Pop-up shops

With the emergence of space-brokers, such as the superb Appear Here (UK) www.appearhere.co.uk, We Are Pop Up (UK and some NYC) www.wearepopup.com and Republic Spaces (USA) www.republicspaces.com, the pop-up shop is now an affordable opportunity for any retailer, large or small, online or off, to extend their physical presence. The range of stuff you can do is as broad as your imagination. Just a few examples would include:

• Test a new location.
• Test a new product.
• Bring an online business into a physical selling space.
• Bring a new product to life.
• Reach a group of customers outside your existing audience.
• Test parts of a new format.
• Gain research data.
• Retail activation for manufacturers or brands^*.
• Pre-launch for PR or soft-launch new idea.
• Set up near a sporting or cultural event.
• Gain media exposure.
• Try something risky under a temporary branding.
• Intensify your sales space for peak season.
• Collaborative project.

In early 2016, Appear Here, for example, was brokering space in Top Shop’s super-busy flagship Oxford Street store for just £150 a day. The power of a weeks pop-up inside a store like this could break your business into the mainstream. A month in an area of your city where you’re currently not represented might bring you a whole new customer base. Bringing your online start-up into physical selling space might just give you the cashflow booster that sees you through to next month. Pop-ups are intense, fun, creative and very powerful. Again, Appear Here and the like can help you to understand and make the best of the spaces they offer and are, generally, delighted to give advice.

Infrastructure providers such as Square (payments) and Shopify (POS) mean even a market stall can now offer full payment options and can help you manage your inventory, pricing, pretty much everything. Both are further examples of how technology is setting free retail creativity. I did my first ‘pop-up aged 13 in 1983 in a field in Peterborough where we’d grudgingly accept credit cards and use a gigantic sort of bicep-exerciser machine to physically imprint a card onto complex multi-part paper vouchers, which would then be signed and distributed to customer, accountant and the bank. I loved that first introduction to retail, red in tooth and claw – selling hard and having the best fun looking after big hairy bikers (genuinely among the nicest people in the world). Now? You can offer contactless at a pop-up market on a mountaintop using your phone. It’s brilliant.

When planning your pop-up, remember your retail disciplines. Think through the objective, consider why people might care, be aware of the practical issues. I would strongly advise you to read through at least Secrets 3, 4 and 5 too, and think about how those principles would apply to a pop-up.

A fantastic checklist on pop-ups can be found on Shopify’s website: https://goo.gl/SoZAjD.

Collaboration

When two brands are better than one, could you bring a known designer in to provide you with something exclusive? Is there a retailer you admire in another sector that might be open to work with you to create a collaborative range of products? In fashion, collaborations have become something of a staple. Right back in 2004, Karl Lagerfeld created a capsule collection for H&M that sold out within minutes of stores opening their doors, setting the template for the modern designer/fashion retailer collaboration. Earlier still, Target built its homewares reputation on the strength of a collaboration with Martha Stewart. They can be very productive – volume sales for the designer and loads of noise and premium margins for the retailer.

Sponsorship and community events

Don’t dismiss requests for sponsorship right out of hand. Sometimes, a sensible sponsorship can be a very effective way to show your commitment to local communities, who will often return the favour later. Businesses located at the centre of smaller communities gain most benefit from this form of promotion. Sponsoring events, such as the town fun run or village fete, makes a very strong statement about your commitment to the community. Many retailers have reported that the goodwill this creates does translate into sales.

Adverts in changing rooms

Cheap, easy and brilliant. Put adverts in your changing rooms. Your customer is absolutely captive when they are in there and they have plenty of time to read. Think about featuring deals on accessories, especially – customers who bite will be helping to push up your average transaction values.

Children’s competitions

Maybe we are just a nation of soppy souls, but children’s competitions always work well. These can be very simple colouring competitions or letter writing. Perhaps themed “draw or write a letter about your mum for Mother’s Day”. Local papers love this sort of thing. You have a good chance of getting a photo of the winner in your store printed in the paper. Easy to run online, especially.

