A shop I know has, as many of you do, a fishbowl drawing as a regular, on the sales counter feature.
You know
“Put your name in the bowl and once a whenever, we’ll draw a name for something-or-other.”
Problem is, no one’s turning those slips with contact information on them, into a marketing tool. A mailing list. To tell these people, who are already at least a bit familiar with your shop, when the next sale is, how they can consign/ sell/ donate, why, in short, they should stay on the line so to speak.
What a waste. Their leads are walking out the door.
They’re the “fish” you caught… and never reeled in.
Don’t be as silly (and as lacking in loyal regulars) as that shop whose name I won’t mention.
Auntie Kate The Resale Expert 
I was actually going to use the fishbowl idea (and yes, put that info into a database), but I also have gone into a few “antique” shops (and boutique fabric/fiber stores) that had guestbooks where people could put down their information for upcoming sales. I thought about adopting that idea as well.
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Glad to see you’re always thinking, wscottling! But a fishbowl for a drawing AND a guestbook would be overkill. Plus, using individual slips as in the fishbowl-as-drawing idea keeps their email etc “private”… folks WILL NOT put their email on a guestbook, where “anyone can see it”, nowadays.
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You’d be surprised! I saw just such a guest book at a tourist trap this last August when visiting the Grand Canyon, and it was full of names, addresses, telephone numbers and yep, emails.
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Hey, I’m not here to tell you what to do or not do… just to suggest that there are repercussions! We are all SELF-EMPLOYED because we want to do things OUR way… which is something me and Frank Sinatra are in TOTAL agreement with!
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