Rocky’s Cigars: Cigar Retailer

Focus:

Mike Glynn bought Rocky’s Newsstand and Smoke Shop in 1986 and built the business into the largest lottery and cigar establishment in upstate New York. During the cigar boom of the 1990s, Mike was able to position his business, Rocky’s Cigars, as Upstate New York’s resource for extensive varieties of cigars and cigar smoking accessories.

Mike recognized that the cigar market was fiercely competitive on price and selection. To counter this, he chose to focus his value on customer service and building a stable, loyal customer base. Rocky’s Cigars’ previous web development company wasn’t providing the service Mike needed. “We had a website with a shopping cart, but no control over it. Our web vendor wasn’t responsive when we wanted to make changes. Sometimes we had to wait two or three days for changes to be made, and that just wasn’t good enough.”

Solution:

Mike signed up with Cazbah in July of 2005. One of the big selling points was, and still is, Cazbah’s dedicated Account Manager. “That’s a big deal for me,” says Mike. “It’s important that someone knows my business, responds to my needs and gives me the one-on-one attention I feel that I deserve.”

Cazbah built Rocky’s Cigars a new dynamic database driven website that went live three months later. With Cazbah’s reporting metrics, Mike is able to learn what sells and how to purchase products that meet inventory and customer needs. “Now I understand not only which products sell best, but which are most profitable – data that wasn’t available to me before.”

Bottom Line:

For Rocky’s Cigars, Cazbah’s effective digital marketing strategy has lead to significant improvements in the business climate. Cazbah helps Rocky’s control inventory and avoid out-of-stock products. Rocky’s Cigars is moving toward keeping inventory for those products with the highest profit margin. “I want to move from developing more sales to developing more profit,” notes Mike. “Since 2005, our website traffic has more than doubled,” said Mike. “Email campaigns have seen consistent and promising response as well.”

Cazbah worked with Rocky’s Cigars to convert the business to an accounting system that would accept direct imports of website data. “I am now free to work on building revenue for the business rather than dealing with time-consuming business operations, reported Mike.”