Is Your POS Ready For Black Friday?

The Link between POS Throughput and Sales It’s Black Friday tomorrow! Now I know, Black Friday is the huge shopping day after Thanksgiving in the US (and seems to be gaining popularity here in Canada), but it’s so much more. That retailers and restaurant owners often don’t understand the greater importance of this day is more than a little surprising. Whether it is Canadian or American, the symbolism of Black Friday for retailers and restaurant owners needs to be clearly understood. In addition to being a big shopping day for brick and mortar stores and online retailers alike, Black Friday is the date that accountants say retailers stop being in the “red” for the year and begin making a profit – or are in the “black”. That retailers operate for 11 months of the year at a financial loss is a mind blowing concept that many people have a hard time coming to grips with. Black is Good Black Friday seems like such an ominous term. Too bad it can’t be Green Friday… it sounds nicer, and more like money… but we Canadians don’t have green money… Oh well. Black Friday it is and we should be glad for it. If nothing else it’s a date on the calendar which seems to give us permission to pull out the garland, play carols over the loudspeakers, and start those Christmas promotions rolling. It gets customers excited about the Christmas season, even if they’re not quite ready yet. So it’s a calendar date you should mark every year as an important reminder of your need for POS Readiness. What is POS Readiness, you ask? Have you taken the required steps to review your POS and make any necessary improvements and do the proactive maintenance on your point of sale system to ensure your Christmas season hums along profitably? Let me put it another way: If your profit for the year is earned over the next 4 weeks, it means that customers are going to spend more money over the next 4 weeks than they have all year. Ideally, you want them to spend a lot of that cash with you. Are you ready to take advantage of it? Remember, failing to plan is planning to fail. Do NOT Make Customers Wait I can’t stand waiting to spend my money. In fact, I won’t. I have too much to do, too little time to do it, and zero tolerance for wasting time being made to wait for a retailer. If I walk into your store or restaurant and see a line-up I may turn around at the door. If I don’t turn around and end up in your checkout line, during my idle time waiting I start thinking about what is not being done while I’m waiting or what I have to do next. Make me wait too much longer, and if I don’t really need or want the item you’re selling me, or I think I can pick it up more conveniently somewhere else, I’m gone. This is death for a retailer. If I happen to find it at the next place easier, faster, and it’s cheaper or better, I’m probably gone forever. I’m not alone in this behavior. A recent retail time survey done by Great Clips, a Hair Salon chain, recently determined that your customers are not willing to wait long either – 5-10 minutes or less is considered reasonable by 94% of respondents. Any longer than that and they think your business is poorly run, or worse, that you don’t care about their business. Long wait times was ranked 2nd by those surveyed as the thing that annoyed them most – it was a close second behind “rude staff” which was ranked number one. Study Your Lines Take an honest assessment of your lines – if you haven’t opened your retail store or restaurant yet, look at the lines in the stores of your peers, and by lines, I mean the line-ups at the point-of-sale terminals or cash registers. Are they long? Are they too long? Get a stopwatch out if you have to. Do customers have to wait longer than 5 minutes to spend their money with you? To solve this you need to take a good hard look at your point-of-sale system. Do you have enough POS terminals to serve your customers at the busiest times of your year? In my experience the answer is no. That’s because most retailers tend to say the same thing when investing in point-of-sale, “We’re not that busy Monday to Friday, we really just need it for Saturdays,” or my seasonal favorite, “We’re only open from this date to that date, we really don’t need it during the rest of the year.” If there was ever a formula for retail or hospitality failure, that most assuredly is it. Most people buy their cash registers for the first 11 months of the year – and they think they can coast on what’s “satisfactory” for the most crucial periods of sales. You can’t. Not if you want your business to thrive over the long-term and have a loyal customer following. Let me put it another way. If you wanted to move a pile of something from the front of your store to the back of your store, would you get it there faster and easier if I gave you one wheelbarrow or two? Now think of your POS system – your cash register – as your financial wheelbarrow, and you need it to carry the money of your customers from their pocket to your pocket. It’s mission critical – you can’t do it effectively or efficiently without it. It’s one of the simplest principles in retail – the more POS you have, the more money you make. You will find that more POS terminals increase your non-Christmas sales too. Why? If you’re a restaurant your table turns happen faster due to the increased efficiency and redundancy, so your customers are more likely… Read More

