The Christmas season is upon us!
It’s the time of year where consumers become more demanding, and it’s essential to be at the top of your retailing game. With consumers coming into your store both on foot and online, there’s the opportunity to build on all your hard work over the year and enjoy success during the silly season. Using a retail management system enables you to track, monitor and analyse your retail performance, as well as create special opportunities for your customers.
Here are a few ideas to spread some Christmas joy
Make your merchandising magic
Many retailers make more than half of their annual revenue in the three months before Christmas. So it goes without saying a key aspect to capitalising on this time of year is merchandising, and making sure the right products are available in the right place at the right time. Understanding sales velocity enables you to determine if you’ll have enough stock for this week and the next, or if you’ll have too much.
Demand Forecasting and Infinity Corporate Performance Management (CPM) help you to simplify the complexity inherent in the analysis to make better inventory decisions, ensuring selling opportunity is maximised and products aren’t left to gather dust.
Don’t underestimate the value of gift cards
Many retailers are now phasing out expiry dates on gift cards, which reduces unused value on the cards. But it’s still a fact consumers tend to spend more than the value of the gift card, and in some categories it can be up to 38% more. So besides the fact gift cards make excellent presents for those hard to choose for, they make smart commercial sense too. They may also be given to consumers who have never thought to visit your stores, and so are a good way to attract new customers in a passive manner.
Infinity Gift Card can be used in all channels, including physical, online, and mobile.
Give even more during the season of giving
We know consumers are becoming increasingly less loyal, more value conscious and price sensitive too. Therefore, a key tactic to help grow customer stickiness is an effectively-run loyalty programme.
Consumers now not only want but also crucially expect retailers to recognise them as an individual – regardless of channel they use. They also expect offers or campaigns and experiences that are meaningful, personalised and have added value, which are not part of the core product or services on offer.
Infinity Loyalty is more than just a points programme. In conjunction with Infinity CPM it enables you to understand, recognise, reward your customers, and ultimately grow profitability.
Show some Christmas spirit
My partner and I buy a lot of rum. At the risk of sounding like complete lushes, we love rum, and we tend to buy rum opportunistically when out and about, although there is one store we do buy it from more often by virtue of its proximity. We also buy beer and wine (and in our defence we do like to entertain a lot!).
How great would it be if they thanked us for our business over the year, and invited us to a rum tasting or craft beer night (along with an educational talk perhaps?!). I’m pretty sure we would buy more rum/beer/wine, and would feel valued and appreciated as a customer. It would also, perhaps, encourage me to transfer more of our business to them.
In another scenario, I recently spent a small fortune on furniture for a new house. You name it, I bought it, and some serious damage to the credit card was done. How great would it be if that retailer emailed me to say ‘hey we noticed you bought a lot of homewares, congrats on the new more, PLUS it’s Christmas, and in the spirit of wishing you a Merry Christmas here’s a $x voucher (applicable when you spend $x amount) to spend in our homewares department. We want to make sure you have everything you need!
I can say without a doubt I would be back, because we definitely need a few more things!
Whatever you decide to do in the spirit of Christmas, at the end of the campaign you will want to benchmark performance and the spend of loyalty customers compared with non-loyalty customers.
Infinity CPM makes it easy to access ROI, and therefore how successful the initiative was and if improvements need to be made.
