How to market your gift shop … everyday ideas for gift shop marketing to help any local independent gift shop attract more shoppers and get shoppers spending more money in each visit.
We have owned our own small business gift shops since the late 1990s. These physical store and online store situations have provided us with opportunities to leverage low-cost and no-cost marketing to grow the businesses. The experience has also helped us improve our gift shop software.
Today, we share some marketing ideas for gifts shops, to help these local and vital businesses grow in service of their local communities.
- Be smart about where you place products. Use the insights data from your POS software to see what sells with what. This usually gets you placing products together that you would usually not place together.
- Buy smart. Too often we see gift shops filled with stock the owners like, which is often different to the products gift shop customers preference. Using the data curated by the POS software, order what sells and sell more of this.
- Email regular customers. It’s easier to bring them back than find new customers. Email them based on past purchases and based on future life events.
- Stop copying others. While it is tempting to copy what we see as successful moves in other businesses, copying does to differentiate. Run your own race. Play your own game. One area where doing your own thing is best does is in loyalty. While most businesses offer points, our advice is that you offer a cash discount off the next purchase. This can be easily managed through your POS software. A cash amount off the next purchase is more likely to get a one time shopper spending more in that visit, making that one visit worth more than it otherwise might to the business.
- Pre-sell and bank the revenue before you pay for the goods. Tapping into popular licence opportunities and limited-edition ranges you can sell products before you receive them from your suppliers, before you pay for them. This pre-sell approach can differentiate your business by seeing you go out with something well before a competitor has it is stock.
- Clip the coffee card but in a smart way for gift shops that don’t sell coffee. If your gift shop sells things people could purchase multiple times over months or a year, setup a digital coffee type cared where you stamp the card for each purchase and offer a discount or something free after the customer reaches a target number of purchases.
- Go online, cleverly. While everyone says sell online, we say do it cleverly, do it in a way that leverages the power of search engines, do it in a way to connects your gift shop with shoppers who know nothing about you. The type of online selling we suggest is connected to your POS software and it uses the smarts you have built into the data managed by that software.
We can offer more advice than this, more marketing advice for gift shops, to help them grow, be more successful and more enjoyable for all involved.
This is another Tower Systems advantage.
