Driving value from magazine traffic in the newsagency
While it is easy for newsagents to complain about the falling traffic generated by magazines, oversupply, inefficient supplier processes or the poor margin, we can leverage magazines for greater economic benefit for our businesses. The best way to do this is through product placement decisions – what we put with magazines.
Placing other products with magazines is easier if you have magazine fixtures designed by a smart shop designer rather than the old school designers who tended to not think beyond themselves.
Check out the photo. The shelf at the top of the magazine fixture allows placement of products. Recently, we used this for jigsaws with excellent effect. Jigsaws are a habit-based purchase, as are magazines.n Enough shoppers purchased jigsaws to make destination magazine purchases more valuable than they might otherwise have been.
Yes, there are people who came in for $5.00 magazine purchased who spend over $40.00 on a premium jigsaw on impulse.
The key to success with placement of products with magazines is the selection of the product. You have to think carefully abut your shopper and what they could purchase. You have to think like them and not like you because what they may purchase on impulse is likely to be different to what you might purchase on impulse.
The next time you find yourself complaining abut magazines, think about what else you could do to drive value from the opportunity of magazine traffic in your business.
The decision to not discount Christmas paid off
A large card and gift shop around the corner from my newsagency started discounting Christmas cards ten days before Christmas. As many of their cards are from Hallmark I was concerned if it could hurt us. While there was a slow down, we did well as it turns out. It helped us having a large range of boxed cards this premature discounter did not have. Plus, we had somewhere to go after Christmas with discounting and they did not.
I prefer to not discount until absolutely necessary and to therefore preserve the maximum margin possible for the business. But when I do scout, I want to go hard to quit the stock.
New Year resolutions for 2016 for newsagents
Happy New Year!
What are your newsagency business related resolutions for 2016? Here are mine:
- To introduce more new traffic generating product categories.
- To increase stock-turn.
- To improve floorspace efficiency.
- To grow the gross profit percentage by at least four percentage points.
Goals matter as they provide a target for the path ahead and a measure for when we look back.
Happy New Year everyone.