In the first part of this article, we talked about the importance of shopper marketing for your business and shared some easy tactics related to the product and its placement that you can apply to make sure your products sell fast. Now let’s see which are the tactics related to promotion that you can use for the same purpose.
Sales promotions involve a high level of strategy and psychology that even the biggest brands sometimes get wrong. So, what can a small business do to promote itself?
More important than the promotion itself is the strategy and planning behind it. Before announcing a sale, you need to consider what type of promotion to offer, when to run it, and the reason you are doing it. What are the goals of your sale: attracting new customers, introducing new products, moving old inventory?
Here are some sales promotion ideas that can help you decide which type is right for your business:
- Use public events/holidays for promotions. Holidays are happy times. People have time off from work and they may have gotten a bonus. They are in the mindset to have some fun and that means they’re primed to spend money. Use holidays to create sales events so that you can take advantage of people’s good mood – happy people spend more money.
- Do a flash sale to clear out old stock. The chance to save money—but only if you act fast—is one of the oldest tricks in the sales promotion handbook. Because of its hype factor, a flash sale gets people talking and attracts new leads. It shortens the sales cycle, inspiring people to buy when they would have otherwise procrastinated. As a result, a flash sale brings in a quick infusion of cash, making it an ideal tool for clearing out old stock and for boosting revenue during a slow time of year.
- Buy something, get something free. Shoppers perceive free stuff to be more valuable than discounts, so adding products or services can bring in new customers—who then stick around and buy more. You can use hard-to-sell or unwanted inventory pieces to give for free together with a more expensive product, so a buy-something-get-something offer can also help you free up cash and clear out hard to move stock.
- Sell “surprise boxes” for a fixed price. Shoppers love surprises and when you find yourself stuck with too much stock to sort, a solution is to sell unsorted boxes of products as surprise boxes for a fixed price (and fixed profit).
- Give a discount/gift card with purchase. The offer of a coupon or gift card with a purchase is a deal for both you and your customer. While the customer gets a chance to save, you get another chance to make more money, as long as the discount still allows you a profit margin. And you get a returning customer, who may buy extra products when they come back to use their discount card.
When it comes to promotions, don’t forget to communicate them. Apart from using external local media to share your promotions, make good use your store space as well: dress the store windows with your latest offers, give flyers in front of the store, put reminders near the cash register.
Next week we’ll share the tactics related to pricing. Stay tuned for part 3 of this article!
Now you can go and make your inventory more appealing for your customers through promotions! We’re here to help you sell your products and make profit fast. To learn more, please contact our sales team.