Tip sheets

No matter what your product, you can easily produce useful tip sheets. A sheet of tips might seem a little uninspiring, perhaps, but time and again retailers tell me that customers go nuts for these, often citing the tip sheets as the reason why customers come back. You can write tip sheets yourself or have a well-known expert do them for you at a cost. Formats can be anything from a full-colour booklet to a small card fixed to a shelf edge. My favourite format in stores is loose A5 so that customers can take the tip sheets away with them. Online you can do cool interactive things, add video, guided help and “pick lists” that link to all the product required.

Here are some examples of tip sheets:

• Recipes in a grocer’s.
• Recommendations and explanations in a wine merchant’s.
• How to automate home elements.
• Improvement projects in a DIY store.
• Ideal kit recommendation at a cycle retailer.
• How to furnish a kid’s bedroom.

Loyalty programmes

I don’t believe that customers are ever loyal to the over-hyped special offers, magazines or bits of tinsel that most loyalty programmes consist of. I’ve written about loyalty in general in the Secrets section of the book and you’ll note that I’m pretty unconvinced, but there are useful options.

The kind of loyalty programmes that do work are those that feel more immediate and are usually much simpler. Maybe a coffee shop gives you a little card that they stamp each time you visit, and that entitles you to your sixth coffee free. Or a pizza company offers a loyalty bonus that allows you to get any pizza you want for free if you have saved up four receipts from previous orders. Those kinds of loyalty programmes are unobtrusive and relatively low cost and customers really like them.

If you’ve read anything on “nudge” theory, you’ll know to create cards that already have two boxes pre-stamped. We daft humans are persuaded by those two pre-printed and stamped boxes that our mission to get the free burrito is closer and easier, even though the burrito place just put ten boxes on the card rather than the eight they actually calculated the promotion on.

Customer-get-customer

You could offer existing customers a gift, store vouchers perhaps, if they recommend your store to a friend who then makes a purchase. Customer-get-customer is especially easy to do online and your infrastructure provider may even have a simple voucher code generator available off the shelf.

In-store, if you don’t have an electronic solution, all you need is a printed coupon, which you give to every customer with their till receipt. The customer can fill in this coupon and give it to their friend. The friend brings in the coupon and it has the original customer’s details still written on it so you can send them their reward.

If you are confident that people like you enough to recommend your store to friends, this is an effective way in which to make it easy for them to do exactly that.

Buy one, get one free (or two-for-one, three-for-two)

In the early 2000s, this was the UK’s most popular promotional mechanic. If you can afford to run them, run them. Promote such offers heavily. Talk to your suppliers about funding either the offer, the advertising or both! If you can run a steady stream of good offers over a long period, then this becomes even more effective because customers begin to pop in just to see what you’ve got on “special”.

Sampler clubs

In some ways, this is an extension of the tip sheet idea, but with a chance for customers to actually try the product out. You take a group of your customers and sign them up to a hands-on sampling club. In that cycling kit tip sheet example earlier you could hold regular demonstration days out on the road just for members, hold set-up lessons with an expert, make pre-ordering on limited edition products available to the members first, and run exclusive offers. Online cycle retailer Wiggle.com run an uber version of this by sponsoring sportives at which they then preview product, provide ride set-up services and give demonstrations and advice – all strengthening their credentials among riders.

Percentage off

Exactly what it says, you run either a day where everything is 10% off, or you reduce a selection of lines for a limited period of time. It has become very hard to make such events really work, though. The DIY sheds, especially, have trained customers to think that anything less than a 25% discount isn’t worth their while. Percentage-off promotions also make a negative statement about your usual prices. The Gap, for example, has suffered in 2016 as a result of heavy discounting throughout the previous three years – customers have come to resent paying full price there.

