SMALL BUSINESS SATURDAY
It’s an annual shopping tradition dedicated to supporting small businesses and celebrating communities across the country. Founded by American Express in 2010, Small Business Saturday is celebrated every year on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Every year, American Express continues to support Small Business Saturday and provides promotional materials for individual businesses and neighborhood champions. Find out more here.
Huntsville - Why I Love Shop Small, Shop Local
Written by Debbie Charbonnueau, Huntsville Main Street Manager
I absolutely love this campaign and was thinking one day of how I could make it a little bit better for my downtown businesses.
So, I came up with the idea of doing it for the entire month of November, and doing a “blow out” on Small Business Saturday as well.
Here’s how it worked: participating businesses paid $25 per 100 tickets, which they ordered to distribute to their customers for every $20 they spent. I wasn’t out to make a profit, but it helped with the printing of the tickets. I ordered 1,000 tickets since I didn’t know how it would be received so I only ordered enough tickets for 10 businesses to participate.
Well, to my delight, that didn’t last long because I had 10 businesses that wanted to participate within two days, so I had to order more tickets. I ordered 1,500 more. There were a few more businesses that came in, but many of the first 10 original businesses were having to order more tickets because they were running out – now, that’s a great “problem” to have, right?
So, for every $20 a person spent at a business they got the chance to enter one ticket into the drawing. There were some businesses that sold large antique pieces sometimes at $500, so right there that is one person that had the opportunity to enter 25 tickets.
I was so amazed at how well received this program went over for our Huntsville small business owners. Everyone was really happy and it gave the community and our guests something new and different, and I know it brought more people to downtown that had never been downtown before – that always makes me happy!
So, the end result for our downtown was that we distributed 2,248 tickets at $20 each which meant an economic impact of at least $44,960.00 in one month!
There would be one ticket drawn for the lucky winner! The winner would receive $1,000.00 in gift cards. Here is a picture of our lucky winner and she was so happy and was headed to a downtown business to spend her money!!
Happy “Shop Small” and “Shop Local.”
Kilgore - Shop Small, Win BIG Golden Titcket
Written by Sonya Waters, Kilgore Main Street Manager
The retail campaign that we just launched in Downtown Kilgore in the lead up to Small Business Saturday. Attached is the Press Release, and we had a huge response from local media already, which is super exciting!
The most exciting part of this campaign is that we have 25 downtown merchants participating!! We haven't had more than 10 downtown stores participate in anything for the past probably 3-4 years. We've got stores participating that have never wanted anything to do with the Main Street Program before, all because we made it so easy for them to participate. We've done a lot of the leg work on it but they have all contributed to the prize and put up the signs in their stores and are telling people about the campaign.