Retail is a fast-paced, ever-changing world where you can't sit still and you're only as good as your last sales report. But, having done retail marketing for most of our 50+ years, we've found a number of retail marketing strategies that work on a fairly consistent basis. Here are seven successful strategies you can put to work almost immediately.
1. Fish when the fish are biting. Sure, this one seems like a gimme, but that doesn't make it any less true. Over the years, big retailers have trained consumers that there are specific times that they can expect to get the best deals. The natural holidays are number one on that list with a bullet. And the biggest two are coming up soon: Black Friday/After Thanksgiving and After Christmas/New Year's.
The down side of this is we've trained customers to wait for these sales, the upside is that they truly believe these are legitimate sales opportunities and are in a spending mode. Make sure you're putting your best offers out there during these time periods or at least have offers that can compete with your competition.
2. Add Pressure Points to your sales. Whether you're in the middle of a big natural holiday sale or an off-time ordinary sale, adding a pressure point can create added urgency and drive extra traffic into your stores. The idea is to pile an additional or better offer onto your sale for a short period of time, usually one or two days (although I've seen the local furniture retailers go as far as to have a one hour pressure point). This just amps up the consumers and gives them a reason to shop now. You can put your pressure point at the beginning of your sale to start the sale on a high note. In the middle to give it a mid sale boost or at the end to wrap it up with a bang. Experiment with these timings and see what works best for you.
3. Extend your TV budget by using 15-second spots. In a previous post, our Media Director Buffy O'Connor,details six ways 15-second spots boost your media budget. It's a strategy that has worked well for our clients for years. The main thing it does for you is add more frequency without adding additional cost. If you buy two :15's within the same commercial break and have them at the beginning and the end of the break, not only does the consumer see your messaging twice, you have a better chance of catching them if they skip the ads or get up during the break.
4. Use your data to segment your customer base. Even if you're a smaller retailer, you can use your database to separate your customers into different buckets. This allows you to target customers by specific needs and customize your messaging for each group to give them the most compelling reason to buy now. You can also find who is most likely to buy again and seek out look-alike customers for prospecting new buyers. Just be careful to not just rely on industry-wide data. As we've found, sometimes an individual retailers data doesn't match up well with what the larger pool of data is telling them.
5. Make sure your sales offers match what the customer wants. For instance, 0% financing has long been a staple of the promotional arsenal for large ticket retailers (furniture, automotive, appliances). But in the research we did for some of our clients we looked at how customers wanted to pay for their purchase. We found that in some cases, less than 20% wanted the 0% financing option. So, rather than putting all the promotional eggs in one basket, we create promotions that offered a choice: financing or some sort of cash off incentive (a certain percentage off, cash back, $XXX off, etc.) This gave customers who wanted financing an incentive to come in and customers who wanted savings options a reason to come in. And with the big combined offer, it made the who event seem like it had a lot of reasons to shop now.
6. Use targeted TV buys to find the right customers. We have found that using this marketing strategy has increased retails sales as much as 20%. With the new media buying tools available you can segment your consumer database, find the shows that each particular audience is watching and target them pretty much like you have been able to target your digital media buying before. So, if you have s specific product that will appeal to a specific audience, you can figure out exactly what shows they're watching and only buy those shows.
Those are just a few of the marketing strategies we've used that work well for our retail clients. We'll share more of them in future #RetailerTuesday posts. Have you used any of these? How have they worked for you? What other retail marketing strategies have worked for you? I'd love to hear about them.
Mike McClure, strategically thinking about work
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