Special nights

Inviting selected customers to join you in the store for an exclusive evening of demonstrations and offers can be very effective. Provide refreshments and snacks and, if appropriate, bring in a relevant speaker, and entertainment too. Try to pick a theme or a special reason for doing it because that can help you to more effectively promote the night. A sports shop, for example, could invite customers in to celebrate the England football manager’s birthday. It’s frivolous, sure, but gives you a hook too. This is another one that can get you coverage in the local paper.

Surveys

You should be asking customers for their views anyway, but surveys can also be used as promotional tools. Create an online survey, using a tool such as www.surveymonkey.com and then send a link to members of your database. Include a thank-you voucher for a discount in-store or online. It reminds customers you are there, it tells them customer satisfaction is important to you and it gives them a reason to come and shop with you.

Celebrity visit

Getting a celebrity into your store for a PA (public appearance) can be fantastic for generating traffic. They are not always as expensive as you might think, either. TV actors, especially if they live locally, can be a bargain. You can find the contact details of almost all British-based actors in a book called Spotlight. Your town library will have a copy. Make sure you tell customers and the local paper that this is happening. A virtual version is easy to run, though needs tight moderating – online, you should pick somebody with direct relevance to your product. You can run these online as webinar-style sessions or as simple Q&A.

Book signings

You don’t have to be a bookshop to hold book signings. A fishing tackle shop can get just as much benefit from having the captain of the British course fishing team in to sign their new book. In fact, it’s sometimes a good way for a non-bookseller to get a celebrity in without having to pay them. Heavily promoting the event is key to making a book signing really work for you. If you run a café, get a local comedian in to sell their new book via a reading, or even to give it a second launch party.

Lunch at the store

People are so busy today that lunchtime often becomes a trade-off between eating and shopping. An idea from the USA is to help your customers to do both. Think about putting on a simple open-packaged lunch for every customer who visits you on one day or one week of lunchtimes. Obviously it’s worth avoiding greasy or staining food. Leafleting local offices is the best way to promote these events. Word is that they are really very effective at getting new people into your store but I’ve been talking about this idea since 2007 and still we Brits are reluctant to try it!

Seminars, how-tos and in-store events

These are absolutely essential, whatever your business. Get local traders, designers and even manufacturers’ reps in to show off your products and demonstrate what to do with them. Construct a series of seminars, how-tos, and in-store events and then give every customer a calendar with these marked on it. Seminars attract customers and they help customers to decide to spend more money. How-to demonstrations and events such as fashion shows bring theatre and drama into your store. That excites customers and helps to make their experience of your store a much more enjoyable and interesting one. Seminars attract customers and they help customers decide to spend more money. Most of these can be replicated online and, in both cases, consider approaching popular bloggers to be involved – their opinions and advice can be highly valued by customers.

Meeting place

If you have a training room or large office that is not fully utilised, consider offering it to local businesses as an outside meeting space. This creates massive goodwill and hardly anyone currently does it, which will mean you will stand out. Maybe invest in a coffee maker and a lick of paint to make the place attractive. Check your insurance terms, just in case.

Charity giving

An honest charity promotion is a winner in many sectors. The usual format would be to partner with a particular charity and then agree to donate a stated percentage of profits earned during a specific special charity day or series of events.

Local radio outside broadcasts

If you have got the space, offer to let the local radio station come and do an OB (outside broadcast) from your car park or store. Make it coincide with a strong event and you’ll find the stations quite keen to be involved. Yes, local radio still exists.

Banded product

This is a cousin of the buy-one-get-one-free offers. Banding is usually applied to fast-moving lines and means either attaching a different product to another for free, or putting two products together as a package deal. It’s a good way to move a slower line out with a more popular one and to please the customer at the same time.

