Boost sales today with a marketing campaign to your point of sale customer database

Today's article is very practical and is about making contact with your customers and driving them to your web site or your store.

How do you do this

Step 1. Analyse you sales and find out what your customer are interested in. To do this you will use your point of sale reports on what stock is moving. YOu then use this information to note what stock is moving. Now that you know this you then need to find and source related products. You may already have these on your shelves.

Step 2. You need to extract from your point of sale system those customer who have purchased a range of products that are related to the product you are going to offer customers.

Step 3. Formulate your offer and the sale pitch

Step 4. With the list in hand and your offer exeute your point of sale campaign.

The above 4 steps can take minutes or hours depending on the capability of your software to provide the tools you need. A good point of sale system will provide campaign wizards where this process is all very simple.

Checkout the PBSA POS CRM module to see how easy this can be

Profits are about managing your margins and the way you do this is via your POS system

To be profitable it is all about selling your goods for more than you paid for them. This tasks as simple as it may sound is not so easy. The reason for this is that the standard retailer can have 500 to many thousands of product lines and it is a difficult task to price all these items and manage your margins.

Lets look as a standard retail scenario. You have a store full or stock and this stock cost you money to hold because you finance your stock or have to pay your suppliers bill via your bank overdraft or you hve to pay interest to your suppliers if you cannot sell the stock within their 30 or 60 day terms. So what this means is that you need access to information on what stock is moving and what stock is not moving. You then need to use this information to determine your pricing. Stock that is not moving you need to find ways to move it, as it is costing you to have it sit on the shelf. To do this you need to know what it cost you and how much you can discount the stock. Sometimes it is of benefit to sell the stock under costs because of the cost of holding the stock.

ON the other side with the stock that is moving you need to maximise your profits by charging your customers as much as you can while mairtaining as much volume as you can. Now different businesses have different models, some are high turnover low margin and others are low turnover but high margins and then everyone else is some where in between.

Ok so how do I use my POS to manage this process.

Well a good POS system will provide you with reports on what stock is moving and what stock is not. You then need to be able to view the stock that is not movng and be able ot quickly view the current price, the average price and last cost price and then be able to adjust the stock levels. Unfortunatelty many POS systems makes this hard as they force you to drill in to a sinple product at a time to alter it price. One of the benefits of the PBSA POS system is the abiility to view in one screen all the products in a particular category including the sotck level, the cost for the stock, the current price and the eGP and EGP%. Then on this same screen you can adjust the price for multiple items and see the changes to the eGP. This is a very powerful feature fo the PBSA POS system that saves you the business owner many, many hours of hard work.

Managing your pricing levels and margins is a daily process and one that is vital to your success. To do this you need to ensure your POS gives you access to the right reports and the gives you tools to use this information to make adjustments quickly and easily.

I loko forward to providing more detaisl on tricks to managing your margins in future articles on POS and POS systems

Touch screen technology is becoming part of our lives more and more each day. The growth of iphone usage and other touch screen phones has shown so many of use how nice they are to use. Microsoft is also committed to expanding the usage of touch screens with the changes to Windows 7 and a long term commitment which will see every home having a touch screen.

At the consumer level touch screens have also come down a lot in price. These lower cost touch screens are great for the office desk although they are not robust enough for the retail environment.

So what about point of sale and touch screens?

There is still a lot of variance in the point of sale market place. If you go in to the major supermarket stores you will defintately see touch screen point of sale systems. Thne at other retailers such as clothing stores and electrical stores you will not see as many touch screens. Why is this.

Well the touch screen brings a lot of advantages to high volume sales points and where there is fresh food and integration with scanner and scales. The commercial touch screen hardware is normally fanless and resistant ot moisture.

So where is a touch screen suitable and not suitable. A touch screen is perfect when there is a simple check out process. For example in the supermarket you scan or weigh the item and move on the the necxt item and then process the sale. However if the store sales process is more complex such as the need to adjust price, the need to access more detailed information on margins, stock availability and more then a touch screen point of sale system may not be as suitable.

So what is my advice when a touch screen point of sale system should be used?

• For a store with grocery items then I recommend the touch screen as it makes the sales process very simple for staff to implement.
• If you run a restaurant, cafe, pizza store or fast food outlet I also recommend a point of sale system. Just make sure if you do phone orders and deliveries that the point of sale software has a phone orders module.
• If you run a clothing store then it is a 50/50 choice. If you like the simplicity of the touch screen then go for it, it you feel you have a more complex checkout then stay with normal hardware.

