Check out how one toy / hobby shop in Hong Kong has created storage and display space in a challenged and expensive retail situation. They have done this in a way that looks integrated with their business. I love their use of ceiling space.
While successive state governments from all sides of politics around Australia screw up transport ticketing, here in Hong Kong this week I have seen how their Octopus cards are used to purchase all sorts of things including newspapers, public transport and plenty more.
This photo shows a stack of papers outside a 7-Eleven store. Newspaper customers don’t even have to enter the store. They tap and go – on the device on the side of the newspaper stand.
While newsagents would prefer to get retailers in-store and buying other items, c-stores are happy to get a few cents by serving customers who don;t have to queue to buy a newspaper.
This week I am shining a light on five back to basics areas of our newsagency businesses over which we can make a difference for the good of our business and the benefit of our customers.
By back to basics I mean parts of our business that define us and can separate us from others.
Today, I want to challenge how you manage greeting cards.
Australian newsagents sell close to 35% of all cards sold in this country. We are the largest single retail channel. Cards giver us the best gross profit of any product we sell – depending on your deal between 50% GP and as much as as 70% GP. Cards are important to us and we are important to the category.
But are we managing cards for success?
Too many newsagents leave the running of th card department to their card spillers. This is a mistake. It’s your business, manage it.
Here are some tips for driving card sales:
Cards are vitally important to newsagents. Ignore tham and you invite shoppers to look elsewhere for their magazines.
The goal of this series of back to basics newsagency management advice is to get you revisiting parts of your business that you may not be paying enough attention to. This should help imporrove basket size, drive traffic and get you better engaged with your newsagency business.
Beyonce on the cover of Time is reason enough to place it next to weekly magazines. I am thrilled that one of my team members did this on their own initiative – a smart and tactical move.
In the magazine section of a Hong Kong supermarket someone moved Famous with Miley Cyrus on the cover next to ELLE also with Miley Cyrus on the cover. I like this a lot. Sometimes, the cover subject for a magazine issue should guide its placement more than the masthead.
mUmBRELLA has an article about the background to the refreshed Girlfriend magazine. It explains the reasoning for the refresh and details that newsagents may have missed. I encourage newsagents to read this.
This week I am shining a light on five back to basics areas of our newsagency businesses over which we can make a difference for the good of our business and the benefit of our customers.
By back to basics I mean parts of our business that define us and can separate us from others.
Today, I want to challenge how you manage magazines.
Magazines continue to be the single most important newsagency channel wide traffic driver for us. Every newsagent sells magazines.
While we don’t have enough control over supplier, are not given equitable gross profit and are are disadvantaged through the supply model, there are management opportunities available to us that can make magazines more successful.
But first, I want to consider why? Why spend any time on magazines? That’s a question I am often asked by newsagents angry with iover supply, under sipply, poor margin and disrespect from distributors. I understand their frustration and that this feeds into anger.
Magazines are important to us because the range we carry is the only channel-wide point of difference we have. Magazines generate excellent traffic,. Magazines work as impulse purchase item. Many maggazine shoppers are loyal. Magazine sales can informa many other valuable business decisions.
How can you better manage magazines?
Magazines are vitally important to newsagents. Ignore tham and you invite shoppers to look elsewhere for their magazines.
The goal of this series of back to basics newsagency management advice is to get you revisiting parts of your business that you may not be paying enough attention to. This should help imporrove basket size, drive traffic and get you better engaged with your newsagency business.
Displaying the full cover of the UK Peppa Pig magazine helps drive sales as customer get to see the gifts that come with tis issue. This is important for all gifts with magazines but especially of to the Peppa Pig customer.
In traditional magazine pockets these gifts would be hidden and opportunities for impulse purchases lost.
We have had a good run since Anzac Day promoting the latest Better Homes and Gardens and the My Kitchen Rules Cookbook between our two top selling daily newspapers. Our tiny time and space investment has paid off. We can sell more magazines.
