venue.
Contact me if you need help with any of this or you can visit my Foursquare Ambassador page at http://join.4sq.com/matthewperosi