Finally in regards to hardware make sure you go for commercial grade touch screen hardware which includes being fanless, having the terminal and touch screen as one unit and ensuring the touch screen is resistant to moisture.

Stay tuned for more information in features to look out for in a good touch screen point of sale system

Every contact with a customer is an opportunity to boost the sale.

Most times when you walk in to a supermarket you know what you want and yet when you walk out of the supermarket you have generally purchased other items. Why?

The reason is that the supermarket uses advertising and specials to get you to buy items you did not plan to buy.

Any good retailer knows that this is one of the keys to boost sales.

So what are some of the secrets to increasing your upselling and cross selling using your point of sale system?

1. Related Products

A very important feature of a good point of sale system is the ability to specify items/product related to another product. For example if you sell the hamurger the fries and the coke are related items and the POS system should prompt your staff to mention this to the customer.

2. A customer display screen

This is an additional LCD monitor that faces towards your customers and display special offers and reminders in relation to product. This can be such things as buy 2 cans of soft drink for $x dollars and other deals that rotate in front of the customer. During the sale the point of sale shows the customer the items they are purchasing and the total, but either on the side or the bottom the customer display screen shows offers. The above 2 features alone can take you a long way to boosting sales by 10 or 20% with minimal effort.

How to segment your data with your point of sale system 

One of the biggest mistakes I see retail businesses make today with their point of sale is to not record sales history against the customer.

What I do see is retails stores recording their sales using customer 'Cash Sale'. What this means is that you do not have a record of what the customer likes to purchase and their contact details so that you can better serve them and market directly towards them.

So how can I use my point of sale system as a data segmentation tool?

It is as simple as recording as many sales against the customers record rather than as a cash sale. To do this you need to incentivise your customers to identify who they are. The best way to do this is with a loyalty program. This way the customer shows their card and you can scan it and then record the sales history against their record.

Now you have this data the next step is using this information to run targeted marketing campaigns. Stay tuned for my next blog entry on how to run a targeted marketing campaign from your point of sale (POS) system.

The benefit of a point of sale customer display

When you visit a store are you amazed how often you walk out with products you did not plan on purchasing when you entered the store.

What are some of the keys to using your point of sale software to upsell additional products to your customer.

1. A customer display screen

This is an additional LCD monitor that faces towards your customers and display special offers and reminders in relation to product. This can be such things as buy 2 cans of soft drink for $x dollars and other deals that rotate in front of the customer. During the sale the point of sale shows the customer the items they are purchasing and the total, but either on the side or the bottom the customer display screen shows offers.

An important things to note is that it is important that you make your customer display advertising bright and clear to the customer. A good point of sale system like PBSA POS gives you the ability to load up images that rotate in a similar manner to a screen saver. You can set the order to ensure the most popular offers comes up first, this is a very important features.

2. Related items

Another very important feature of a good point of sale system is the ability to specify items/product related to another product. For example if you sell the hamurger the fries and the coke are related items and the POS system should prompt your staff to mention this to the customer.

The above 2 features alone can take you a long way to boosting sales by 10 or 20% with minimal effort.

If your point of sale system does not support a customer LCD display and upselling prompts via realted product then you shoudl consider PBSA POS or a point of sale system that does.

For more details on PBSA POS go to www.pbsapos.com.au

Make the most out of every customer contact

Being successfull in retain is about serving your customer well and having them come back time and time again. If you are really organised you will also have programs that encourage them to refer their friends.

Do you know that if a person has a good experience they may tell 1 or 2 people where if they have a bad experience they tell 8 or more.

What does this mean?
You need to do everything you can to manage your moments of truth. A moment of truth is any form of interaction with a customer.

What can help me manage these moments of truth?
The key is customer information storage, systems and staff traiing

If you have a good point of sale system that enabled you quickly to recongnise the customer, know their purchase attribtes and other details about likes and dislikes and if you can know their name. These factors can make a big difference. One of the best ways to gather this information is thorugh a loyalty pogram where the customer presents their card and you swip e the card and your staff are shown all the informaiton you need to assist the customer while also recording more sales data against this customers profile.

For more information checkout all the modules and informaton on pos, touch screens and touchscreen point of sale systems at pbsapos.com.au