Improve Sales in Your Retail Store with these Marketing Tips

The goal of every retail stores is to be profitable and to do that they must always improve sales. It is difficult, sometimes, for neighborhood retail businesses to improve sales and solidify a marketing plan, especially one that will work all the time. This is because different times of year, and the different retail neighbors IN that neighborhood can effect that business in ways over which they have very little control.

If you are the lucky owner of one of these establishments, I thought I would share a few tips to help improve sales and build a better relationship with your top clients.

Create a Preferred Buying Club – This can be a by-invitation-only proposition, or have your customers self-select. By keeping track of sales by client, you can easily decide which clients are in your top 20% and offer them special services. It could be a concierge service for your company, members-only sales, or other preferred methods of communicating with you.

Offer a special service for locals – We have a private coaching client that is a dentist. Her office is in a large office building complex. We created a direct mail piece that was mailed and also hand delivered to each office in the complex. The main special was not a discount in pricing, but rather an offer that saves the workers in the complex their time! Each day during the lunch hour, they set aside two appointment slots for workers in the complex who need a cleaning and exam but only have their lunch hour to get it done. Their new client can just walk over to the office from theirs.  That is HUGE, especially in Los Angeles where if the patient needed to drive ANYWHERE it would keep them out of the office for at least 90 minutes.

Create your Email List – To improve sales, one of the marketing rules to of the last decade has become ‘The one with the largest list, wins.’ At Yuloff Creative, we have added a very important addition to that rule. It isn’t just the largest list it is the most accurate list filled with your clients and your target market.  Having 1,000 random email addresses is probably not as good as a list of 100 email lists of consistent customers. Important tip: As soon as someone joins your list, send a Thank You for Joining Our Email List message. Promise them you will not overwhelm their email box with messages, and each message will have important information. And live up to that promise, because it will reduce your opt outs.

Create your mailing list – And when I say mailing list, I mean MAILING, not e-mail list. Open and response rates for emails are not what they were even a couple of years ago so to improve sales you better create a list where you can get your message into your client’s hands. Designing an incredible mailer is difficult, but for a retail business, the better the special, the more effective the response will be. Here is my best example: How far would you go out of your way for a 10% discount on a burger and fries lunch? How about if I give you 50% off – or Two for one? In this case, you will get a better result using the two for one and stressing that your customer is getting one free. If you want some tips on developing this list, keep reading this blog or give us a call. You can also check out our blog on effective direct mail.

Update the look of your store on the outside – Most of the time, you have very little control over the look of your business’ building. We DID make a huge difference to improve sales for this store in our Sedona area. In this little corner of Arizona, there is a policy of Dark Skies. That means that the city fights Light Pollution so that residents and our 5 million guests a year can enjoy the star filled sky. In one case, though, we found a loophole. Our client could not put lights OUTSIDE their building, but we found a way to add light inside the shop that could be seen by people who drive by when they are closed. We put up 5 shelves of Salt Lights in the window.  They immediately realized a 500% increase in sales because customers came into the store saying that they saw the lights in the window and came back the next day to buy them. Of course, that increased their sales of other products as well. We have given lots of tips like that to retail store owners.

Ask your customers to sell out their friends for a discount. Tell them that if they refer a friend to your company, both you and their friend will get some incredible special. This is a great way to improve sales because referrals make for the best customers. I think I will do this to improve sales for my business right now: If you and a friend are both new clients to Promotionally Minded and order promotional products from us, you will each get a 20% discount on your first orders.

While you are grabbing your customer’s mailing addresses, you can ask them to opt in for a once a month text marketing special. Send them an awesome special and you will have them looking FORWARD to your texts! Do not abuse this very personal connection your client has given to you to improve sales.

If you have not created a mailing list, but still want to use direct mail, the US Postal Service has a service called Every Door Direct Marketing which allows you to break down your geographic mailings by letter carrier. Their website has very specific directions, so check them out for directions.

We would like to offer you a Free Marketing Consultation to help you improve sales. Most small business owners that take advantage of this conversation report back to us that this success call was worth at least $10,000 in increased sales and savings to their bottom line. Let’s begin our conversation by increasing your profits. Go now to www.FreeMarketingConsultation.com. When you are looking for more ways to increase your retail business’ sales, you can also give us a call at (800)705-4265.