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Whether you are starting out in the industry or just want to refresh your marketing plan, here are four retail marketing strategies that will help you generate more sales for your store.
Definition of retail marketing
Before diving into the actual strategies and tactics, it’s good to understand the concept of retail marketing and how it helps retailers attract customers and drive sales. Retail marketing has four key elements called 4Ps, which are:
- Product: What you sell and offer to the customers.
- Price: Pricing strategy of how you want to sell your product.
- Place: The physical location or online platform to display and sell your products.
- Promotion: This includes deals, product debuts to spread the word out and entice sales.
Use customer research and analytics
You probably use your analytics reports to manage retail inventory and gauge employee sales performance. But reporting and analytics software is also an incredibly powerful tool for any retail marketing strategy.
You can analyse your data to glean insights into your customers’ purchase behaviour, combining it with current retail marketing trends, which can then form the basis for your marketing strategies and tactics.
If you see certain products skyrocket in sales, for instance, you might consider pairing the popular product with other merchandise in your store and communicating the promotion through a campaign. This can help you leverage the popularity of one product to increase sales of another. Or, if you see products that are lagging in sales, you might create innovative promotions or discounts to jump-start sales.
Focus on personalisation
A personalised experience creates more interest in your brand, more leads for your business, and happier customers overall. In short, personalisation should be a key aspect of your marketing ideas for small retail businesses. There are various ways to deliver customer personalisation, and you should use them to target customers across all your retail marketing channels.
If you decide to plan a retail email marketing strategy, for example, sending out personalised automated email, like birthday offers and welcome messages, can go a long way.
If you decide to include online advertising in your retail marketing strategy—on social media, for instance—you can test out personalised ads by focusing on very specific audiences based on location or even interests. If you target correctly, you should see a higher ROI on these ads compared to standard online advertisements that target a broader audience.
Leverage social media presence
Advertising plays a crucial role in the success of retail marketing by letting the customers know about your product offers and might perform a purchase. Creating accounts on social media channels to post updates and market your products. Whichever channel you decide to use, make sure to target the right audience group and create relevant content to attract users to your business channels.
Online listings
With the digital age, more and more people are using Google and online platforms to find business, especially local businesses. Google Search is being used for almost 95% of all internet searches in Australia as of June 2021. The number speaks for itself, it’s time to take Google Search into consideration, starting with Google My Business (GMB). By listing your business via GMB, your business product and services can appear when people search for relevant products, allowing them to learn more about your business. The tool is easy to use and set up.
Empower your customers
Your customers want to be empowered. One of the best ways to do this is to open the lines of communication between you and them.
By implementing customer feedback software at your retail store, customers can communicate directly with you about their purchase or the customer service at your store. You can use this information to fix issues, offer special promotions, or even respond to customers directly with discounts.
For example, if you receive negative feedback on your return policy, you can take this opportunity to go back and review the return process. Do you give customers a sufficient return window from the time of purchase? Do your employees treat customers with returns politely? Are you tracking returns of specific products? Solving these questions derived from your customers can greatly improve your business.
And by encouraging feedback and making customers feel heard, you’re actually creating customer loyalty. That’s incredibly important for your business because a 5 percent increase in customer retention can boost profits up to 95 per cent, according to data by Match Board.
Reward your existing customers
Like we mentioned, an increase in loyal customers can do big things for your business. While many tend to focus on new customers when creating a retail marketing strategy, it’s important to think about customers who have shopped with you before.
One way to generate sales with your existing shoppers is to create a customer loyalty program. Loyalty programs usually work by incentivising customers to buy a certain amount to receive free merchandise.
By setting up a program with customer loyalty software, customers can sign up at checkout and your retail POS will track their progress toward a reward automatically (no punch cards necessary).
A study on loyalty programs found that they are extremely popular in Australia. Nearly 70% of Australian consumers say that the loyalty programs help enhance brand experience. Including loyalty rewards for current customers in your retail marketing not only creates buzz around your brand but also encourages your existing customers to spend more. So, what are you waiting for?
These four tips will teach you how to discover retail marketing opportunities that drive sales and understand the impact of customer loyalty programs on your retail business.
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