With the winter sales officially underway and in full swing, retailers are facing one of the busiest periods at the start of the year during which the main objective is to get rid of surplus stock.
How to protect margin and optimise inventory while generating profitable and effective sales?
In this week’s webinar Analyticalways gives you all the tips you need to maximise your sales without reducing your sales margin.
Sales, discounts, promotions and clearance: January kicks off intense weeks of disposing of surplus stock generated during the last months of the year.
Year after year, retailers set up sales and marketing operations in all their sales channels to clear out the previous season’s collections and items and make way for new products.
Attracting the consumer and generating maximum sales are just the tip of the iceberg of the sales, the crux of the matter is how to optimise stock and protect margin to achieve profitable and effective sales.
Here are a few tips to help you make the most of the sales season. To find out more, sign up for the webinar that the Analyticalways team is offering this week.
General discount periods versus own promotions
Although January marks the beginning of the winter sales, with the commercial liberalisation approved a few years ago, the reality of retail in Spain is marked by increasingly longer periods of discounts during the different times of the year.
Today, retailers not only have to prepare for the general sales, but also deploy their own strategy of discounts and promotions throughout the year.
Thanks to the Internet, the increasingly intelligent and informed consumer has access to a wide range of brands and products, and price is becoming one of the key elements that set the pace of his or her purchases.
Retailers face the challenge of promoting their own discount strategies and promotions, complementary to the general ones, to help them attract consumers to their brands and collections on a recurring basis.
Importance of planning
Implementing discounting is one of the retail milestones that requires pre-planning and target setting to help deploy an appropriate clearance pricing strategy.
It is not just a matter of clearing surplus stock, but doing so by setting various KPIs and analysing in advance how we want to generate sales without affecting the margin.
At the end of the day, the sales margin will be our ultimate indicator of the success of the sales policy we implement.
Proper planning can help avoid losing up to 20% margin on each collection.
Product turnover is one of the most important steps in planning as it can have a major impact on profit.
Stock management: always before, during and after
The planning step is intrinsically linked to how we will manage products throughout the product life cycle.
This means focusing on stock management at three key points: before, during and after the launch of each collection in store.
In this respect, retail now has within its reach the possibility of using the intelligence offered by predictive technology to get it right in pre-, in- and post-season management.
During the webinar we will provide the keys to how technology can help today’s Retail inventory management.
Focus on visual merchandising
The customer’s connection to the last mile is becoming increasingly important in providing a unique shopping experience that elevates customer engagement.
The Visual Merchandising department has a growing importance when it comes to adding value in the process of conquering the customer and building customer loyalty. Analyticalways has Merchandise Planning, Stock and Visual Merchandising tools that combine predictive intelligence and machine learning, focused on adjusting investment and product layout within the store.
Preparing the sales team
In addition to technology, retail has a great historical ally that is proving to be a key support for a successful sales strategy: the employee. The importance of the sales team has grown steadily in recent years, as the human factor is indispensable and irreplaceable. It is a matter of creating a good tandem between technology and the sales team by putting at the service of the human factor in retail a set of tools that raise their intelligence and sensitivity to the business even higher.
