I get restaurant menus, flyers, and coupons in the mail quite regularly. Judging by their marketing efforts, I’m guessing most of these new venues won’t last more than six months. Typically, the places sending out flyers are nowhere near my apartment, or they’re priced too high, or they’re too generic to justify switching from my favorite establishments.

With this in mind, here are some things that every restaurant should do when sending out a mailer:

- Pick a sensible geographic area. It’s a waste of time and money to blanket the whole city with flyers, when your customers are likely to live within a few miles of the restaurant.

- Explain why people should give you a try. In today’s economy, people have finite restaurant budgets. So, trying a new restaurant probably means snubbing an old favorite. If your food is better or fresher or different, make that clear. If your atmosphere is nicer, throw in some pictures to prove it.

- Include a coupon or discount offer. Unless you’re Rick Bayless, simply announcing the new restaurant opening probably won’t attract enough customers to pay the bills. By providing a financial incentive to give the place a try, you’ll get a lot more customers in the door and help build word-of-mouth.

Granted, these tips still won’t help you overcome a bad location or bad food or an oversaturated market segment. But if you do have the basic ingredients for a successful business in place, telling people about it the right way should vastly increase your chance of success.

Some stores have a dedicated “customer service” desk to handle things like returns and exchanges. When nobody has a transaction like that, the register just functions like any other checkout lane. Other stores do away with the notion entirely, and let any register handle special transactions. But is getting rid of the customer service desk really a good idea?

Normally, I’d say yeah, it’s better for shoppers if they can go to any register to do a return. However, my experience last weekend in a clothing store changed my mind. I went in there to exchange a shirt that was defective, and saw huge lines at all the checkout areas. Surely, I figured, they had some area dedicated to returns and exchanges. So I asked an employee, and she told me I’d have to wait in the same humongous line as people who were making regular purchases.

Well, the wait ended up being pretty short, since the checkout people were quite efficient. But I still felt snubbed that I had to wait in line again due to the store’s own screwup with quality control. All else equal, if you’re going to eliminate the customer service desk, you should at least designate a triage area for returns and exchanges during really busy periods. It doesn’t have to be fancy: just choose one or two checkout lanes and instruct the staff to call out for returns before they take regular sales transactions. That way, customers won’t feel like you’re penalizing them for having the misfortune of getting a defective product.

Many services are easier, faster, and less painful when the customer invests in a little bit of preparation. For instance:

- If you’re having your carpets cleaned, try moving the furniture out of the way beforehand.

- If you’re going to the dentist for a cleaning, try to brush right before the appointment.

- When you’re buying groceries, try helping the cashier pack the bags, rather than sitting back and doing nothing.

In each of these cases, the customer and the service provider are better off when the customer shows up prepared. They each save time, money, and hassle — or some combination of those elements — when the customer takes ownership in the process.

How can service providers get customers to chip in? Just tell customers what you’d like them to do and what’s in it for them. Sure, some people will ignore the suggestions. But others will take the hint and do what you’re asking. And as more and more people invest in improving their own experience, these behaviors will spread to a larger and larger portion of your customer base.

Virtually every public transportation system has signs in each train car, bus, and station telling you which behaviors are prohibited. For instance, you’re not allowed to panhandle on a train. But I frequently see people going through the train cars — and even hopping through the emergency exit doors — to beg for change. Never once have I seen police or security staff try to enforce the no panhandling rule. This makes me wonder: do the warning signs help at all?

The panhandlers probably don’t care about getting arrested, or feel confident they’ll never be caught, or are so crazy that they believe they’re trapped in another universe and are collecting change for their interdimensional trip back home. Either way, the widespread violation of the posted rules underscores the need to enforce them more effectively. If that’s not possible, I believe you’re better off not bothering with the empty threat that the signs represent. Get the funding for proper enforcement first, so the signage actually means something.

On Sunday, I walked into a retail store with a handful of printouts from the retailer’s website. This particular company provides no way to check which products are carried in stores versus online, let alone any type of inventory status for one store versus another. Anyways, after browsing the shelves and talking to several employees, I learned that none of the 5+ products I printed out was even carried in the store.

In an apparent attempt to follow a script that the corporate office provided, each of the staff members tried to give me other options. They could check another store or order the product to be shipped there. I declined the first option since the nearest store would have been quite a walk, and declined the second option because I wanted to get something right away. 8-10 business days, as they stated it, isn’t exactly what I had in mind.

This underscores the importance of providing instant gratification for retail shoppers. People don’t walk or drive to your store just to talk about the product and then have to go somewhere else — or wait more than a week — to actually obtain it. They visit the store to see the item and take it home right away. Anything less, and most people would probably prefer to buy it online.

So what can stores do if the product is out of stock or simply isn’t carried in retail inventory? For starters, help customers find the closest substitute so they have at least one option for taking a product home that day. If the product is available at another local store, offer to have it couriered over to the first store — or delivered to the customer’s home — the same day. And finally, if you’re faced with the last resort of ordering it for delivery in a week or so, make it worth the customer’s time to wait. Give them a discount on the order, or throw in a $20 coupon for next time. Not everyone will take you up on these offers, but the added revenue from those that do should help make the efforts worthwhile.

