Creative sales ideas can save the day when a retail business meets a slowdown. These tried-and-true tips can be new and effective for generating foot traffic for your retail store.
- Establish your own holiday
- Have a truckload sale twice a year
Transcript
Gerry Borreggine
Today, we’re going to talk about the market conditions and what’s been going on since the COVID wave stopped coming to our shores. You know, that wave just kept coming. Business kept coming, coming and coming. It’s been two years since that COVID wave stopped hitting the shoreline for most stores. So what’s happening? We’ve developed back into that holiday sleep sale cadence where our businesses spike high when the holiday events are going on, and then they ebb, and we’re in a roll in between holidays.
And it’s a long way from Presidents Day to Memorial Day. There’s a long lull for many retailers in that low-selling period. So you need to do is establish more holidays. You can have your own holiday and a good holiday for you. Each store has an anniversary sale.
Every store should promote its brand and its anniversary by conducting a large sale. It gets exponentially better when it becomes your double-digit anniversary this year, your 10th, 11th, or 12th anniversary. Those things transfer a credible sense of comfort to the public. They’re not afraid to give you their money. It establishes confidence in your brand.
Your store. Another great sale to use is a truckload sale. It’s a really credible story. We bought truckloads of mattresses at great savings. We’re passing the savings on to you, the public. That’s a really understandable, believable story. In the olden days, there really were things like truckload sales because the mattress factories typically closed for a week in the summer for vacation and a week in December for the holidays.
In those times, mattress factories closed down, and dealers would build up their inventories to cover themselves for that ten-day period when they weren’t going to get goods. But also that meant the factories had these trailers available, and they could become promotional tools for the dealers, where you could have the truck parked in front of your store or in your parking lot, whether it was full mattresses or not, it didn’t matter.
It gave the illusion there’s something special going on where that mattress store is—truckload sale. If you’re not incorporating it, bring it into your repertoire, Put it in your program, and run it twice a year. You’re going to run it once in the summertime, once right after the holidays or during the holiday period. It doesn’t matter if the factories are closed or not.
Build up your inventory a little bit, get a trailer, park it outside your store, and run it. You had now three sales on your promotional calendar. You had an anniversary and two truckloads. You’re filling in these five major holidays. Now you’re building them up, expand them to eight. This helps even out your sales throughout the year and helps keep the business flowing all year long.
This is Inside Track. And I’m Gerry Borreggine. Thanks for watching.
