From Boxing Day bargains to summer sales, people all over the country love to grab a good deal. And with new sale days coming into play, such as Black Friday which had a meteoric boom in popularity within the United Kingdom recently, it can be difficult to effectively promote your business.
What are the best practices to ensure you can get involved in the sale season?
Having the stock levels
The starting point is to ensure your stockroom is full come the big day. This is vitally important, so you need to keep a strong balance between supply and demand. That said, you do not want to overload yourself with products that may not be as popular as other sale items, as you may end up with a huge backlog of stock you can’t shift.
Create a visual understanding of your stock levels using a whiteboard and tally system – depending on the size of your company. Make up a list of all the products that will be in your sale using a board marker, with a number of strikes for the total you have, then each time you sell an item, take one off the respective tally.
Choosing the discount carefully
The discounts on your sale items need to be eye-catching as well as profitable – remember, concentrating on one and not the other may leave you with either too much stock left over, or not enough profit from every sale.
Do your research beforehand and see what other companies in your sector are offering and try to find the discount they are taking off their product range. That way, you can gauge an idea of what you need to be aiming for. Your offers need to be the three “I”‘s – Immense, Irresistible and Interesting.
Advertising the deals
It’s a fact; if you don’t let customers know about your deals, they won’t buy them – it’s that simple. Raising public awareness that your business will be having a sale will help drive consumers into your store or onto your website, and hopefully bring in more custom.
Any business needs to look at the two main points of advertising – online and offline. Using your website is a fantastic form of promotion, as you can list all the deals you’ll be offering in one place, and create web banners to decorate each of your site’s pages with sale advertorials.
For offline, putting together posts and signs to fill your shop windows is a must, as is printing out the most jaw-dropping deals on offer. Ensure you use brightly coloured paper to catch the customer’s eye and use labels on your products to truly drive home the discounted savings they stand to make.
Having an online and in-store presence
Following on from making the most of your advertising, using both an online and offline platform for actually selling your sale stock is a great way to get involved. Big sales events will create fierce competition between companies, so you need to open as many avenues as possible in order to drive sales.
A customer might not come across your website, but if they are walking down the high street they will stumble across your store, so utilising all your platforms is key to generating both interest and sales.
Make sure you are organised
You might think of this as an obvious point for your business all year round, but once you get caught up in the chaos of sale season you’ll wish you were well and truly on top of your game. Having the likes of calculators and receipt books on hand for keeping track of your takings, as well as notepads to jot down the products that are doing well and paper bags for your customers to take their new purchases home in are all essentials that you’ll need to pick up well in advance. To avoid any confrontations on the discounts, use a pricing gun to clearly display how much something costs.
Black Friday, January Sales and any other sale day is something that companies simply cannot afford to miss in the current consumer rush, so take on board these few handy tips and you’ll have no trouble turning this shopping holiday into a success.
