Last Updated: March 31, 2021
Like many things in life, the small things can quickly add up to something substantial. Many basic budgeting strategies ask you to identify these items and cut them out of your expenditures. As a business owner, a similar line of thinking can quietly help sales skyrocket. With a little ingenuity and a great product, your customer base might not be able to resist spending those couple extra dollars; a bird in the hand is not always worth two in the bush. Here, we’ve put together a few ideas on how to increase retail sales in your store through a higher average transaction value (ATV), without ruining anyone’s New Year’s resolutions.
Upsell and Cross-Sell
This DOES NOT have to be as annoying and pestering as it may sound. And it doesn’t have to be as flat as the old “Do you want fries with that?” tactic to increase your profits. Identify some of your most standard upsells and make them visible.
- Create a specific plan for your point of sale marketing. The area around your point of sale is an easy target point. A paint shop always has essential products for basic jobs that customers tend to forget in this area. Landscaping gardens put their gloves and packets of seeds in visible spots for customers waiting in line. Coffee shops offer travel mugs that can be used for daily discounts on their coffee.
- Train your staff on your product so they can make suggestions for higher-end items or suggest products that might pair well with what they’ve already decided to purchase.
- This is also something to keep in mind with the layout of your store to optimize your overall retail marketing strategy. The $5 box of crackers next to your best cheeses is hard to resist.
- Lastly, set time-sensitive goals and challenges for your staff. This can easily be more fun and rewarding than stressful. Make it a game and offer gifts to your top-sellers. Your retail POS system should track individual employee production as well.
Add High-Ticket Items to Your Menu
This is especially relevant to quick service businesses like coffee shops and bakeries. There is plenty of room to increase the average value per transaction from $4 to $5. A 25% jump for the customer at that price is hardly noticeable but as the business owner, it would result in an incredible jump in revenue. Sprinkling a few pricier products will help. Even if those items don’t fly off the shelves, they make the lower ticket goods seem that much cheaper and that much easier to add to the cart.
Promotions and Sales
These can help move products that are good for inventory and draw in new customers, but they also easily boost the ATV. Make sure you have a cloud-based POS system that easily integrates new promotions into the system and focus on getting creative! Some of the standard strategies are offering a discount for larger spends, buy one get one deals and product bundles. But these can come in any number of forms. If done well they can even be integrated as a standard part of your business, like McDonald’s Value Menu. If you have a business which charges an hourly fee, you can bundle time in packages to instead of hour-by-hour rates. Also, be sure to bring every product out of the shadows as that can boost retail sales. Don’t let anything go unnoticed; you never know what a customer might be looking for.
Loyalty Programs
Your POS can help with different types of retail loyalty programs. Offer periodical benefits and discounts for regular customers. A discounted item is hard to turn down sometimes, even if you would never buy it otherwise. Games are another way to up the ATV. Again, McDonald’s sets a pretty high bar with their Monopoly Game. A dollar fry for a shot at peeling back a Boardwalk is just too tempting. Receipt rewards can also help push a last-minute additional purchase.
Amazon came up with a new type of loyalty program with Prime. The offer of free shipping through a membership isn’t a traditional type of reward, but it’s led to an incredible boost in sales. And the Echo has taken it to another level. Average annual sales for the three customer groups rise from approximately $1,000 to $1,400 to $1,700 with each membership option.
Continued Learning: Retail Cross-Selling and Upselling – 4 Tips to Do It Right
How to Increase Retail Sales with Your POS System
There are of course many, many other ways to help boost your sales. Some will be unique to the character of your store. But this brief list is a good place to start and hopefully gives you a few ideas that you can personalize. Your point of sale system can help with all of this. Click below to find out more about KORONA POS and how we might help your retail store.
