Your point-of-sale marketing (POS marketing) area is one of the most important parts of your store, and it can be a great source of sales if you can market it effectively.
Anyone who’s been in retail for a while will know how important the point-of-sale (POS) area is for driving sales. By the time your customers get there they will already be in the right mindset to make a purchase; after all, they’re almost certainly there because they’ve already picked out something to buy. This provides you with the opportunity to up-sell them on other items, which can be easy if you know the best POS marketing strategies.
Even if your POS items are only small, they will add up to a significant amount of profit if you can get your customers to consistently purchase them.
So how do you go about doing this?
Here are some of the best strategies for POS marketing that will help you drive sales and boost the amount of money your business makes.
POS Marketing Strategies:
1. Draw customers’ vision
The first important thing to bear in mind is that consumers aren’t naturally going to seek out products for themselves. If you want to drive POS sales, you need to focus on visual methods of POS marketing that will get your customers to look at items and deals that are likely to appeal to them during the time they’re making a purchase.
Signage and displays are important here. The simple act of putting a product on a display around your tills is likely to get your customers to look at it, but you can do better. Innovative retail shelving, wall display shelves and signage can be used to highlight not just a product but the main reason a consumer might buy it. This can be as simple as making sure the price is clearly visible if it’s a good deal, or as complicated as eye-catching, light-up displays that show an exciting product from all angles.
2. Use data wherever possible
It’s easy to assume what the best POS products are. You’ve seen all the grocery stores selling sweets and chewing gum at the tills, so you should do the same, right? Not necessarily. While your assumptions might be correct, you won’t know without measuring, testing and making use of data wherever possible.
This doesn’t have to be a high-tech endeavour. You can set up a simple test by placing different products at different tills, and seeing which sells best. This kind of A/B experiment can be utilised in many ways; another example is to have cashiers ask customers if they want to add an item onto their purchase at one till, while at another you simply leave the product in view of consumers. This way, you will be able to narrow down your best options.
3. Take advantage of impulse
Most purchases customers make aren’t planned in advance; some estimates have the figure as high as 74 per cent. This is something you will depend on when it comes to POS marketing, but it’s ls something that needs planning out. You want to make sure the products your customers see in your POS marketing area are the ones they’re most likely to impulse buy.
You aren’t going to be able to know what these are for certain until you test them, but you have to start somewhere and that means using a bit of common sense, as well as thinking outside the box. One good option is to take the most common type of item you sell, and think about what items go with it that customers might not have thought of. If you sell kitchenware, for example, your POS marketing area might be the place to display items like coasters, napkins and other supplementary items.
Make Use Of Your Space
Your POS marketing area isn’t just limited to the space around your tills. Anywhere your customers are going to be standing or moving through while making a purchase counts, and you should aim to utilise it as effectively as possible. For example, what do you use to direct customers while they’re queuing? Could it be replaced with shelves or displays?
It can be a good idea to separate out your POS marketing areas. For example, while customers are queuing they will be bored, and might be attracted by interactive media like magazines or books. At the tills, they won’t be able to dedicate time to browsing so you’ll want to focus on small impulse items they can decide to buy in a split-second.
