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So 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.
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 marketing.
You can analyze your data to glean insights into your customers’ purchase behavior, which can then form the basis for your marketing strategy 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 personalization.
A personalized experience creates more interest in your brand, more leads for your business, and happier customers overall. So in short, personalization should be a key aspect of your retail marketing strategy. There are various ways to deliver customer personalization, and you should use them to target customers across all your marketing channels.
If you decide to invest in email marketing, for example, personalized automated email like birthday offers and welcome messages can go a long way. In fact, according to data from Square’s email marketing platform, birthday offers generate the highest engagement, with open rates 2.5 times higher than any other type of email campaign.
If you decide to engage in online advertising — on social media, for instance — you can test out personalized 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 reach a broad audience.
Empower your customers.
Your customers want to be empowered. One of the best ways to do this is to open the flow 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 five-percent increase in customer retention can boost profits up to 95 percent, according to a study by Bain & Company.
Reward your existing customers.
Like we mentioned, an increase in loyal customers can do big things for your business. So while we 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 incentivizing 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 62 percent of U.S. shoppers make more store visits and purchases as a direct result of loyalty programs. So what are you waiting for? Rewarding current customers for their loyalty not only creates buzz around your brand but also encourages your existing customers to spend more.
Running a business is no easy feat, but Square is here to help. We have all the tools you need to start, run, and grow your business, whether you’re selling in person, online, or both. And we’ve made all our tools to work together as one system, saving you time and money — and making decisions easier. So you can get back to doing the work you love and focusing on whatever’s next. See how Square works.
