Retail

5 retail marketing strategies for the point of sale

2020

Point-of-sale marketing strategies are used to incentivize purchases and increase the value of the average shopping basket. Campaigns aimed at a store's potential customers are created on a recurring basis, with the objective of encouraging consumption by creating an environment that is conducive to it.

Retail marketing represents the set of actions and strategies carried out at one or more points of sale. There are different intermediary objectives, such as increasing customer satisfaction, increasing average dwell time, improving in-store footfall, improving customer recurrence, etc. But they all share the same ultimate goal, to improve the bottom line.

Actions such as ambient music, smell, lighting, product distribution, etc... are all part of retail marketing strategies. But how can you achieve a higher level of conversion? What are the guidelines to follow to improve results thanks to retail marketing?

What retail marketing strategies help improve sales?

When carrying out retail marketing strategies, you have to think about a connected, omnichannel consumer who is unfaithful to brands due to the wide range of possibilities that exist when it comes to consumption.

These are some of the keys to retail marketing:

- Importance of window dressing: Window displays represent one of the most important points in customer acquisition. It is the most direct point of potential buyers and is part of the brand identity. In fact, in an omnichannel world, the window display is already an extension of the store itself, where the window display can be a springboard to the online store even when the point of sale is closed.

- Personalized incentives: In today's retail environment, sales periods have lost momentum in recent years. Sales are no longer a one-off event, they are chained throughout the year so consumers no longer pay as much attention to these general offers. In order to have an effective impact on the consumer, offers must be much more personalized, such as for example the consumer having a discount for making a certain number of purchases, discount codes for the online store when buying in the physical store, promotions for using the loyalty card, etc...

- Impulsive selling: Impulsive selling generates an extra profit for the company relatively automatically. The strategic placement of products and the study of the customer's path inside the point of sale is a determining factor to improve sales of this type of products.

- Optimizing the customer's path inside the store: This point, related to the previous one, not only allows to place impulse products strategically, but it is also key to maximize sales. In certain types of stores, the distribution of space and products is one of the most important factors. It is common for consumers to visit stores without a clear purchase interest, so correctly displaying products and planning the customer journey can go a long way to increasing sales.

- Loyalty: Loyalty is often achieved by providing the right shopping and post-sales experience. Maintaining contact through the different communication channels available and sending them information of value to them is the best way to build customer loyalty.

Measuring the results of retail marketing strategies

The first step is to create a retail marketing strategy according to the objectives to be achieved. When carrying out actions at points of sale to achieve specific objectives, it is important to be clear about which KPIs you want to impact. It is not advisable to make many changes at the same time when seeking to improve results.

To verify the impact of marketing strategies at the point of sale and obtain the ROI of each strategy to assess its impact, you must measure customer behavior data and extract the KPIs of the point of sale.

If we try to improve the number of store visits, as well as impulse sales and average dwell time, we run the risk of not knowing if the actions carried out have really had an effect or what has caused what.

At TC Group Solutions, as a leading company in counting systems for obtaining the main business metrics in physical points of sale, we help to measure the results of retail marketing strategies.