Cool tech for garden retailers

Subject: Quick Idea to Boost Your Marketing Performance

Hi Elizabeth,

I hope you’re doing well. I came across your company and wanted to reach out briefly. We work with marketing teams to help streamline campaign execution, improve reporting visibility, and drive stronger ROI through our technology platform.

Many marketing leaders we speak with are looking for better ways to consolidate tools and gain clearer performance insights without adding complexity. That’s exactly where our solution fits in.

Would you be open to a quick 15-minute call next week to see if this might be relevant for your team?

Best regards,

[Name]

[Title]

[Tech Solution to End All Tech Solutions Company]

[Phone]

[Website]

Does this look familiar to you? Not sure about you, but my inbox is inundated with messages just like this one several times a week. And no. I’m not open to a quick call. I don’t have 15 minutes for you. I really don’t.

Cold calls and emails do not convince me to buy a product or service. But last spring, I started to think about what does. Under what circumstances do I make the investment, start the subscription, hire the agency? And I realized that every solution I’ve employed has been discovered by me doing my own research in response to a problem I’m trying to solve on my own timeline, or it’s a solution that was recommended by an industry peer or adviser.

So, I gathered some of my solutions-oriented besties at Cultivate to share our favorite tools in a panel called “Cool Tech for Retailers.” For those who couldn’t make it, I’m sharing the tools we love and why they can move the needle for you.

Please note: This article has not been sponsored or endorsed by the companies I’m highlighting here. I’m just a fan. When I find something that works, I’m ready to tell the world about it. Hear-ye, hear-ye! May you be as happy with your tech solutions as I am. Let’s go.

A tool for when your customers are confused about when you are open.

Did you know there are hundreds of online publishers that list your business hours? Did you know that MapQuest is still a thing, and that people use it to get directions to your business and find out when you’re open?

I didn’t — until I did. An upset customer shared a Mahoney’s business listing from MapQuest that showed hours that were correct in the spring but woefully outdated for January.

Sigh. Another platform I needed to update whenever we changed our hours for the season ... times seven ... for the seven Mahoney’s locations. We were already manually updating Google, Yelp, Apple and our own website. When would it stop?

I despaired until I discovered Yext. Yext does a lot of things, but my favorite thing it does is that it allows me to update business hours in one place, and it acts as a source of truth that pushes out our business information for more than 100 other publishers, including Google, Yelp, Apple and, you guessed it, MapQuest.

In my opinion, Yext or something like it is a tool that every business with seasonally changing hours needs, whether you have a single location or stores all over the country.

Gone are the days of 1-star reviews from customers who drove all the way out to us only to find out we were closed. Peace at last.

A tool for connecting with your customers a little differently.

Kate Terrell, owner of Wallace’s Garden Center in Bettendorf, Iowa, loves TapOnIt, a tool for sending text messages (with images!) to her customers.

She says that text marketing through TapOnIt has become her top revenue-generating channel because it reaches customers instantly and has a 98% open rate. It's also easy to personalize, automate and scale, and she can measure the results easily and optimize her campaigns.

Wallace’s uses text marketing for sales and promotions, customer loyalty programs, sweepstakes, e-commerce, gift cards, event promotion, and even employee communication.

The program has led to lifts in transaction count and average ticket that Wallace’s is able to track and measure.

A tool for keeping your team on the same page.

One of my very favorite tech tools available to retailers is ConnectSpace, an employee intranet tool created by BoomerWrangle and available through the Proven Winners Connect+ Elite subscription.

When I was at Rockledge Gardens in Florida, we were fortunate to be among the first garden centers to adopt this tool. It was a massive game changer for team communication.

Everything we needed our staff to know about our company was finally in one place. From our POS manual to our delivery fee schedule and anything else we could think of, we now had an effective and efficient system for getting information to our staff.

We’ve recently brought this tool to Mahoney’s, where the size of our organization makes a tool like this invaluable.

The real super users of ConnectSpace are the folks at Down to Earth Garden Center in Wisconsin, where co-owner Sarah Polzin has leveraged this tool to make her team some of the most knowledgeable retail associates in the business. Beyond internal communication, Down to Earth employees its “DTE Space” for education and training as well as trackability with forms, jobs and KPIs.

ConnectSpace is highly customizable, but it can also be pre-built with tons of product training sourced directly from your vendors, ensuring that frontline team members have the knowledge to help your customers succeed on their gardening journey.

A tech tool you probably don’t think of as high-tech.

Finally, everything that’s old is new again, and my very favorite tech tool that you probably wouldn’t think of is your public library. Last year, I had a 10-minute impromptu conversation with my local librarian and learned that I was sleeping on some pretty high-tech value offered by these amazing institutions.

Thanks to the public library app Libby, I far exceeded my goal of reading 20 business or personal growth books in 2025 because I was able to breeze through them during commutes and cleaning with free audiobooks on Libby.

I also learned that most public libraries (including mine) give you access to LinkedIn Learning for free! LinkedIn Learning is an online education platform that offers on-demand video courses taught by industry experts to help build professional skills.

For garden centers looking to offer training in leadership, strategy, basic accounting or other technical or soft skills that would be valuable to new and seasoned managers alike, this is a cost-effective (read: free!) way to connect your teams with the basics.

The tools above didn’t win me or my colleagues over with cold emails or unsolicited phone calls; they solved real problems. They’ve saved time, reduced confusion, made my team smarter or helped us drive revenue in a measurable way.

I’m curious, what are you using that the rest of us should know about? What tool makes you want to stand on a rooftop and shout, “Hear-ye, hear-ye!”? Let’s keep the good stuff circulating.

Liz Lark-Riley is a writer, speaker and leader who is passionate about growth (for plants and humans). She is the senior customer relationship manager at Mahoney's Garden Center in the greater Boston area.