Marketing

Are you ready for Valentine's Day!

This year,  IBISWorld forecast predicts Australians will spend $1.09 billion on Valentine's Day, the average Australian consumers are expected to spend $43.61 on someone special. If so to give you a feel of its size, that is about 40% of  Boxing Day.

I believe it as when I look in google trends and put in Valentine's Day, for Australia over the past five years, you will see this graph which shows that there is a lot of interest, comparable to previous years.

So I hope you have some plans to take advantage of this interest.

One point I can assure you is that you don’t have to be in the chocolate or flower industry to win some of that business.  We have a client that sells a lot of mobile phones on that day so try to find an angle.

Start off here and see in your point of sale software, how your existing stock goes for Valentine's Day and ask yourself do you have this stock?

The report I recommend you look at is the Top N stock report which gives you among many other details the top-selling items.

Go to Register Reports marked in green.

Select stock and now you will see two reports, click the one on green first. The purple you should hold in memory as you may need it before placing an order.

Now select last year, for this date until Valentine's day (see yellow arrow)

Here I would suggest looking at the top 40 items, which for most shops should be plenty.

Now you will get a report with your current stock on hand figures to see how your shop looks stock wise for Valentine's day. You also have supplier's details too which you can investigate with the Top N stock report by suppliers that I spoke about above.

Another idea to consider is I did this report for last year, it's a good idea to do it for other years as well.

Now gather the items together as Valentine’s Day is known for having plenty of last-minute shoppers. So you need to make easy for them to find appropriate goods in your retail store. If possible make it a spot in the shop with plenty of red.

Happy Valentine’s Day retailers! And happy selling! 

It is an excellent marketing idea to create a sale on a specific theme. Doing so will make it easier for people to relate and grasp your promotion.

There are many, and they are all the time. Piggyback on holidays such as Mother’s Day, Father's Day, ANZAC day, etc as themes.

You should also consider piggybacking on *unofficial* holidays.

For example, I am a huge coffee drinker, so an advertisement like this, in a shop that sells coffee is something that I can relate too.

Why not do something similar. Look for the holidays. It does not have to be an official one that relates to your business and use it as a hook to draw people.

Click here for a list of unofficial ones

We are the only point of sale system. I know that has data mining so our users are lucky that can drive through their tons of data unaided for free. 

With margins so low now in retail, you need every help you can get to gain those few extra percentage points that make or break a business. 

Today business is about data and analysing.

Here is one example, SMB has a significant problem with setting up sales targets that are reasonable as who has time to go through every stock item and make a sales budget. Yet if these sales budgets are:

1) If they are too high soon, no one pays attention to them

2) If they are too low, then its no challenge, what people tend to do here is once they make the budget to stop.

What can help drive sales are targets that are challenging and believable?

Well, our clients have an automatic system that can do that now. It is the focus number. It will give you a reasonably good idea of what sort of movement you can expect from every item in your shop. It is a weekly budget.

Here is how you set it up.

It is easy to set up, and use for details click here.

With capable software, you can assess your stock sales better. You can see what you did right and what you did wrong this week.

For details on how to do this, please, click here.

As unbelievable as it seems, 2019 is almost over and its time to start detailed planning for 2020.

The problem here is that many of the next few holidays are traditional, which means many use the old lunar calendar, not the solar calendar we use now. This all means that they move every year and you are going to look pretty stupid if you advertise a holiday and its the wrong day.

This happened to one of my clients last year, who ordered in cards for Chinese New Year thinking it was the same as last years date, so he got his cards alright a week too late.

So I suggest you click here. This site that has a great list of holidays in Australia, what I particularly like about it, is if you require an explanation on the holiday, all you need to do is click on the holiday, and you get a description.

If you have clients from other countries, you can select these to see when their special holidays are too!

The marketing season now has us on Boxing Day. This is the time where retailers traditionally try to shed the last of their 2019 stock before the newer 2020 products.  It is one of the biggest days on the Australian shopping calendar. 

I hope you are ready, but if you have nothing for the last-minute gift shoppers and the bargain hunters today, then I suggest you look at my previous post titled "Last-minute shoppers" here. It should give you some ideas.

