Over a few cocktails recently, a friend of a friend joined us at our table for some pleasantries. Eventually the conversation turned toward business and the general state of the economy. This friend-friend was talking about his retail store, a hobby shop of sorts, and something he had read recently about the importance for retailers to capture sales information in order to sell more to those customers.
He said it never dawned on him to think about tracking information, relying instead on a consistent media schedule to drive traffic to his store and hoping for word-of-mouth referrals for additional buyers. Fortunately, I gave him a few pointers and I thought, hey I’m going to share this on my blog. So here goes.
There are different pieces of information you should and can record on buyers. The most elementary are their name and address. With the advent of new technology and marketing tools, recording their email address will allow you to communicate with them frequently for a low monetary investment. The caveat to remember is being clear to the customer that their email address will not be used for anything other than communications from your business. Period.
With name and address information at least, add the sales-related information such as a product, or at least product category, along with the date of the sale, the dollar amount and perhaps other information such as method of payment. Think of this process as continuing to build a snapshot of what comprises your customer base. The most important piece of data to make every effort to capture is the SOURCE OF THE SALE! If you are a business owner, retailer or not, with marketing expenditures, one major focus of your operation is to identify what ads, offers, prices or merchandise drove response and generated sales. If you don’t, it’s like putting money into an investment and hoping it pays off but you don’t monitor its returns. For some of us, we know how that turned out, don’t we?
Much of this information is already stored in your point-of-sale system in your store. However, it may not be readily available if the POS system does not allow access to this data in a way that you can use it to analyze your customers. If not, start building your database with every single piece of sales paper you might have, even that information that may be older, say back two to three years. Take a software program such as Microsoft Access (some will even use Excel) to enter in customer sales information. The time and effort is well worth it because as your build your file, you’ll be uncovering opportunities to sell more product to those people who already have an affinity for your store.
Look to capture this information:
Name/Address/City/State/Zip/Phone
Gender
Email
Product Purchased
Dollars Spent
Sale Date
Payment Method
Source of Sale
When you start your customer file, you will begin to identify multi-buyers, those people who have purchased either multiple times from you or bought more than one product, or both. You’ll see the geographic areas that are producing sales. You’ll know your average sales ticket and have a better idea of what products sell, and perhaps when, if they have a seasonality to them.
The more you know, the better you can market your business. Capture data, build your database and educate yourself on who your customers are and where they come from. Education pays dividends!
