What differentiates large and small organisations is often their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. What I often see is that large organisations often know more about their customers' details then small ones. This is a big plus when it comes to winning new customers or getting an existing customer to buy more. 

The most popular and successful is birthday promotions. A special offer goes off to the customer on their birthday.

Do you send something to your customers on their birthday? 

It is that CRM which is you can unlock your potential, and push growth in your shop

So I urge you to look at the next major upgrade which is coming, in it, you will see our CRM software has been overhauled, you can find some details here.

Right now because of coronavirus. We are in the middle of a shopping frenzy for toilet paper.  Shops have entirely sold out even though many are getting daily deliveries.

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Explore search interest for Toilet paper by time, location and popularity on Google Trends

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I confess I do not understand why, if someone had or suspected to have it, yes I could understand them mass hoarding, a family with two (2) weeks isolation needs a supply but not this?

Old-timers and farm boys know of an old solution, do you remember this?

Anyway, the problem some of my clients face now is that they have customers coming in trying to buy toilet paper and they have none to sell. One of them sent me a checklist of what his chain sent on what they suggest that you do if this happens to you.

1) Try to get more supply, do your best. One of my clients managed to get some commercial toilet paper from a cleaning company. Its not good stuff but at least he got something.

2) Accept the importance of the issue to your client, whatever you think, to the customer, it is crucial, and it is your responsibility to act on the issue.  Tell them the truth that you are trying your best. If they want as supply comes in, that you are prepared to keep some for them in a special order.

3) Above all, stay calm.

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! 

I first came across this product when my daughter demanded that we get her Sphero SPRK+. After using it, I was hooked too.

I then enquired with some of our clients. I was not surprised when they reported good sales with the new Sphero's SPRK+. While not a massive seller, it's worth it as the margins on offer are good.  Some stated that they had people waiting in line to snap it up. They consider it to be a destination product.

Here is a report of the public interest in the product.

When I reported this, some were negative as for a toy it has a high cost. They fail to realise that schools are pushing it now, too. So the interest by the public is high, and because of the teachers, parents are willing to pay this high price. There is much hype and excitement for this product. 

The other positive is that Disney is pushing it. Any toy driven by Disney is worth investigating.
 

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.

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.

Whatever you think of Google, face it, most Australians today are using it.

Currently, in Australia, about 95% of all searches are done on Google. Where are you here?

According to google trends over the past five (5) years, the number of searches for "near me" has gone up from 2 to 76 an increase of 38 times.

Modern consumers are using google to find local businesses. Reaching this local audience is critical to any retailer today. This is now the dominant way consumers are finding you. This is a very large section of any new business you are going to get potentially.

As an SMB owner, you may feel that investing time into your Google search ranking is useless as it means competing with larger retailers, but this is not true for local searches. I am sure that when you examine 

Try this go to google.com.au

Put the business type you are eg barber, chemist, newsagent, etc and add the following words "near me" and see what comes up.

Are you happy with that result?

Check out who is on top, ask yourself why are they doing better than you?

I am sure you will find the ones on top are businesses somewhat comparable to your business; this is because Google recognises the benefits of local business as it knows that shoppers do. So they go to a lot of trouble to make sure that the local searches are as relevant to the local shopper as possible.

With that being said, there are critical elements to ranking well in local search.

Here is an idea to start you off which is FREE

Put a listing for yourself in your Google My Business listing: Google My Business is a free online listing service offered by Google. Add your details. 

Then get some good reviews by asking happy customers to write something.

At least now you exist in Google.

If you want something more we can help you with that too.

This is a tip. I have noticed that in many companies, you will see a KPI board in the back. This is filled out regularly and shows relevant details for the people who work there that management is particularly interested in everyone following. In a factory, I saw a board listing the number of accidents. In a collection house, I saw one listing the amount of money collected this month.

People interested in it can buy KPI boards, especially for doing this.

