In essence, marketing is conceiving, promoting, pricing, and distributing your goods, ideas, or services to individuals or organizations. It is every company’s goal to market its products and services successfully. Marketing is an important tool to raise awareness, attract new customers, and build lasting relationships. Effective marketing can help you increase your sales and secure a competitive advantage.
Today, customers are overwhelmed by choices. Marketing experts use communication and advertising approaches to convince customers that a given brand is what they need, including its products and services. Make sure that you know your customer and your marketing plan. Doing a marketing survey is always a great idea to better know what to put in an email.
Here are some ways your POS system can improve your email and/or social media marketing campaigns.
- Let People Know about Good Customer Experiences
Share your brand’s positive experiences with others. Gather customer feedback and share your reviews to let others know about the perks that your company can provide. This works especially well on social media. Share positive stories across as many media as possible using an omni-channel communication system. You’re more likely to attract new customers through existing ones than through advertising. To maximize value, leverage positive interactions. Special software like NPS can help you gather qualitative information about your company.
- Loyalty Programs
According to TopPOSSystem.Com, Loyalty programs offer your company major benefits. These go far beyond a few transactions. To get an edge on the competition, do everything you can to exceed your customers’ expectations. Studies have shown that the majority of consumers, if promised a positive experience, are willing to pay more.
- Add Value
Another thing you can do is develop and grow a relationship with your customers that goes beyond the moment they buy something. To add value means to show you care about more than just their money – you also care about their wants and needs. POS systems are equipped with special software that creates schedules of company events, competitions, or raffles, which your target audience might be interested in. Use these features to your advantage.
Creating a community of customers is another way to add value. Loyalty cards are a popular concept that has been leveraged by businesses to the latter’s advantage. Your company can be successful in POS marketing through loyalty cards. Take a quick look at your wallet, purse, or key-chain and you’ll see several loyalty cards from various shops that you frequent. You might not even recall being given some of them. It is probable that they get you to keep going to that particular location for your purchases.
A simple option for a loyalty card would be a punch card. If you run a retail or coffee shop, creating a “Buy one, get one free” option can be a great way to keep customers returning. This approach has been applied by a number of international chains. According to companies who’ve utilized this approach, it can really help maintain sustained patronage by customers.
Encourage signups by offering a free sample or gift at the register for requesting a loyalty card.
- Send Promotional Emails
Consumers miss out on event and product announcements when they don’t open email marketing messages, and retailers in turn lose opportunities to turn a profit. A study showed transaction rates increased six times when promotional emails were personalized. Such emails have an almost 30% higher unique open rate, and the unique click rate is up 41%. It is perplexing that more than two-thirds of all companies still don’t target individuals through email despite these impressive figures.
A POS system makes it easy to track what people are buying. This way, you can reach out with customized information about new offers or items you believe might provoke interest. As a retailer, you need to ensure every touch point between the consumer and your brand is lucrative and relevant.
Facebook ads are a great way to grow email lists. This is the cheapest and most efficient way to succeed in email marketing. Companies can achieve huge revenue growth by using targeted Facebook ads to get names and email addresses. X-generation Facebook users are rapidly increasing, and they are the most profitable group businesses target. What is more, millennials and generation Z users are dropping off.
- Capture New Leads
POS systems are highly effective at capturing new leads no matter what the size of your company is. They work just as well for franchises as they do for sole proprietors. You can capture dozens of new leads as often as daily, and the size of your budget is not decisive. These leads are likely to purchase what your company is selling. They can be targeted very specifically based on age, geographic location, and online purchase history.
According to a recent survey, the main reason consumers choose to shop in traditional stores is to experience products before buying them. Retailers need to be aware which products customers most often want to test in advance to take advantage of this consumer preference and make sure they always have these products available. A POS system can be imperative to this end.
- Integration with CRM
If your POS integrates with a customer relationship management (CRM) portal, it’s easy to track purchasing behaviors using it. Retailers can therefore be sure that when customers enter a store, they will locate the products they hoped to purchase and have the chance to try them out. This will both ensure a positive in-store experience and limit the burden of customers refunding items which do not meet their expectations. As we know, this can be quite a pesky problem, one that retailers today go to great lengths to avoid. In fact, they always have, but it is still a problem.
- Final Note
On a final note, successful retailers use POS marketing to get people to buy something extra when they are near the cash register. Things like lists, signs, and displays encourage customers to add something small to their order. You can market almost any product with a POS system, but it’s most effective when the visitor is prone to impulse buys or just in a hurry. Finally, POS marketing can help attract attention to a new product a shopper hasn’t tried yet.
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