Discount off future purchase

I am a big fan of this technique, also sometimes called “delayed discount”. Every customer buying on the promotional day gets a money-off voucher that they can use in the store or online on another day. Usually, the value of the voucher depends on the value of the original spend, so a typical offer might look like this:

• Spend £20, get a £5 voucher off next purchase.
• Spend £50, get a £12 voucher off next purchase.
• Spend £100, get a £30 voucher off next purchase.

You can afford to be quite generous because a high proportion of the vouchers you give out will never be redeemed. Incidentally, make sure that whatever you use is secure and that it has an expiry date and a 0.0001p cash equivalent mark on it. Online redemption generally will be higher than in-store, so plan carefully.

Promote it on the day with lots of bold signs, or a bespoke site headline, and make sure you have told all your database contacts to come and visit. This promotion type makes a great story for social media sharing – people love to do each other favours and sharing details of a promotion such as this one feels like a nice thing to do.

Gift certificate promotions

This is very similar to the discount-off-future-purchase offer, except redeemed using normal store gift certificates, which can be used at any time. Customers treat gift certificates more like money, so redemption rates, and cost, will be much higher.

Buy now, pay later

A credit-based promotion and very popular among big-ticket retailers because it enables customers to fulfil tomorrow’s desires today. Actually, they are a good deal for both punter and retailer. Like the storecard I’ll mention in a bit, do be careful to make this a good, honest offer rather than something that ties people in debt they can’t cope with.

Interest-free credit

A very powerful promotion that enables customers to buy your product and pay for it in instalments without them incurring any credit interest. Various deals are available to suit independent retailers and are worth serious consideration if you are aiming to move big-ticket items. The same considerations as above apply.

Storecard

Storecards earn us retailers a lot of money, and they can be very convenient for some customers. I struggle with storecards, though, from an ethical standpoint. This is a very expensive form of credit with interest rates that are way above those for ordinary credit cards or for personal loans. Lots of good ordinary people, our customers, get caught out by storecards and they run up huge debts with awful consequences. Retail is a people business, so I don’t believe we should be responsible for making anyone’s life more difficult. So, for that reason, I cannot recommend running a storecard.

Time-limited

Examples of these promotions include: at 4pm, all bread rolls free with soup for half an hour; every Monday, shoes are 20% off; on the hour, every hour, this Saturday we will offer a different item in limited stock at a crazy price. These are great for creating instant interest and PR. The countdown is another popular version of the time-limited promotion. In the last examples, if the stock is too limited, then you do risk annoying customers. Amazon.co.uk’s 2010 “Black Friday” promotion of this type generated masses of bad press, as offers sold out fast, often in under a second. And, then again, in 2014, in the UK “Black Friday” in-store promotions, particularly those at large grocers, led to hideous scenes of customers fighting and staff being assaulted. So use with care!

Bargains (price promotions)

The most powerful promotion of all: the humble bargain. Scour your price lists, badger your suppliers, pester the marketing team, gather up end of lines or last season’s stock and go mad for your customers. Bargains bring people in: they make them spend more and they bring them back again.

Displays in empty stores

I need to credit brilliant retail speaker Rick Segel with this great idea: find the landlords of an empty local retail unit and offer to put a display in the window. It makes the unit look more appealing for the landlord trying to find permanent tenants and provides you with an excellent advertising space. I first mentioned this in 2003 when it was super-rare. You see it a lot now and it seems to work well for everyone involved. So these aren’t quite pop-ups as they’re static but they are still very much worthwhile as drivers of additional awareness.

Joint activity

Look for promotions you can share with either manufacturers or other retailers in your association or street. The obvious benefit is that you can pool costs and then afford to promote the activity more aggressively. An example of retailers engaging in joint activity might be a “fun day” held within your shopping centre. A manufacturer and retailer joint activity could include manufacturer-supplied demonstrators, linked to a customer promotion and a manufacturer-funded staff incentive.

Promotions and the rules of performance improvement at a glance

*A celebrity or author who is expert in the same field as the store can lead customers into buying all sorts of extras to go with a base purchase. However, a non-related one can’t!