I saw one in a retail shop that showed top-selling items, the top-selling department, queue sizes, and the growth of loyalty program sign-ups. What the owner did was every Tuesday afternoon update from the computer, the latest figures from last week. I thought getting everyone on the same wavelength was a good idea.  He said it worked. 

I saw another one in a fast food place being used as a marketing tool. They have a special burger. They put up a sign-up for how many they sold last month compared to the same month the previous year and the year-to-date figure compared to the year-to-date figure in the prior year. The number of burgers they sold was quite impressive. When I enquired about it, the girl serving said this is the burger we are famous for, so I decided to buy one and test it out. 

Please give it a go and see how it goes for you.

 The information is on the computer, and it is not doing much good there if it is not being used.

Using shopping seasons is a very successful marketing method; for example, the bank Tyro referred me to a study of the Australian holiday Click Frenzy here. Even for a minor hioliday, it is impressive. 

The big one is, of course, Christmas. I have many clients that will do about 40% of their yearly trade in this shopping period. What many have noticed is that this year the Christmas shopping season is six days shorter than last year. As this shopping season is considered to start on Black Friday. This year this is 29/11/19, while last year it was on 23/11/18. That means retailers have lost six days of holiday trading. This will hurt. 

However, marketers are very astute so what they are doing is extending the holiday. The days are long gone when this season was a few days before Christmas.

Here are some exciting ideas for you to consider to extend the shopping seasons.

At the DFO shops, Black Friday sales are celebrated over three days. Maybe you should offer a similar deal.  

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But why wait till Friday, take a look at Aldi, Black Friday sale starts on Wednesday. 

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Woolworths is not waiting till Wednesday. They are into Black Friday deals now with a banner

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If you look at the majors, many are acting similar, I have noticed that Amazon is already holding a Black Friday sales early deals as is eBay with its Black Friday deals too.

I hope this gives you food for thought. 

A big challenge with online selling now is called the last mile problem.

It is easy to sell the product online, it can be delivered to an address at a cost, but is there a person at that address to accept it. This is needed as if I am sending a $500 item, I do not want to leave it on a door.

For this reason many deliveries, customer request to be sent to their work because there is no way to guarantee that someone will be at their home to accept it. Many people do not have this option, plus many people do not want people at work to know what they ordered, if its a present you often want to present it to them, not they pick it up and see what it is first and many workplaces will not do it. 

As such many large retailers have set themselves up with Click and Collect so their customers can pick it up.

This option is not available to large online retailers and many SMB businesses, so what they use hubs. Currently, these hubs do about 30% of all online deliveries. So these hubs do bring many people. It is a lot of traffic and now this extra traffic it is going to IGA supermarkets, Priceline pharmacies and some shopping centres. So I was pleased to hear that Amazon is extending its hubs to many of my clients.

Knowing Amazon, I am sure their payments are not going to be much for providing this service, but the real question is just how good will be this extra foot traffic be for the shops that offer these hubs.

We are entering now the holiday season, the next major one in the rank is on the 29 November, Black Friday which as you can see from google trends now has overtaken in interest in Australia Fathers day. It is a shopping holiday,

As you can see from the graph, Black Friday in blue has overtaken in Australia interest Fathers Day.

While the sales aren't quite so big in Australia as in the USA where it is the biggest shopping day of the year, it is a big shopping day whose sales are growing every year here. Last year on Black Friday, Australian shoppers spent about $320 million. I bet its more this year as interest in it this year appears to be extraordinarily high

I noticed that most of the larger retailers, eg Woolworths, IKEA  and Priceline are all doing something. Why not you?  

Easy to set up in our system a special!

Pick a few products and advertise it as a Black Friday special with an offer like  

* XXX dollars off - What people like on Black Friday are expensive items on discount

* BOGO - Buy <some quantity> and get one free. This has proven to be a very successful method of selling 

* Double points - Can often work

Give it a whirl and see how you go.

Update: In a South Australian, retailers across the Adelaide CBD and suburbs will be given the opportunity to trade until midnight on that Friday, as a result of strong demand from consumers.