"The National Retail Association (NRA) forecasts that Aussie shoppers will splash more than $2.6 billion in cash nationwide". If so this is the biggest Boxing Day ever in Australia. They are expecting from the Roy Morgan who has been quite accurate over the past few years in their retail sales forecasts, predict that Australians are going to spend $18.7 billion across retail stores during the post-Christmas trading period (Boxing Day to January 15). That is an increase of 2.3 per cent from a year ago.

If so as in last year this season is not as high daily as it used to be, but as a season its longer, much longer.

For many of you, with the holiday season, you are going to have some irregular schedules. If you won't be even better, but you need to tell people that because otherwise, they will assume that you are closed.

So what I suggest is that you notify your clients so that they will know when you’re open with signs, facebook and email VIP newsletters.

If you have not got anything, here are some templates you can customise now and use for free.

Right now what you will get many shoppers looking at the last minute for a gift idea. It is not a small market, I have seen figures that these people will be bringing in many shops 16% of the season trade. 

These people are rushed for time and what you need to do is make it quick and simple for them to buy. So what we recommend is a compelling visual stand that displays a small selection of your best selling items which your Point of Sale software should be able to provide you. This stand should show about ten items tops. Any more is starting to get confusing. So the idea here is that a person looking for a present sees your small front-of-store display, propped upright, with some popular items in a vertical backdrop. Will say to himself why not that?

If you want to know how to get the top ten selling items in the shop, well its easy in our point-of-sale system to do it.

Go to Register reports.

Now select "Top N Stock Sales for a Given Period."

You will want about 100 items with the last three months of sales so on our listing which will look like this because not all the items will be suitable, like always you need to use some intelligence  

Start at the top and build your stand.

Give it a shot and see how you go. 

I saw this on my facebook page, and I think it is an excellent idea for my clients who have businesses that are local to do. Have a read, and I will take you step by step through the process.

What has happened is that Facebook has recently just rolled out a feature that allows you to invite everyone to like a page that you found. This is what they are asking everyone to do.

If you go to a Facebook Page, in this case, I will use Ingleburn newsagency for the example, but what I suggest you consider is doing this for your shop.

On the left-hand side, you will see "community" (which I have circled in red with an arrow). click that

Now on the right-hand side, you will see this.

Now click "See all Friends" where the red arrow is, click that.

This is what appears.

Now they press the red arrow, and then the green arrow and the invites are off.

See how you go.

If you want to learn more about Facebook marketing, click here.

Note: If you still have not got a Facebook business page and are unsure about how to set it up, and your a client of ours, contact us, and we will set one up for you free of charge.

An idea that works well is rather than massively discount slow-selling stock to get rid of it, is to use the slow-moving stock as a promotional item. What you do is take a good selling item, add an unsatisfactory selling item to make a package and sell it as a package. For a little extra, the person can get both things. 

As a large percentage of the Christmas trade is yet to take place, and right now people are looking for bargains, so why not try this idea.

Now the first point is to identify these slow-selling items. 

So go to Register reports > Stock > Slow moving Stock lines

Now I put in a year of sales, and I say anything that I have stock in and have sales of less than $100. 

I find it best to work by the department separately because you want some consistency with your offer. 

So in this shop, I went looking at the stationery department.

Now we got a big report of detailed information of all the items that we considered here a slow-moving. It totalled almost $80,000 worth of worthless stock. 

So we have someplace to start.

We now have a list of goods that we can use for promotion. 

Give it a try.

Here is the KPMG’s November survey of 18,520 consumers from more than 20 countries which shows the use of Loyalty programs by country.

Australian are the most significant users of loyalty programs in the world, with 61% usage.

You can read the full report here. 

One point I did find particularly interesting is that 

"More than six out of ten Millennials say they prefer to donate their loyalty rewards to a good cause than redeem them personally vs. 40 percent of Baby Boomers."

In other words, about half the population are happy to use the loyalty program if you were to donate their proceeds to charity. This may be an answer to the problem of getting people that only use your goods and services infrequently to get motivated in your loyalty program. I know that Amazon gives its clients a list of charities and ask them to select one, you may try that too. Check out the Amazon program here it may give you some ideas.