Summer is around the corner and that means Mothers Day, Father’s Day, Memorial Day, graduations and July 4th. Or perhaps it’s a slower time of year for you. Either way, get ready with these tips.

Put the sizzle in your promotions – Click the “Ideas” button in Step 2 when designing your offer to access great promotional ideas. You’ll find our hand-crafted, attention-grabbing headers for Mother’s Day and every holiday this summer.

Re-commit to growing your email list – Did you know Fanminder now enables you to send offers to your email list? The crush of business during summer holidays means renewed opportunities to capture email addresses from new and existing fans. The fastest way to do this is by giving your fans a BIG offer for giving you their valuable email address. And don’t forget to replenish those paper forms or add a countertop fishbowl. Above all, ensure your staff is motivated and monitored to ask every single fan for their email address.

Use a Fanminder Theme – Make your offer stand out from the crowd by choosing from dozens of unique and attractive themes, including four new summer themes.

Summer-ize each promotion – Combine a summer theme with your product or service. So you can sell “Wine for Backyard BBQs”, “Tire Rotations for the Classic Summer Road Trip”, or giveaway “Free Sunscreen with Purchase”. You get it.

Take the Road Less Traveled – Celebrate more, ahem, unique holidays like Nerd Pride Day (5/25) or Men’s Health Week (6/11).  Just click the “Ideas” button on Step 2 of Design Your Offer.

Dress up the rest of your marketing for summer – Add summer pictures and brighter colors to your website, marketing brochures, and signs.

Test new price promotions – If summer is a slow month for you, test out a “10-15% off month of June”.

Get up to speed on summer events in your neighborhood – Summer’s a time for festivals, street fairs and carnivals in towns across the country. Identify those events and their dates so you can take most advantage of them. You can bring your business to those events by renting a table. Or simply plan to soak up traffic by holding a sidewalk sale or placing banners in your window when car or foot traffic are the highest.

Food + Event = Summer Customer Appreciation Day!!! ‘Nuff said.

Fly the Flag – Besides demonstrating your patriotism, you’ll draw passerby’s attention.

Give a summer gift – haven’t you ever picked up that free summer beach bag at Macy’s? You can giveaway a gift card, or some other package, a guidebook, better servicing – whatever would be appreciated by your fans.

Lazy Friday Afternoon – People love goofing off of work on a beautiful summer afternoon – so give them a reason to do so! Hold an extra-early happy hour or special sale between 3-5pm on a Friday.

Need Help? Call us 800-335-0520

More ideas from around the web:

startupnation’s 9 Sizzling Summer Marketing Ideas

OneIms 7 Summer Marketing Tips

The U.S. Small Business Administration’s 5 Hot Small Business Summer Marketing Tips

The Fact: Somewhere between 16-20% of all emails are opened solely from mobile devices (sources: Return Path, Knotice). Critically, this grew 50% from last year.

This means that unless your email is automatically configured by your service provider to look good and work well on a phone, then you risk 1 in 5 of your customers not seeing and acting on it.

O’ Faithful Fans of Fanminder, it’s been a wild February. We officially launched Version 2 by announcing it to prominent business and technology blogs and publications. In the same announcement, we officially shared our awesome investor roster and our torrid growth rate.

The pickup has been fantastic. Our favorites:

• Small Biz Trends placed us in the #1 slot on their home page. Small Biz Trends is the #1 small business blog in the U.S. Read it here.
• BIA/Kelsey is one of the very top, most respected Local Commerce Analyst firms. Mike Boland is a top analyst and had these things to share about us.

You can read the original press release here.

Dear Customers,

Fanminder 2.0 has launched. With so many features and changes packed into one release – with no change in price – we want to give you a full run down of what’s changed.

New Features

Offers Gallery™ – Simply select from 8 different promotions such as Coupons, Alerts, Specials and more – and go.

Offers Wizard – We walk you through a step by step process complete with a preview of what your offer will look like on the web and mobile phones as you design it.

Bright Ideas™ – No more guessing what to send since we give you hundreds of different seasonal and holiday promotional ideas to select from.

Themes – With our new Themes, you can primp, preen and design each offer just the way you like it. We’ll be adding more every few weeks.

Stunning Mobile Offers – Every offer automatically comes with it’s companion mobile-perfect page for in-store redemption. And we’ve made redemption tracking optional.

Tons of Flexibility – We’re giving you loads of options to trick out your offer:

• 6X the amount of text to communicate what you want (400 char).
• “The Fine Print” lets you add restrictions we suggest for you.
• Add a different photo for each offer
• Expiration date is now optional.
• Location is optional.
• Send your offer to as many Facebook Fan Pages as you own (but they must all be linked to a single personal profile).

Say Goodbye to…

Blasts – Blasts are replaced by the 8 different offer types. Every offer has all the original features of Blasts PLUS more flexibility and more features. You’ll also note the Blasts graph and Blasts history was removed and replaced with superior tracking. If you want to see your old blasts, please call us.

Text Message Mailbox – This feature didn’t see much usage so we’re removing it to simplify the experience and focus our value on sending promotions.

Thank you for being our customer,

The Fanminder Team

We’ve long believed that your Fan Club represents the cheapest and easiest way to build steady, repeat revenues. And the more fans you have, the more revenues you’ll get. Make a three to four month commitment to follow these time-tested membership-boosting basics:

Basic #1: Give fans One Big Reason to join

It all starts here. Offer a weak incentive, get fewer sign-ups. So don’t skimp with 10% off coupons or weasely “come back next time to use it” restrictions. Give your fans a compelling reason to do what you want right while they’re in the shop. Read tips on how.

Basic #2: Give fans more ways to join

With only 1 in 5 fans ever opening your emails, maybe it’s time for other methods. We might be a bit biased here, but try collecting mobile phone numbers since your fans sign up on their own and you get 97% of texts opened within 15 minutes of you pressing ‘send’. Or ask fans to “Like” your Facebook Fan Page by pulling out their phone, finding your page, and clicking like right on the spot – all for a big special of course!

Basic #3: Make staff involvement mandatory

Sometimes, buy-in isn’t optional. And few requests go over as poorly as asking staff to push something. Properly explained and backed up with training, contests, and enforcement, your Fan Club should be viewed by staff as a critical enabler to recognize and reward good fans as well as paying their salaries. Nothing is more important to your Fan Club’s success.

Basic #4: Market it everywhere

Ditch the fishbowl already! Promote the heck out of your Fan Club with banners, table tents, take ones and lots of other signage we make for you. Use your social media profiles, advertising, events, and even a fun sweepstakes to roll out the red carpet.

Basic #5: Don’t make your Fan Club the Yeti of your Marketing

The second biggest mistake we see is business owners who go through the trouble to collect all this information but fail to regularly send out special offers. Make it a habit to send one simple offer, special or announcement about something exciting at least twice per month. You can even use the calendar and its timeless holidays and wacky new celebrations to ease your brainstorming. You’ll train fans to expect news and goodies from you and stay top of mind.

Ya know, it’s actually this simple.