What are you looking for in a dive shop?

[waitressvn]

I am looking for idea's to help my local dive shop in these tough economic times. The owner is a close friend and she looks to me for advice. We plan trips, set up charters, teach many classes, and hold a meeting once a month to bring people in and we speak about a different topic each week. We are also in the process of setting up an online store. One current problem is we have many customers who come in ask many questions and then show up a week later and show us the gear they bought online, per our advice. Its kind of frustrating, so not sure how to prevent this or at least lessen it. So what I am asking is what are you looking for in a dive shop?

[McHow2]

People are looking for good and reliable service when they select a dive shop. They also look for the 'personal touch' in a dive center. Only youngsters don't mind how big and unpersonalized the service is as long as it is cheap. These are not the people who are likely to come back to a dive shop since the are traveling and moving on and will be somewhere else next year.
What you are looking for if you're thinking longterm are divers who you can get personally involved with. People can go and dive anywhere today but once you've built a personal relationship with your customers, they are more likely to come back to your dive center or your liveaboard safari. One way to achieve this is to have an attractive website to start with and then you need to collect your customers email addresses to be able to send them newsletters and 'happy birthday' emails.
The reason is obvious, not only are you getting personal and show that you care about your divers but you also make sure your existing customers are going to recommend you to their friends and relatives.... and that they come back to YOUR dive center and not just go down the road because diving is the same with the other company.
Make sure you know what's going on in your dive center by using a software like DiveShopManager which is able to collect your customer data and send newsletters with links to your website as well as birthday emails. You will get more visitors to your website, your Google page rank will improve and your search engine position will get better over time, thus bringing you more new customers to your dive shop.
It's easy, just do it.

[Davidlyle]

Just do it!

[McHow2]

Originally Posted by Davidlyle

Just do it!

Just do what? Diving?

[Davidlyle]

Do diving or do what you advise.

[McHow2]

Originally Posted by Davidlyle

Do diving or do what you advise.

Thanks for the clarification David. :-) What business are you in? Diving industry?

[Davidlyle]

I do something about SEO and SEM. Just like what you say in the post. Help some web site improve its pave view. Make customers' web site be in the search engine result pages and son on.

[McHow2]

Originally Posted by Davidlyle

I do something about SEO and SEM. Just like what you say in the post. Help some web site improve its pave view. Make customers' web site be in the search engine result pages and son on.

Ok, Let me know if you need some help somewhere. We are specializing in internet marketing for dive centers and we are pretty successful with it.

[Davidlyle]

Originally Posted by McHow2

Ok, Let me know if you need some help somewhere. We are specializing in internet marketing for dive centers and we are pretty successful with it.

Ok. Thanks!