There are fundamentally 4 ways to make more money in your shops.
You can get existing customers to visit more often, you can get them to spend more each time, you can attract more new customers, or you can put up your prices.
On pricing, whilst each retailer has its own unique situation, its stage of evolution, its competitor pressures, it would not be a good idea for anyone to simply put prices up (compared to the market), certainly if you’re not offering any more to the customer.
On acquiring new customers, all the financial evidence shows how expensive it is to get new customers through the door. It takes time and money to build up a physical community presence, whilst online only works well if you have large pockets to fund perpetual visibility on google.
This leaves as the most effective ways to get your tills ringing, attracting existing customers more often, and getting them to spend more, either through buying more things, or more expensive things. It has always been this way.
However, today we need to add another level of difficulty. We must set everything against a sustainability backdrop where we are all being encouraged to spend less, to consume less. A lot less.
If the ‘cost-of-living crisis’ doesn’t impact customer visits and sales negatively, then their sustainable consciences, or environmental and recycling tariffs may well do.
The answer in a shrinking market is to gain market share. Market share in an increasingly sustainable market. The answer to customers buying less, is to maximise the sales from the lifecycles of every product you sell, and to maximise the sales from the lifetime of every customer you sell to.
Making more money, from selling less products, to the same number of customers.
Let’s look at how to make more money from the lifecycles of every product. The scenario now is to sell a product and never see it again. An effective initial sale but with no potential to follow through.
What a waste of the precious customer sales interaction. But for health food and wellbeing shops there are commercial opportunities to extend and monitories the lifecycles of every product.
When you sell a product, is there an opportunity to extend the customer connection by combining it with wellbeing services? Can you attach a health check at the initial sale and follow up with further checks to measure the effectiveness of the product?
Is there a possibility to extend the lifecycles of products with refills, next step products, and a sequence of progressive purchases? Can you offer the customer a final return and packaging recycling service? Are there even opportunities for re-sell, up-sell and re-use of products and their packaging?
As retailers, you must ensure that you ‘own’ the lifecycles of each product, from the initial purchase, through any subsequent customer lives, to its final resting place. Each interaction along this lifeline offers opportunities for additional sales and services, whilst guaranteeing our primary aims – to get existing customers to visit more often, and to increase their spend.
To increase their spend, not through selling them more, or unnecessary products, but by adding a lifetime of value to every product that you sell.
Every product lifecycle spent with a customer extends and monetarises the customer’s lifetime with you. Regard your customer’s lifetime as a series of long-term product interactions and service opportunities.
Resist the temptation of quick wins and opt for a lifetime of loyalty and patronage. Build loyalty with every interaction, evolve loyalty schemes, consider rewards, and deliver personalised experiences. Anticipate and add-value to every stage of your customers’ lives with you.
Sooner rather than later, educated and motivated sustainable shoppers, and there are many that are attracted to health food and wellbeing shops, will begin to buy less stuff. You may have found that already.
Most retail sectors from fashion to furnishings are dreading the challenge of making more money from selling less. But for the health sector, with its intrinsic responsibility & sustainability, it is not only possible to survive but to flourish, through adding value to every product sale and value to every customer interaction.
Maximising and monetarising the potential of each product’s lifecycle, and each customer’s lifetime, allows businesses not only to adapt to a sustainably conscious market, but to establish themselves as responsible guardians within that market, and to flourish as commercially successful businesses.