Housewares Business-to-business magazine for housewares retailers and their suppliers
Golden rule: the job of advertising is to significantly increase your footfall!
a) How spending £40 could bring you 200 new customers
Here’s how. On your own computer make up a coupon for a free item to be collected from your store on a certain day and date (normally your slowest day). Note on the coupon that stocks are limited to 100, 200, 300 or whatever quantity you still have.
Choose an item that is redundant or a very slow seller. The item should have a value in excess of £10 but, remember, it has to have been sold at the original value in the last 30 days.
The items should be placed in the back of the store so that people have to walk through the whole store to find them.
Get a staff member to take the coupons and distribute them in the local streets, or on windscreens in the local car park. Make sure to note where the coupons are distributed as you will want to record all results for future campaigns.
b) Use the “partial sets” method of advertising
Get a staff member to go to the local mall and hand out free a part of a full set to potential customers so they would need to come to your shop to complete the set – for example, one glass from a set of six, one spoon from a cutlery set.
c) Use “the take it to them” method of advertising
One retailer hired 20 students to walk in a line carrying the shop’s bags over their shoulders and looking like a snake going through the mall – even going into their competitors’ stores. Clever!
For Halloween, another company dressed one of its staff up in full costume and sent them out into the town centre with a price list leaflet telling the customers where to buy their Halloween merchandise.
Think outside the square!
