Educate customers on green practices & help ur bottom line

Posted on by wrote in Blog.

It’s time for everyone to do their part for the environment. Your company is doing its part — here’s how you can involve your customers!
You know you follow green practices and your employees know you do it as well, now you need to show potential customers that you follow them – it could help you add more green to your bottom line! Green marketing isn’t just a phrase, it’s a marketing strategy that can help you attract more customers if you do it correctly.

For a green marketing program to be effective, you have to do at least three things – you need to give your customers the opportunity to participate, educate your customers and above all, be genuine in your practices.
  1. Be “real” in your practices; it’s more than a matter of letting people know you’re doing what you can to protect the environment. You have to let customers know you are truly doing what you claim to be doing in your green marketing campaign and you need to have your internal business practices align with whatever your company is doing that is environmentally friendly. If you meet these criteria, you will be able to establish environmental credentials that will make your green campaign successful.
  2. If your company is undertaking green practices, you need to let your customers know why it matters. You don’t want your customers looking at your marketing materials and saying, “so what?” when it comes to your green practices. Your campaign won’t gain traction if you haven’t told potential, and current, customers why it matters.
  3. You know you’re green but why not give your customers an opportunity to participate in your “green-ness?” tell them about message on hold players that utilize the internet or email for delivery of their on hold messages. You can personalize the benefits of the environmentally friendly practices that you practice. If your business has stopped using plastic bags for customer purchases, your customers will obviously see that change, but do they know that it takes close to 1,000 years for a plastic bag to decompose? (educate your customers about this) You can incorporate this fact into your marketing campaign. It’s not enough to do away with plastic bags though, you need to practice recycling in all aspects of your business.
  4. Your customers will know – just by the simple act of your having gotten rid of plastic bags – that you practice what you are preaching about green practices. By shopping at your store, your customers are taking a small step in protecting the environment by not letting a plastic bag go into the landfill. You can reinforce your customers’ decision to do their part for the environment by offering them cloth bags that they can purchase.
The best thing you can to do promote a practice is by actively participating in it. Another way to promote your environmentally friendly practices is by spreading the word electronically (like your on hold messages) – do away with paper coupons, snail mail letters, invoices and post cards. Offer your customers the option to show you their coupon via their smart phone or by a code you’ve emailed to them that they can input at check out time. Reducing the amount of paper your company generates is another easy-to-implement business practice.
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