Optimizing your promotional strategy is essential for increasing sales. With the upcoming bi-weekly promotion periods with INFRA Deals, now is the perfect time to enhance your in-store promotions program and improve efficiency. Here’s how INFRA's promotional and marketing resources can support your store in these areas.
Strategic Promotional Pricing
Effective pricing strategies are crucial for driving sales. The right price point can significantly impact customer purchasing decisions. For instance, an item at $5.99 regular price may move 10 units/week but promoting it at $4.79 could sell 50 units/week and at $3.99 could sell 100 units/week which can dramatically increase your overall sales volume especially when extrapolated out to multiple items throughout the store. INFRA Deals flyer pricing available from the INFRA Marketplace promo portal simplifies this process, allowing you to offer attractive pricing with minimal effort. This strategy helps shift focus to increasing unit and dollar sales, ultimately producing more margin dollars through higher volume. Price points and discount depth are critical for activating shopper purchases and increasing unit movement.
Effective Merchandising Planning and Execution
While having items on sale at the shelf is essential, placing high-performing items on endcaps or displays can further increase sales. The goal is to interrupt shoppers' usual routes and entice them to add extra items to their carts without a second thought. Keep displays simple with 2–3 brands and 3-5 SKUs per brand. For example, pair top-selling pasta, pasta sauce, olive oil, and a parmesan cheese shaker to create an appealing dinner solution display. This approach not only boosts sales and basket size but also answers the shopper's question, "What's for dinner?" with convenience and affordability. The INFRA Deals Endcap Planners assist in streamlining display planning, offering visual planograms and SPINS data to guide your purchasing and merchandising efforts. This resource ensures that your promotional displays are impactful and easy for staff to execute, reducing labor on planning and execution.
Promotional Marketing
Attractive price points and abundant displays are ineffective if shoppers are unaware of the deals. Use large, eye-catching signage to highlight savings and ensure prices are visible from a distance on displays. Use smaller signs at shelf for each item in their home location that are easy to read, and the savings are visible. For meal solution displays, emphasize the overall value, such as "A meal for 4 at $6 per person," or “A meal for 4 at less than $25”. Clear, compelling signage drives shopper engagement and increases the likelihood of additional sales and larger basket sizes. The INFRA Deals Toolkit provides turnkey promotional materials such as pre-made price signage and customizable signage templates, which helps to reduce labor. Also, consider using the INFRA social media calendar and INFRA recipe box to support content creation.
Actionable Steps
This Week: Focus on enhancing your displays using Endcap Planners and Deals signage. Create solutions-focused displays that combine high-performing sale items and ensure your signage clearly communicates the value to shoppers.
This Month: Review the INFRA Deals Toolkit with your teams to plan and coordinate upcoming promotions. Consider using the cross-merchandising suggestions to increase basket size and create convenience for your shoppers. Utilize the provided resources to ensure everyone is aligned and prepared to execute the upcoming promotions.
This Year: Implement the 3-2-1 planning approach monthly with Purchasing, Operations & Marketing teams:
3 Months Out: Refine monthly themes, account for holidays, major events, and in-store events and start collaborating across teams with new trending items, local products and discuss trends teams are seeing in store, the industry and on social media.
2 Months Out: Solidify the plan, secure local promotions to complement INFRA Deals, and start preparations. This may be bringing in new items to get on shelf and running movement reports and submitting off shelf demand in the INFRA Marketplace promo planner.
1 Month Out: Prepare for execution by providing data, tools, maps, and communicate across teams. This includes scheduling social posts, including topics in your newsletter, creating store signage, flyers, circulars, etc.
By leveraging INFRA's promotional and marketing resources, you can maximize sales, improve efficiency, and reduce labor. Start with these actionable steps to see immediate and long-term improvements in your store's performance.