If you’re a regular visitor to a certain store, it’s easy to tell which customers have never set foot in there before. These first-time shoppers walk through the door slowly, stop in random places, and generally look rather confused. Some stores put a lot of thought into the “decompression zone” just past the doorway, so why not segment this further and create a holding pen of sorts for first-timers?

To accomplish this, the store could provide a little nook or endcap targeted towards new customers. Start with signage that says something like “First time here?” Next, include a very basic map of the store, and a list of the top-selling product categories — the latter designed to show which products keep bringing customers back. And finally, use the opportunity to explain your pricing approach. In other words, do people need a loyalty card to get the best deals, and if so, how can they sign up?

In the limited swath of retail stores that I visit regularly, I don’t recall seeing any attempts to better educate first-time shoppers. However, I’m sure that some retailers have tried it out, and I bet this approach helps convert more first-time visitors into paying customers.

Over the weekend, I updated my Southwest account to include the extra info for the TSA SecureFlight program. The idea is to ensure that the name, date of birth, and gender that you give to the airline match up exactly with your driver’s license, passport, or whatever other identification document you present at the airport. Presumably, this reduces the chance that you’re mistaken for someone else who has the same name, but is on the terrorist watch list.

Dubious benefits of this program aside, I am puzzled by one aspect of how Southwest implemented it. When they ask you to enter the extra data, it says it’s a “one-time” opportunity and you only get “one chance” to update it. Sure enough, once you click Save, there’s no way to edit the info.

Granted, your date of birth can’t change, and I imagine that very few people undergo a sex change that would result in them having a new gender. But the name field presents an issue. What if you get a new ID that lacks your middle name, or just shows a middle initial? What if you start traveling with your passport instead of your driver’s license? Surely there should be a way to update your SecureFlight info.

This is probably an issue with TSA rather than Southwest itself. But I’d really like to see Southwest provide some details about how you can change your info later. Otherwise, I suspect many people will be scared by the apparent permanence of the changes and just skip the process of entering their info — thus defeating the purpose of the program in the first place.

The following scenarios have a lot more in common than you might think:

- You decide to try an online grocery service, so you visit their website to get pricing info. Each delivery is only $4.99. Your time is worth way more than five bucks, so you buy the week’s groceries online.

- You arrive at a foreign airport and need to exchange some currency. You ask what their fees are, and they say it’s a flat rate of $3.50 per transaction. Sounds like a good deal, so you give them $100 USD to exchange.

So far, so good. But what happens next? In my experience, you’re in for a nasty surprise.

- Aside from the delivery fee, the online grocer marks up every item 20-50% higher than what a regular store charges.

- Separate from the service charge, the currency exchange tacks on several extra percentage points — in their favor — when calculating the exchange rate.

What’s going on here? These businesses are engaging in a form of bait and switch. They lure you in with the promise of a very reasonable, flat rate price. Then, since you’ve already agreed to what you think it’s going to cost, it’s much easier for them to sneak in more charges. In my examples, the companies do this by inflating the prices for the core goods and services, making a ton of extra money along the way.

How can you avoid getting caught in this trap? One approach is to check the total cost and compare it to the alternatives — before you mentally commit to doing business with a company. In a perfect world, these businesses would have to provide clear, upfront disclosures of the true cost of their products and services. But since that probably won’t happen anytime soon, we all need to be on the lookout for sneaky companies that hide one fee behind another.

While walking through a busy Trader Joe’s on Saturday, I found myself in a conversation about whether the store is a better deal than places like Jewel-Osco. As anyone who reads this blog could guess, my answer was an overwhelming “yes”. I told the new shoppers about how I save at least $100/month versus any other stores in downtown Chicago, and they seemed pretty happy with the endorsement.

Basically, the prospective customers were asking me a very simple question: why do you shop here? If you asked 100 people that question, you’d probably get 100 different answers. However, I bet many of those responses would make for great testimonials. So why don’t more stores ask their repeat customers for this sort of info, and then make it a key part of their outbound messaging?

Restaurants already do a great job of this: any decent place will have a wall full of reviews, and some restaurants may even include customer quotes in the mix. Online retailers also make extensive use of testimonials. If you ask me, local stores need to adopt the same model. Find out why people shop with you, select the most convincing responses, and get big signs printed up to tell the world why your store is the best place to shop. My personalized testimonial helped bring a new customer into the Trader Joe’s family, so just imagine the impact that information would have on a larger scale.

When you’re designing for the web, perhaps the most basic rule is to make hyperlinks look different than the rest of your text. Some people take this too far, and try to think up new and often ridiculous visual treatments for their links. Blue and underlined suits me just fine, thank you.

Even worse than going overboard with your link style is going out of your way not to have a link style at all. I came across this very problem while looking for warranty repair info on the Samsonite site. Some genius at Samsonite made the links in their body text identical to the rest of the text. In other words, the links are black, non-bold, non-underlined — just like all the other text on the page. If it wasn’t for a few crudely placed “click here” phrases, I wouldn’t have known there were links on the page at all.

Obviously, this is a terrible approach. Visitors should be able to instantly discern where the links are within a page, rather than having to hunt for them by rolling over each piece of text with their mouse. Perhaps the person who designed the Samsonite website has never used the web before, or some careless person changed the CSS file without testing a single page afterwards. Either way, violating such a basic convention of web design is a surefire path towards low task completion rates and pissed-off users.