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While it’s getting harder and harder for small businesses to bring in foot traffic, traditional brick-and-mortar stores can still be successful at attracting customers. How? By knowing how to promote their brand.
In today’s day and age, selling online might seem like the more lucrative and convenient option, but brick-and-mortar merchants can be just as successful as their online counterparts. The proper promotional ideas for retail stores are all it takes.
Brick-and-mortar merchants actually have an advantage over online retailers. They can connect with their customers and offer a consistently great customer experience.
Statistics show 86 percent of consumers are willing to pay more just to get a more personal customer experience. That’s an impressive statistic to pay attention to. It is particularly true in the retail industry according to POSQuote.Com
Here are 4 great promotion ideas to help give you a leg up on the competition.
1. Appealing Window Displays
Attractive, creative window displays are an art form. What is more, they can be an important way to advertise promotions for retail stores. A window display can be anything you want. You can be funny, recreate an exotic location, make a political statement, or anything in between. The options are endless. More importantly, you need to make sure that your window display clearly conveys the retail promotion you are offering or what your business sells. Presenting a clear and strong statement will attract passers-by and get them to visit your store. Also, you can get commercial flagpoles outside your window displaying your national flag representing where you belong. And you can conduct small events on special days right under it.
2. Improve Your Marketing Funnel
If you’re involved in Internet marketing at all – and you need to be to get people to visit your physical location – your funnel needs constant attention and consideration. Retailers can run the risk of customers limiting or stopping their engagement with their content at each step of a funnel. Even a slight increase in drop off may have an adverse effect on your bottom line. End-stage funnel optimization by just 1% could increase total engagement by 50%, which might mean a plus of hundreds of thousands depending on the value. Below are some tools you can use to improve your marketing funnel.
FreeMind
FreeMind enhances productivity by keeping track of projects, time recording, and task statuses. This free (written in Java) mind-mapping software helps you prioritize tasks. It keeps a collection of notes – a knowledge base – with links in a field which can expand as you wish. Here are some more features:
– Essay writing and brainstorming
– Using node size to indicate essay size
– Using colors to show open or completed essays
– Keeping a small database of dynamic or unknown structure
Tools for Creating Landing Pages
Hubspot writes that landing pages typically convert at 5 to 15%, but highly optimized ones can convert at more than 30%. Yet, why are site owners and marketers so resistant to using landing pages? That’s because they are too hard to create or take too long to do so. In some cases, people aren’t sure how to improve them systematically or haven’t been able to achieve better conversion in the past.
The landing page builder tools we’ve reviewed in this section can help solve these and many other problems. These tools are helpful when you want to improve conversion rate or are running a PPC campaign and want to direct traffic to a single page.
Unbounce
Unbounce is the quintessence of simplicity. This “drag and drop” tool is a novice’s best friend. You can pick forms, images, and other elements from the side menus and drag them to your location of choice on the landing page.
LeadPages
This landing page editor features a vast selection of templates, which can be sorted by conversion rate among other criteria. This makes LeadPages one of the most effective landing page tools on the market. The quality of the landing page templates is outstanding. Investing in this tool will definitely pay off because it is known to augment email marketing and increase lead generation. The analytics section makes it possible to split test landing pages to check their effectiveness. LeadPages is most suitable for small businesses.
Hello Bar
You can use Hello Bar to help convert blog post subscribers in efforts aimed at email marketing, among other purposes. You could use the bar and an attention-grabbing call to action to link to your landing page across your website. This is unobtrusive to your blog post and will drive extra traffic to your page without great effort on your part.
The bar can also be used to offer a service or product discount on a sales landing page. You don’t need to edit the text on the page to do this.
Hello is a direct opt-in lead generation tool, not a landing page builder in the traditional sense. Once you’ve installed it, you can launch an email marketing campaign at once. After all, the goal here is lead generation.
4. Markdowns
Everybody loves to get goods for less. Lots of people will actually wait until an item is marked down before buying it, so markdowns are an obvious promotional idea. Stores that only offer small occasional discounts or none at all are missing out on this promotional winner. For clothes shops, the change of season is when you should put all of last season’s items on sale. Items that were once in style that new items have now replaced can be put on sale.
Grocery stores should mark down seasonal items such as pumpkin spice after the holidays. Don’t neglect slow-moving items regardless of the season. Old inventory shouldn’t be taking up valuable shelf space.
Conclusion
The consequences of fixing even one tiny thing in the way you run promotions could be better than you’d ever hoped for. There might be different steps to take depending on which metrics you consider valuable and what you want to measure. Some brands will focus on developing a conversion funnel, while others will prefer the regular marketing funnel. The ideas in this article have helped the vast majority of retail stores further their diverse goals.