Dear Retail Friends, Customers, and Prospects,

As we head into August, I want to encourage everyone to begin preparing themselves right now, for the busiest shopping season of the year. We all know the holidays can be very demanding for retailers, but if calculated properly, you can expect to end with a profitable holiday season for your stores! I’d like to offer a few quick tips you can begin to implement to guarantee a successful season for your store.

The holidays are a crucial time to manage sales and take quick action when things are not working out as planned. There are tools that can help you analyze your sales and traffic and adjust quickly. If you are not already using people counting technology, you should be. By having an integrated system implemented, it allows you to track sales transactions and measure the traffic of people coming into your store while analyzing how much traffic is converting into sales. This information is relevant for a profitable shopping season because you’ll know if you need to work on your marketing efforts, to invest in a quick email campaign to drive traffic in-store, or if you know you have the traffic in store but sales are not converting, you can hold an emergency meeting with staff to go over their performance and training to ensure traffic is converting to sales.

The holidays are also a vital time to capture customer information. Whether you gather this information by hand or have a system that allows you to gather it electronically, you should be capturing this information because it will help you all year long. One way to capture this information easily and as an added benefit integrate marketing and advertising into your stores are with digital receipts. Digital receipts are a powerful tool to email a customized and personalized receipt to a customer and link it to social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest, allowing the customer to immediately share their purchases online so their friends and family can see what they are purchasing and where they are purchasing items. If someone sees it and likes it, you just captured a new customer. Digital receipts also give you a marketing opportunity to sell additional or similar items to those people who have purchased them in the past. This creates a rapport with your customer because you aren’t just sending coupons their way, but you are sending an email with information about products you know for a fact they would like to purchase, creating a satisfied customer because they know you understand their style and interests.

One of the most discouraging things about shopping during the holidays can be the crowds and excessive lines, so work towards pleasing your customers by finding a solution to ensure an enjoyable shopping experience. Offer them a small coupon for the inconvenience of waiting or a personalized bottle of water. Small gestures go a long way. If you are interested speeding up your checkout process by in adding valuable technology, Mobile POS allows staff to combat wait times with line busting through quick and painless checkouts. It also allows your sales team to engage in a more intimate one on one setting so they can talk to the customer and discuss their purchases, or upsell by encouraging them to check out matching new merchandise or stocking stuffers.

As always, we thank you for your continued support and if there is anything you need us to help you with to prepare for a prosperous holiday season, I suggest you reach out to one of our specialists today.

If we haven’t worked together yet, I hope you give us this business opportunity so we can aid in the planning process of your most successful holiday season and your future retail technology needs!

Cheers to a prosperous holiday season,
Scott Kreisberg
CEO, One Step Retail Solutions