Once you’ve made the decision to get a POS system for your business, you’re upgrading not only your checkout process but your inventory management, your employee management, and yes, your marketing efforts. Modern POS systems have excellent tools that you can utilize to better market your business to improve your sales and drive that much-needed foot traffic right through your doors. Here are some ways a POS system can work to assist your marketing efforts.
Customer Profiles
Customer profiles are an essential part of marketing. The names and contact info of your customers are your link to that customer when they’re not inside of your store. You can reach out to them with promotions, discounts, or other news concerning your store via their customer profile.
Most POS systems include a customer profile tool. This is helpful for creating that all-important human connection with the customer. Learning their name, contacting them with special promotions, and keeping them up to date with your store is a great way to connect with them.
Customers strive to find that human connection with the brands they touch. That’s why this tool is so vital to improving your marketing efforts. You’ll learn the spending habits and favorite products of your customers, thus enabling you to create more effective marketing campaigns.
Tailoring marketing emails and phone calls to specific customers is a form of customization that will help persuade customers to take advantage of what you’re offering. A personalized marketing effort is always more effective than a generic one.
Analytics
Many POS systems have an analytics tool built into their software. If you’ve never used analytics for your business, you are missing out on valuable information that can help you staff better, organize your store and inventory, and much more.
Analytics provide vital insight into the store’s performance; sales, customer visits, busiest times of the day, and more store data that you can make use of. Without knowing what your customers purchase the most when they visit your store, and what they’re looking for as far as customer service, it’s very difficult to market a brand.
Never underestimate the power of knowledge. The more you know about your customers and about your own store, the more power you have to drive your sales up and increase foot traffic. Analytics tools are simple, easy-to-use, and provide information that any business should be aware of.
Receipts, Gift Cards, Surveys, and Loyalty Programs
Every one of these items can be managed within your modern POS system. Gift cards make for excellent marketing materials and can be purchased and redeemed directly within your POS system, so you don’t need to use a third party company to provide them.
Your receipts also act as amazing marketing tools, as well as a record for the customer of the products they’ve purchased. You can customize your receipts with company logos and even coupons, making that POS system a marketing powerhouse.
Additionally, using the customer profiles to send out surveys lets you better understand your customer’s preferences when it comes to your store. You can ask things like “is there anything you wish our store could do for you?” or “was there a detail about our service that stood out to you in particular during your visit?”. The possibilities are endless with short emailed surveys, allowing you to create a better marketing campaign based off of customer preferences.
Finally, a loyalty program is another excellent marketing tool you can manage directly from the POS terminal. Loyalty programs (especially ones that come with a card) are a constant reminder of your brand; rewarding those customers for their loyalty with points and/or discounts in-store.
Your loyalty program will be centered around customer profiles that are already located in your database, so there’s no need to manage it on another piece of equipment or software. A large portion of your marketing efforts can be accomplished within POS software, making it an incredible tool for small and large businesses alike.
Efficiency
What is one thing that marketing requires that is often underestimated? Money. There is a cost to marketing, and POS systems can help alleviate costs in other areas to provide extra cash to put toward your marketing campaigns.
Inventory management via POS systems helps control miscounts and even prevent losses. POS systems come standard with automated inventory management tools, preventing the need for manual counts which are costly and often riddled with errors.
Employee performance and attendance can also be monitored within certain POS systems, providing managers with a powerful tool to help identify weak spots and praise those employees that are standing out among their peers. The POS system will track attendance and even employee development, so you can identify areas where improvement is needed quickly, and make important decisions based on patterns of performance.
All of these efforts will save your company money, which you can funnel towards marketing to increase your sales. If you’ve ever thought about using a POS system for marketing, now is a great time to do a test run with your business. There are dozens of POS systems available, each with their own tools and perks.
Conclusion
POS systems help keep lines moving and make transactions quicker, but they also help provide valuable insight into customer behavior and foot traffic numbers. Utilizing these analytics and customer insights can help you better tailor your business, staff, and marketing efforts to maximize their efficiency and drive sales numbers up.