Drive Sales & Build Excitement

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Create line-ups at your door by offering amazing deals to your customers. This concept is possible, even for smaller independent retailers.

Years ago, I used to offer a down and dirty deal on a timely popular item every week. This Amazing Deal of the Week was a limited offered to our customers on a first come first serve basis starting every Saturday morning at 9:00 a.m. sharp, no exceptions! This created excitement and caused line-ups at our door every Saturday morning. It also created a flood of phone calls and inquiries every week from customers asking; “What are you guys giving away this week?” To choose the item, we would anticipate one of our top SKU’s for that time of year and offer a deal that saved them between 50% and 75% off the regular retail price. Customers were usually limited to 3 or 5 units, which only added to the excitement. Most of the time, we would even leave them on the skids, or the transportation racks that they came on to again add to the excitement and show that it was such a great deal that we didn’t even have a chance to display them on our regular shelving. Again, adding to the excitement.

We moved away from that strategy, thinking we were being smarter by protecting our margins more. We dropped the deal of the week strategy for a few years, this was a mistake that I believe cost us quite a few customers over the years as we started to gain a reputation of only stocking higher end items and not offering any great deals to our customers any more. But, we recently started to move back in that direction with our Weekly Feature Promotion.

We’re slowly changing this perception and are starting to see a return of customer excitement again to the stores. We haven’t seen the line-ups yet, but I fully expect that they will come back.

~Andy

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