Point of Sale Marketing: 3 Tips to Boost Your Bottom Line

Retailers are always looking for new marketing ideas to help bring more customers through the doors, leverage their existing customer base and ring more sales through the register. This article outlines 3 proven “point of sale” marketing techniques that are used effectively by retailers all over the world to boost sales and their bottom line! So, read on…

1. Everyone Knows the Value of a Good Ad Campaign… Or Do They?

Whether you focus on printed marketing material, radio commercials or email blasts to registered customers, it’s a must to accurately track the results of all the advertising campaigns that you run.

By tracking sales back to the original marketing stream you can get a clear idea of those campaigns that are indeed bringing more customers into your store and those that aren’t. Better still, it’s even possible to calculate the exact sales return for every dollar spent on the campaign. This is the only way to accurately measure the effectiveness of one method of advertising against another and allows you to focus on those that are giving you the best return on your investment and drop those that are not performing.

A simple means to achieve this is for sales staff be trained to politely collect information from customers. It could be as simple as a pleasant greeting and an enquiry regarding where the customer heard about your store. The answers collected can then be recorded against the sale in your POS system. The more information that you are able to collect, the more useful the resulting reports will be in focusing your marketing efforts and growing your business.

A more involved, yet more precise method is to provide coupons or codes that customers can present to receive a nominal discount or special offer on products or services that you supply. Using this method you can very accurately assign total sales revenue to your various marketing channels, simply by recording the coupons that shoppers present with the sale in your POS system.

2. Are You Feeling Feisty?

A slightly more aggressive tactic, that in truth is more suited to some businesses than others, is to also collect details from non-purchasing customers.

If a consumer has shown some interest in a product, they may be comfortable in leaving their name and contact details with the promise of a follow up call regarding an upcoming promotion. This may be as simple as collecting their email address or mobile phone number so you can send them automated alerts regarding sales and specials.

Some customers will be willing to participate, while others will not, but if staff are well trained and are able to offer such services in a subtle and friendly manner, no customer need be offended or feel “pushed” into an action that might leave them with a negative brand association.

3. Accentuate the Positives!

This final point is critical. You must leverage your existing customer base. These are people who have, of their own accord, found your establishment and been so significantly impressed by the product on offer as to buy. More often than not, that indicates that they have already had a positive experience of your brand.

As in the previous point, this could come in the form of collecting mailing addresses, mobile phone numbers or emails with the promise to notify them of upcoming sales and promotions. For bigger ticket items or tailored services, personalised phone calls from a team member may be a more appropriate form of contact.

One step further to this tactic is the offering of a loyalty or membership program that entitle those who sign up to discounts not available to members of the general public. This is an offer that not only enforces brand loyalty through the perception of “exclusivity”, but is also guaranteed to increase the instance of customers willing to supply their details.

All that’s then left to do is to choose how often you leverage the collected data. You might make contact with customers in your database on a weekly, monthly or seasonal basis – It’s all dependent on the nature of your product range and your target market.

These 3 techniques are tried and trusted and suited to all manner of retail endeavours, so there’s no reason you can’t start using them to the benefit of your business - Perhaps you already are!

Do you have some suggestions for similar tactics, or some ideas that might build up those listed above?