Boost your seasonal sales: Top tips for merchant and trade counter
Whether it's the pre-Christmas rush or increased demand in Spring when the weather starts to pick up, merchant and trade counters businesses need to be prepared for surges in customer demand. To ensure success during any peak period, it is essential to implement effective strategies across your business and consider key factors such as warehousing, retailers, and distribution.
In this blog, we’ll discuss five key tips and strategies trade counter and merchant businesses can use to boost sales.
Invest in efficient warehousing
In today’s unstable market, combined with frequent supply chain disruption, managing stock levels and making sure they’re accurate can be difficult, especially when it comes to busy, seasonal periods.
Balancing being overstocked with increased potential for waste with being short of supplies leading to potential loss of sales is a fine line for businesses centric. Maintaining data and reports on previous years’ purchasing habits can help forecast what to stock up on when that time comes round once again.
Utilising warehouse management systems will allow businesses to accurately track stock levels and automate reordering when necessary. By optimising your warehousing process, you can prevent stockouts, maximise sales opportunities, and deliver exceptional customer service.
Streamline distribution channels
When selling to other businesses or tradespeople, especially in sectors such as construction, plumbing, electrics and engineering, it’s important to manage small orders just as efficiently as larger projects. Ensuring these larger orders are distributed carefully and on-time is not only vital to the customer receiving them but could have knock-on costs to the supplier a lot if things were to go wrong.
Collaborating with third-party logistics companies can help streamline your distribution process, reduce delivery lead times, and minimise operational challenges. Additionally, utilise tracking technologies to provide real-time updates on orders to both retailers and customers, ensuring transparency and building trust.
Implement season-specific marketing campaigns
Similar to consumer-focused retailers, running compelling advertisements, social media and email campaigns that resonate with your customers is a crucial strategy in encouraging repeat purchases.
These campaigns can be in the form of offering deals, discounts or bundled packages to customers, leveraging social media platforms to engage with them, hosting giveaways and sharing useful content related to specific products. By showcasing the value of your products and creating a sense of urgency, you can generate excitement and drive more sales.
Creating sector-specific campaigns is another way to optimise sales during a busy time. Recognising when a particular industry has a boost in demand for their own business like stocking up for the new year is a great time to boost awareness and entice customers.
Multi-channel focus
An increasing number of merchant and trade counter businesses are venturing into the multi-channel and online markets due to demand from customers expecting to be able to buy from different platforms.
Utilising end-to-end multi-channel systems, businesses can integrate everything from supply chain, online marketplaces, warehousing and sales into one central hub. Being able to gain complete control of these areas allows in-store staff to focus on delivering high quality customer service and obtaining sales.
This, combined with trade counter POS, which handles multi-site counter operations, and ecommerce websites which allows customers to self-serve when managing orders, can help keep merchant and trade counter businesses running smoothly even at their busiest times.
Provide top-notch customer service
Exceptional customer service is crucial for attracting and retaining customers across all areas of business. Using RFM (Recency, Frequency, and Monetary) tactics to understand the true value customers bring to your business and training staff to be knowledgeable, responsive, and attentive will encourage customers to return. Consider implementing a customer loyalty program to reward repeat customers and encourage them to choose your business over competitors.
Tradespeople want to experience a personalised buying journey, just like other customers. Offering individual assistance, recommendations, and a seamless checkout experience is now just as important as selling a good quality product. Train your staff to be knowledgeable, responsive, and attentive to customer needs.
By implementing these tips and strategies, you can ensure your trade counter and merchant business is set for success during seasonal changes. Understanding sector trends, customer habits and why looking to the future is as important as looking at the present will make you a strong competitor.
Looking for more ways to keep your customers happy and sales soaring?