I was listening to a video newsletter. In this video what the presenter did was did an interview with a small business owner who owns and runs a successful lotto agency in Dandenong. 

She is clearly an experienced business owner, running a business not too dissimilar to many of my clients. Now, what when asked did she think was so important to her business success. Her response was social media in particular Facebook and Instagram and being involved in the local community. When I looked up her business Facebook account, I could see that yes she was regularly posting information relevant to her customers on the latest in lotto and her community. Clearly based on her interview here, it is working for her business. 

Too many people today have not caught on that the traditional methods of marketing advertising or direct mail are less effective. Today much of the world largely connects, as she states through the social media community.

PS: What is weird about social media and shows how different it is, is although I do not know her or her business, through social media, I can see that she is a friend of a very close friend of mine. It is a small world.

What is amazing with such powerful tools like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, Pinterest, etc which are free to business what amazes me, is too many business people do not use it. Yet the reality is that these have fundamentally changed the way we are now connecting, communicating and collaborating.

If you have one of our websites, it is easy to automatically connect these social media to your site.

Here are some benefits of doing social media:

Customers: 

It can bring more customers to your shop. Most people are looking regularly at their social media accounts if you are there, it brings your shop to their attention.

Create more Sales:

Have something to sell them, why not offer them something. New products are coming in all the time. It does not have to be earth-shaking, a new shipment of pet food, a new range of cards, some cooking pots that are now on sale, some new magazine, etc 

Cost: You cannot beat FREE. 

Builds Relationships with your Customers: People on social media are communicating. You can answer questions, give advice on a product and talk to potential customers quickly and efficiently. 

Still unsure

The first point is to look at facebook to see what similar business to yours are doing. Then if you like what you see and want something similar and need help and are a supported user of ours, we do offer a free setup of a facebook account for your business.

Today, a customer display is something that anyone with a Point-of-Sale should consider. 

Here are some advantages and some points to consider if you are thinking of getting one.

The advantages are:

- That your customers like to see what you are charging them and appreciate you being transparent as they can see that they are being charged fairly as they can see what is happening now. This inspires confidence among your customer and in practice, can boost customer loyalty. 

- It also gives them something to do, so making them feel less than they are waiting. Instead, your customer feeling like a spectator, they think they are a participant.  

- It reduces the problems of queries after the transaction is done. Time is saved as most queries can be done when they happen. 

- Finally, a customer display in our system can be used to convey important messages to customers to consider as they are waiting their turn, like here. If you are interested in *Discount Vouchers*, this is a better way to go then receipts which very few customers get in real-time in modern retail.

If you are looking at such a unit!

Here are some points to consider.

-Workout what the screen size should be for you, maybe look at a few that other shops have before deciding. The screen size, once selected, can not be changed. As a general rule, a bit bigger is better.

-You need something hardy. Retail is a harsh environment for computer equipment. It will be knocked, if it is flimsy, it will smash. It will be in the open, so it gets dirty, and dust will get into it. Make sure it can handle this.

-Over the lifetime of this screen, it will be moved and adjusted, so make sure that the screen can be lifted up and down, and the angle of the screen can be changed. Ideally, you should be able to change it from vertical to horizontal and anywhere angle in between.

In your point of sale software, it is straightforward to change prices.

What several of our clients do, eg cafes and hairdressers have specials at certain times of the day! For example, after 2 pm, a cafe starts offering the remainder of the sandwiches and a coffee on a special deal. The sandwich that is not sold today, will probably be in the rubbish bin tonight. 

A hairdresser if she is quiet in the morning often offers a special on haircuts for seniors.

Make a Happy Hour 

If you want to experiment with such a limited-time promotion which last on a few hours, then it is worthwhile looking into the price changing facilities in our POS system as it can handle such changes effortlessly on the fly. 

Just a few taps and you are ready to go. 

Good luck and let me know how it goes.

_{Note the Image is by Gerd Altmann}