The summer travel season is undoubtedly on the rise! While there are advantages and disadvantages that this season brings to various industries, perhaps, you are curious about what would it bring to the retail industry.
Thus, here are some of the ways we can give you on how you can actually maximize this seasonal spending and some examples of retailers who are already giving a shot on it.
Understand your Audience
Knowing the ways and creating strategies on how you can leverage the summer travel season can be a good scheme to better serve your existing customer base—which perhaps, can also attract new customers.
The first thing to do is to know your market’s behavior. You have to understand and be of knowledge regarding your customers’ preferences, what your customers are looking for, what they love about your products and services, and on what way would they want to complete a purchase in from your store.
Create a Summer-feeling through Summer Shelves
On this matter, you could also create seasonal and/or limited edition products that would best fit for the summer travelers and tourists. In accordance to the article entitled, “13 Summer Retail Marketing Tips To Heat Up Sales,” Forbes says: “Take Starbucks’ Lilly Pulitzer water bottles as an example. The bottles flew off the shelves as soon as they were available this past spring.”
If ever you can’t actually grab a partnership with a major brand like Lilly Pulitzer for your own special product, you can create a design of various seasonal products—such as mugs, stationery, or whatever makes sense for your brand—through CafePress, Vistaprint, or Printful. Make sure that these things would appeal to your shoppers.
To create noise about your seasonal products, perhaps, you might want to consider hosting a contest or giveaway and create a mechanic wherein your customers shall submit designs that would be featured on your limited edition merchandise.
Unique Experience is a good scheme
Aside from giving out unique products to gather more new customers during the summer months, perhaps, you should think about offering unique experiences and ways on how they would experience and interact with your brand on the time they’re in your store. Based on the article entitled, “Travel Trends Could Bring Shoppers Back to Brick and Mortar, Nicole Reyhle of Retail Minded states: “Whether that is an in-store demo/class, a take-home trial, an on-site expert or something completely your own, know that consumers will travel for experience, not for product.”
On this matter, you might want to consider hosting events with food and/or prizes wherein your attendees would have the opportunity to check out your merchandise. Also, may create custom displays so your possible market can have a first-hand experience of your products.
Give your Customers reasons to Stay in Your Store
Nicole of Retail Minded also says: “From the music playing in your shop to the seating areas you choose to offer, understand that comfort and aesthetics are key to keeping customers in store once they arrive.”
Here, you can various tactics to actually get your customers to be in-store for a longer span of a moment. You can use the following strategies:
- Offer a free Wifi
- Place a juice bar/bottled water “pop-in” around the store to provide refreshments to your customers
- Enhance the layout of your store to make your merchandise be easily discoverable
- Set up a clearance section at the back of your store
- Set up product demonstrations inside your store