Mother’s Day 2025 is done and it’s four months to the next traditional season for newsagents and other retailers. Now, this four months can be filled with the every day, or you can fill it with actions designed to attract new shoppers. If you know me you know I’m pitching the latter: make your own success through actions designed to attract new shoppers. Start today, now.
Set your goals. Know what you want from the next four months in terms of revenue or other measurement points. Develop this with everyone who works in the business. Leverage their feedback.
Declutter. Get rid of all inventory items not selling. Items not selling are wasting your time, space and money. Decluttering is also good for your soul. And while you are decluttering, spend good time on cleaning up the counter. Everything there on your side and the customer side needs to have a vital role, needs to add value to the business. 90% of counters I see in newsagencies are awful.
Create events. Decide on a series of events to bring shoppers in. They should be fun and unexpected by your regular shoppers. Build them around a new product category or at least a category for which you are not well known.
Reset. Change the front third of your shop to look different, so much so that people notice it and comment on it.
Play outside the boundaries. Using a modest amount of capital and a small amount of shop floor space, bring in a product category you’ve never stocked before.
Get advice. Ask someone you trust to take a look at your business, for them to give you their warts and all view.
Change your social media approach. If you are like many small business retailers it’s likely your social media messaging is same same. Change it up. Take a 90 degree turn. Give people fresh content.
If you’re not online, get online. Like this is urgent. There are Australian newsagents doing hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales online.
What happens in and for your business over the next four months is entirely up to you. What you want by the time you reach Father’s Day is new customers shopping with you, insights learned, people loving shopping with you and more money in the bank. The success of the next four months is yours to make.