As the seasons change, it’s time to make room for the incoming merchandise by clearing the products you currently have. Seasonal clearance sales are a regular part of the retail cycle, but without proper advertising, you might not sell enough of your nearly outdated inventory to stock the backroom with new items.
Before you end up with boxes full of unsold merchandise that’ll become obsolete when winter arrives, check out these tips for promoting your fall clearance sale.
Look back to move forward
When you prepare for this autumn’s clearance promotion, it can be helpful to review how the store fared last year around the same time. According to Business Know-How, you should identify what types of sales you ran in the past, the amount of inventory that was sold and aspects of the seasonal deal that didn’t pan out.
Gift Shop Magazine explained that it’s important to clear out seasonal merchandise from your backroom throughout the year, even if that means lost profit. The issue with holding on to those products and continuously expanding your sale section is that your store can begin to look like a discount store in general, which you might not want.
While we’re discussing the year-to-year necessities to sell seasonal items, consider starting markdowns earlier in the season next year. You can recover more of the money you spent on inventory if you start reducing prices as soon as it’s clear that the product isn’t selling at an ideal pace.
Identify the most attractive deals
There are several types of sales that you can use to entice shoppers into scoping out your seasonal clearance selection, according to Gift Shop Magazine.
Two popular and easy options for in-store promotions are “buy one, get one” sales and a sticker system to reflect reduced prices. Deals that offer a free or half-priced item as a reward for a single purchase have success in several industries. Whether it makes more sense to say “buy one, get one free” or “buy one, get one half off” for your store, it will surely encourage customers to add another purchase to their shopping baskets. Alternatively, you can use eye-catching signage and attractive stickers to tell patrons what price they’ll pay. Brightly colored stickers that cover the original cost are indicators for shoppers that are hunting deals.
When it comes to your online clearance section or promoting fall clearance through your online channels, a few different tactics can be used. To begin, send out a coupon about the upcoming deal and perhaps an online coupon to the customers on your mailing list. This is a quick and painless way to broadcast your deals to a large group of people without using any of your marketing budget. In the same vein, use your current patron base to offer especially excellent deals on clearance items that will be hard to resist.
Every promotion, sale and event you hold should be announced on all of your social media platforms, the company’s blog and the website. One fun way to clear fall merchandise that’s taking up store fixture space is grab bag contests on social media. Alert followers and fans that there will be a drawing for a mystery bag full of products. You can do multiple contests like this, which help you shed merchandise, but don’t necessarily replace any of the money you originally spent. However, in exchange for the free items, you’re boosting your brand image and customer loyalty, which can have more apparent returns in the long run.