How To Setup A Great Loyalty Program

In It To Win It! If you’re in the retail or restaurant business and you’re not paying close attention to loyalty programs, you should be. It’s hard these days not to – they’re everywhere. For example, it was no surprise to me that 86% of Canadians are members of at least 1 loyalty program. The average Canadian is a member of 4 programs and the average Canadian household is a member of 9 or more programs. Folks are collecting box tops, trading cards, stamps, points, and buying memberships anywhere they can, and they have been conditioned to do so by the chains that nationalize their programs. To my amazement, independent retailers and restaurants in Canada are not doing loyalty programs, much to their own detriment. Loyalty increases the frequency of existing customers and improves retention of new customers. Running a WagJag or posting a coupon in the local paper is much more expensive than marketing to your existing customers, and this has been mathematically proven over and over again. Unless you are deliberately trying to attract new customers so that you can capture them in your loyalty program, save your money and invest it in your own loyalty offering. Whatever promotion you offer, it should be intended to do four things: Drive more customers into your business Increase profits and revenue Increase stock rotation and preferably slow moving higher margin stock And provide you with customer data to remarket or analyze down the road. In my career here at Armagh, I have seen hundreds of promotions offered by my customers. Many of them, unfortunately, do not do what they were intend to do, so here’s a few things that I have learned along the way that might help you to customize your own loyalty program for your retail store or restaurant. Look Before You Leap Consider your point of sale system and include your service provider in the discussion. I have seen retail store and restaurant owners have meetings and print marketing materials and send out email blasts only to find out that the loyalty program they have dreamed up isn’t possible with the POS system they currently own. This usually leads to self-inflicted strained relations with their POS system provider and is completely avoidable by simply doing some homework first. Whatever you plan to do, it must be compatible with your POS system, as the POS system is absolutely critical in the tracking of whatever program you launch. If your POS system doesn’t have a points or loyalty program, or there is no compromise available between what you want to run vs. what is available in your system – you need to change POS systems. If you’re a new business owner and you haven’t selected your POS system yet, you should consider Catapult for retail or Digital Dining for restaurant. Both systems we offer have loyalty programs that are very detailed and easy to use, and even if you don’t select one from Armagh, you should use them as a benchmark for whatever system you ultimately choose. What’s In A Name? It must have a catchy name. I know. It’s cosmetic, and that’s unlike me, but it really matters what you call it. Remember, if you market the loyalty program effectively to your customers you’ll eventually have thousands of members and the program will be around for decades. You really need something that your store can be proud of and your customers can easily remember so they can pass on to other customers by word of mouth. It Must Be Well Planned They call them loyalty plans for a reason – they’re planned. Once you have a great loyalty program name, you need to carefully organize the details of the program. You can’t do this willy-nilly. If you need some professional paid help with this, get it, and I can’t stress this enough. You need a program brochure outlining the details of the plan so that your staff can easily educate themselves and hand out to customers asking questions about the program. You need a sign up form asking for the customers information so that your staff doesn’t unnecessarily tie up POS terminals with data entry. You need a customer card or key-tag so that customers can be easily recalled at the POS and their purchases and redemptions can be tracked with ease. You need to determine the percentage return on your loyalty plan and how your customers will realize that reward. Keep It Simple Stupid Remember who will sell this program – your staff. Make it too complicated and they won’t even try. Even if you sell the loyalty program yourself, remember who you want to join the program – your customer. Make it too complicated and they won’t try either. You should also actively try to avoid program contradictions with other marketing initiatives. It’s not a good program if it causes you to get into arguments with your customers over whether or not you’ll include one thing or another in your loyalty program. Make the reward calculation simple – it should be a points or dollar percentage return based on purchases, and your POS system should track it automatically. Beware of anything you have to mail, count, track, or redeem manually – it is unlikely that any plan you create that has an intense labour requirement on the part of you or your staff will be successful. Any promise you make that is not fulfilled is worse than making no promise at all. In other words, if you promise a customer you will mail him a gift certificate if his purchases reach a certain level and you fail to follow through because it’s too much work or you don’t have time to do it, your loyalty program will be contrary to your goals. Quid Pro Quo Don’t be afraid to ask for some information in return for a decent loyalty program and make sure your staff are trained on how to ask for it politely. Ask… Read More