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Retail SMART |
In Search of the Perfect Sale |
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By:
Dennis A. Conforto
Chairman & CEO of A-Z Media Group, Inc. |
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Last week I talked about the retail grind and the ten ways you would know that you were out of the grind of your retail business. Item number one was "When you had three years or 36 consecutive months of revenue growth." At the end of the day, retailing is making the cash register sing. However, having 36 consecutive months of back-to-back record sales is a tall order for any retailer.
The funny thing is that, just like consumers, retailers are always in search of the perfect sale. Creating meaningful yet powerful sales events is an art form. Retailers need to create a reason, every month, for the consumer to shop
now, not later. There are Spring Sales, Winter Sales, and Summer Sales. There are Holiday Sales like Christmas, Thanksgiving and Halloween. There are sales for special days like Valentines Day, St. Patrick’s Day and Mother’s Day. There are Event Sales like the Anniversary Sale, the Inventory Clearance Sale and Grand Opening Sale. There is no limit to the number of believable sales events a retailer can and should do to create excitement for the consumer.
There is a perfect sale for every week of every month of every year. Some sales last a few hours, others for a day and others can be month-long events. Grand Opening Sales can last up to three months, while Going out of Business Sales (for some retailers) seem to last for years.
Since sales are the lifeblood of a retailer’s business, it stands to reason that a retailer needs to promote their business often. Creating 36 months of consecutive sales growth requires that much of your creative time be placed on the marketing efforts of your company. This is in addition to the effort placed on your sales events and the amount of cash that is invested. If you are an aggressive promoter, you will spend 6% to 8% of each sale on advertising. At minimum you should be spending about 4% of your sales on advertising if you want to have a chance of sustain growth for any meaningful period of time.
Unfortunately, most scrapbooking retailers are not placing the efforts they should into the constant promotion of their retail business. The truth is: most scrapbooking retailers don’t pay the price that needs to be paid to have the kind of growth that should be coming from this merchandising category. In many cases, less than 2% is being spent on advertising. While the scrapbooking business, since 1996, has had tremendous growth, the growth could have occurred more rapidly with increased advertising dollars spent to get to the beginner or newbie scrapbooker to buy sooner and more often.
It is the retail sector of the scrapbooking industry that should create the massive exposure needed to change the scrapbooking industry from a $2 billion to a $10 billion industry.
At Scrapbooking.com Magazine, we have come up with the perfect tool for retailers to pick the perfect sale event for their store at the perfect time with our Retail Happenings Program.
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