5 ways to gain more foot traffic and increase your sales revenue
The amount of sales revenue your business generates is directly proportional to the amount of foot traffic it gets. In order to stay afloat and competitive, people need to be walking into your store regularly and buying your goods and/or services. But in the current market, one that is unpredictable and consumer-driven – it’s not as easy as it used to be to set yourself apart from the competition.
Thankfully, there are still a few tried and tested marketing tricks that you can rely on to keep your business ahead in the retail market.
Get the foot traffic you need with these three easy Ss
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- Sales
Nothing draws a crowd like a two-for-one promotion. Since time immemorial, business owners have been able to rely on promotions and discount sales in order to attract people to their stores. But not all sales are successful, so it’s important to put a bit of strategy behind your promotions. Most sale attendees are usually bargain hunters who rarely become loyal customers. Determining metrics like your Customer Lifetime Value and Retention Rate can help you figure what kind of sales to have, when to have them and who to target them towards.
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- Signage
The signage you use outside your store is a crucial touch point between you and your potential customers. Visibility, after all, is one of the main drivers of brand awareness. For example, if you have a window display, changing it up every day or week (whatever you can manage) can create some anticipation and make passers-by look forward to the next window display. Sandwich boards are also an effective and inexpensive way of combining information and entertainment. Coffee shops use this tactic regularly to drive pedestrians into the shop with quotes, jokes and riddles (e.g. whoever solves it gets a freebie).
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- Social media
You would be remiss to ignore social media and other digital tools as part of your strategy to drive more foot traffic to your store. Simply having an active and engaged social media presence can encourage customers to visit your store. This S ties in nicely with the first one because you can use social media to increase the reach of your sales and you can segment your audience by demographics, purchase history and location for improved targeting. And, more than anything else, social media humanises your business, making people more comfortable with your brand and more likely to patronise it.
Two quick tips to generate more sales revenue
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- Optimise your store’s interior
Once you have customers in your store, you have to ensure that you’re doing all you can to encourage sales. One way of doing this is by optimising your store layout. There are several ways of achieving this, like providing free samples and testers for products on promotion, strategically placing items along the way to the till and putting “mystery bins” all around the store that encourage customers to dig in and find items that have been marked down. If you pay close enough attention to how your customers move around in your store, you may be able to actually “guide” their buying.
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- Diversify your offering
One of the ways to get people to buy more is to offer them more to buy. Adding to your products and services might seem like more effort than it’s worth – there might be invisible setup costs, new suppliers to deal with and the risk of shaking up your formula. But when done cleverly, new additions can invigorate your bottom line.
A great place to start is by asking your customers what more they would like to see inside your store. Sift through all your comments and complaints for common threads and see if you can’t turn any of them into profit-generating ideas.
Selling prepaid services is a guaranteed way of adding revenue streams to your business. With a device like Kazang (which is free), you can sell a number of prepaid products and services like mobile airtime and data, electricity, international calling vouchers and betting services like Hollywood Bets and Lotto. Kazang also lets your customers send money and transfer airtime to their loved ones in other countries.
To learn more about Kazang and all the products and services you’ll be able to offer once you become a Kazang merchant, download our guide below.
