CONNECT: The Connection No Algorithm Controls

Why your garden center app matters more as search and social change

For years, the path to your garden center ran through someone else’s platform. A customer searched, and a search engine sent them to your website. You posted, and an algorithm decided who saw it.

That path is shifting — and it’s a good reason to take a hard look at the direct connection your customers have deliberately chosen.

At The Garden Center Group’s Fall Event in Cleveland, we shared a direction built around three ideas:

CONNECT. ANSWER. GUIDE.

Last week’s Sunrise newsletter looked at ANSWER. This week, we’re focusing on CONNECT — and how the garden center app acts as the hub that brings all three together.

THE GROUND IS SHIFTING UNDER YOUR WEBSITE

AI-powered search is increasingly answering customers’ questions right in the search results.

Someone asks when to plant garlic, gets a useful answer and never clicks through to the garden center website that could have answered the question — and mentioned the seed garlic that just arrived.

That doesn’t make your website less important. But it does mean customers may increasingly get information without ever reaching it.

Email still works, but it competes with a crowded inbox. Social media depends on algorithms determining whether customers see what you post.

The app is different.

A customer who installs your app has deliberately chosen to stay connected with your garden center. You don’t need a search engine, social algorithm or another platform to make the introduction every time you want to reach them.

The app creates a direct connection with customers who have already chosen you.

WHAT CONNECTION LOOKS LIKE IN PRACTICE

Think about one of your regular customers.

On Thursday morning, a push notification lets her know that fall mums and pansies just came off the truck, accompanied by a short video from your greenhouse manager.

On Saturday, she comes in, and her member benefit gives her another reason to feel good about being part of your garden center community.

In October, a quick poll asks what she’s thinking about for next spring — natives, edibles or a pollinator garden. A few hundred responses later, you’re learning what customers are interested in before the next season begins.

And when she reaches a new reward level, the app recognizes her loyalty.

None of these moments is remarkable on its own. Together, they keep the customer involved with your garden center between visits — when relationships can otherwise begin to fade.

LOYALTY FOR WHAT THEY BUY — AND HOW IT TURNS OUT

Traditional loyalty programs reward customers for what they buy.

Rewards still matter. Years of running Bonus Bucks taught us how powerful recognition and rewards can be in bringing customers back.

But the app gives us an opportunity to go further: help customers succeed with what they buy.

It can reward the purchase, help the customer make a better decision before the purchase and continue helping after the plant goes home.

That creates a different kind of loyalty — one built not only around what customers spend, but around the confidence and success they associate with your garden center.

And that’s where CONNECT begins working with ANSWER and GUIDE.

ONE APP. THREE WAYS TO BUILD THE RELATIONSHIP.

The garden center app acts as the hub connecting all three parts of the customer experience.

CONNECT keeps the relationship active through communication, content, membership, rewards, offers, events, polls and other reasons to stay involved.

ANSWER extends the garden center’s knowledge beyond the store. The Garden Guide gives customers a place to ask gardening and plant questions, drawing on the garden center’s information along with trusted plant and horticultural resources. Live chat provides another path when help from a person is needed.

GUIDE helps customers move from “What should I plant?” to “What could this look like at my house?” Garden design technology lets customers visualize possibilities for their own landscape and become more confident about starting a project.

These aren’t three disconnected technologies. They reinforce one another.

A customer connects through the app. She gets inspiration from a post or push notification. She asks a question when she needs help. She explores what a project might look like in her own yard. And ultimately, she has another reason to return to the garden center that helped her succeed.

Confident gardeners keep gardening — and they keep coming back to the garden center that helped them succeed.

AN APP IS ONLY AS GOOD AS ITS AUDIENCE

The technology can be excellent, but the connection only has value when customers actually use it.

And app adoption rarely happens because someone sees an advertisement and decides they need their garden center’s app.

It happens in the store.

The most effective app promotion may simply be an employee who has just helped a customer saying:

“Do you have our app?”

Better yet:

“If you have another question when you get home, you can ask us right through our app.”

A signup benefit that can be used that day provides another reason. QR codes at checkout, plant tables and places where customers naturally have questions make joining easy.

Staff participation is critical. If employees understand that the app isn’t replacing their relationship with customers — it’s extending it — they become the people who make the connection happen.

Push notifications also need to be worth receiving. Use them for things customers genuinely want to know — a new arrival, an event, a timely gardening reminder, beautiful weekend weather or something worth making a trip for.

The objective isn’t to send more messages.

It’s to make the connection worth keeping.

FROM TRANSACTION TO RELATIONSHIP

For years, much of garden center marketing has focused on getting customers back for the next transaction.

The app creates an opportunity to stay involved between transactions — when customers are planning, wondering, learning, succeeding and deciding what they want to do next.

CONNECT keeps the relationship alive.

ANSWER makes the garden center’s knowledge easier to access.

GUIDE helps customers imagine what comes next.

And the app brings those experiences together in one place — with the independent garden center at the center of the relationship.

That’s a very different role for a garden center app.

And we think it’s where things are headed.

Want to see how CONNECT, ANSWER and GUIDE can work together for your garden center?

Schedule a demo with Sunrise Marketing and we’ll show you the experience from your customer’s point of view.