Retail marketing activities and spend should have a clear goal! It could be to create more in-store traffic or drive customer basket spend – whatever the goal, it needs to be identified upfront, otherwise you can waste a lot of money (FRC demonstrated to one client how it literally wasted 30% by delivering childrens products leaflets to customers who lived in retirement homes!).

Marketeers must make effective use of communications to ensure existing customers are retained and new customers are won from competitors. The choices of promotional tactics are influenced by factors such as the competitive retail environment, the profit margin on sales, the budget available and of course the best way to reach a specific audience. The success of a retail marketing project is defined by calculating the additional sales achieved and gain in market share, compared to the cost of the marketing activity. Being able to make sense of this comparison of cost and activity is particularly important to ensure every marketing campaign is a learning process making sure future spend is effective.

Connecting with your customers in ways that are meaningful and convenient to them is the only way to drive sales and success. At the same time, that’s grown more difficult as we are all living in a world of information overload. Customers are bombarded with and endless stream of messages on a daily, if not hourly, basis. They’re coming at them from all directions and in all forms of media – emails and banner ads to television commercials to in-store retail merchandising and promotions.