How To Increase Sales When Its Slow In Your Shop

If you run a physical, brick and mortar shop, you’ll know that there are times when sales are slow. If you’ve been running your shop for a while now, you may even know when these times are coming so you can prepare in advance, but if you’ve just started, you might not really understand when these slow times are on the horizon, and it can come as a shock, especially if things were going well up until that point.
 
Either way, whether you’re expecting it or it comes as a surprise, you need to have some ideas in reserve for when these slow times hit your store. If you don’t, you might lose so much money that it’s hard to claw anything back even when sales do start up again. Read on to discover just some of the many ways this can be done.
 
Create Your Own Holiday Celebration
There are some very well-known holidays around; Christmas, Easter, Shrove Tuesday, and so on. There are also some very little-known holidays. Did you know, for example, that there was such a thing as national crush day (25^th September), national wine and cheese day (25^th July), or national tea day (21^st April)? There is even a national mannequin challenge day (25^th November), and you can use your retail and display mannequins to set the tone.
 
There are dozens of these mini holidays, and you can use many of them in your shop to make it stand out and give yourself a reason to hold a flash sale or add some other kind of value to the products you’re selling.
 
You won’t be able to do this every day – it will become exhausting and expensive (especially if you are giving away cheese and wine, tea, or anything else with every sale to celebrate the day), and it will lose its impact – so pick a fun day during your usual slump in sales, and you may be able to boost them back up again.
 
Advertise More
You might think that when you have less money coming in, spending out on additional advertising is a bad idea; you’ll not only have lost money from sales, but you’ll be adding to those costs with your advertising.
 
If you advertise in the right way, however, this won’t be the case at all; in fact, your advertising should bring you additional sales to make up for the ones you’ve lost. The key, however, is to ensure your advertising is different to what everyone else is doing and that it, therefore, stands out in the crowd. You might consider:

• Video marketing
• Giving a talk in the local area
• Opening late night for a limited period of time
• Using social media

 
Generate A Buzz
If you can keep interest in your shop even when sales are slow, you’ll soon boost those sales back up again. So, if anything noteworthy happens to you, to your store, to your products and services, write up a press release (or hire someone to do it for you), and send it out to local media outlets.
 
By doing this, you are essentially gaining free advertising, and you’re showing that you are different and can do more than any of your competitors. The public will be intrigued or impressed and will want to know more about you and your store.
 
Other ways to create a buzz around what you do would include hosting networking events, organising workshops, or sponsoring local sports teams, for example.