New Strategies Improve Retailers’ Sales

Merchandising, marketing and online initiatives drive business through 2011

December 20, 2010 By Nancy Klosek

multipage

Throughout last year, dealers implemented many different strategies to increase sales, traffic and profits. Here’s a look at what several regional retailers did to improve their merchandising and marketing strategies last year and what they plan to do during the next.

Mark Reckling, CEO/President, Grand Appliance and TV, Zion, Ill: We ran promotions with a lot of green energy products in the appliances sector—mainly using either the states’ monies in the cash for appliances program or manufacturer monies for that segment of the business.

We’ve also expanded our website, with more money spent on Internet marketing and social networking. We are getting buyer inquiries and sales from that source. As print media are becoming less effective, we’ve been transferring our budget in that direction.

In the more rural areas where we market local newspapers are still an effective means of advertising, but in the urban markets we’ve had to turn to the Internet.

Neil Welsch, Vice President, Jeff Lynch, Inc., Greenville, S.C.: We’ve had to re-merchandise our floors at lower price-points because consumers are just not spending as much today because of the economy. Even though as an independent dealer we have better salespeople and better services, price is still a big factor in making the sale. In our advertising and in our floor assortments we’re having to carry a heavier volume of lower-priced goods.

We do not sell on the Internet, although we have a full catalog there of the brands that we carry. We sell by buyer inquiries and we get quite a few of them that translate into sales. As far as merchandising the floor with Internet, we’ve definitely been on top of that and we’ve got the merchandise that consumers are looking for when it comes to those Internet-based products. We show them widely on the floor. We are still getting our hands around Google, as that will have an impact ultimately.
From a business standpoint, we are exploring it.

As far as selling online, we’re investing in other directions right now. I think the states need to get control of the revenue being lost through Internet sales. All of our economies—states, cities—are struggling; it’s not fair for companies like us who have invested in their franchise and in all that infrastructure in their marketplace for these Internet companies to be able to ship across state lines and not charge the tax.