In Five Reasons Why I Love Women’s Magazines – And Am Over The Backlash Against Them at the UK Daily Mail, Sara Mccorquodale makes a case we can connect with in our newsagency businesses.
The decline in revenue for newspaper publishers continued as evidenced with the release of the latest data. The revenue challenge has more to do with ad revenue than circulation revenue whereas the cost challenge is more to do with distribution than editorial.
Smart publishers will realise that they could make more money setting their content free from mastheads. I am more likely to purchase news stories than I am to subscribe to a branded news outlet. I suspect that I am not alone.
Focussing on making money from your core competency is a better business plan in my view.
Newsagencies have some of the best retail foot traffic yet too often we fail to leverage that. Here are some very very basic touch points you can use to better connect with shoppers to drive purchases and return visits:
There are many more touch point opportunities. This list is barely a starting point yet many newsagents do not even embrace these … missing opportunities to reinforce the brand and all it stands for.
If you are not happy with how your newsagency is performing – are you doing the things on the list?
Sometimes when on the shop floor of my newsagency customers approach saying do you work here? or something similar. I can understand that since I am often not in uniform as I am only there for a brief visit.
In an instance recently I joked with the customer – work here? I own the joint! She laughed, thankfully. We then had a good discussion about a very specific card caption she thought we should carry. It felt like she talked more because I owned the business.
The interaction got me thinking that we business owners should do more than wear a shirt with our brand and a name badge, we should wear something letting people know we own the business – making ourselves a target … in a good way!
This is a way we can differentiate ourselves from big business competitors. In our newsagencies customers can speak with the owner whereas in competitor businesses they struggle to even get to a manager.
UK lad’s mag Nuts is to close following a circulation decline. As it’s not been in wide circulation in Australia, many would not have seen Nuts. I checked out a copy yesterday at the airport. I find Nuts trashy and disrespectful. Guys into this can get what they want online for free.
Great to see The Saturday Paper supporting newsagents again with supply and supporting this with social media mentions of our channel. Suppliers speaking to their customers about our channel is important in this social media centric world.
Newsagents and suppliers often claim success without providing proof supporting their claim. There have been instances in our channel where newsagents have believed a claim without seeking evidence and gone on to discover that there was ho evidence and that the claim was false.
Everyone wants success. Unfortunately some want it bad enough to spin or lie to get their success – often at the cost of newsagents and others they serve.
Nothing beats the truth, especially the truth in sales data.
As I wrote recently, sales of our everyday counter cards, a card segment that accounts for 56.90% of our overall card sales, are up 17% year on year comparing January through March 2014 with the same period in 2013.
This is an extraordinary result.
Unfortunately, word has reached me that someone is putting it about that the figure is made up. It’s not made up. I can provide the growth back to source data, data that anyone is welcome to audit.
So, it is true. Our every day (birth through death) counter card sales are up 17% year on year. We did this without a major advertising campaign and off an already good sales base. We also did it without a VIP loyalty points program.
Our success is in part due to our front-end loyalty program, discount vouchers. By giving away under 1% of card revenue we have achieved a stellar year on year increase.
In fact, the growth we have achieved puts us, I think, in the top group of newsagencies in growing card sales.
In someone claims to you that they are achieving extraordinary growth, ask to see the report that shows this. satisfy yourself that the claim they make is true. There are some in our channel who pay little regard to truth and, sadly, newsagents follow and make bad choices as a result.
Data does not lie.
I love the cover off the latest issue of Cosmopolitan Bride – it stands out from all the other bride titles we currently have in stock. Whereas other bride titles use a soft pallet, Cosmo Bride has gone for bright … and it works. This is the wedding title you see first in our wedding section.
We have made sure to place TV Week and New Idea Jumbo Puzzler next to each other to leverage the Kylie Minogue covers of each title. This placement sets up to sell both titles together. It’s small moves like this that help us sell more magazines than being average would usually achieve. Supermarkets ands other national retailer outlets would not respond to magazine covers in this way.
We have made sure to allocate extra space to Women’s Health and Girlfriend to display the excellent gifts with purchase available with the current issue of these titles. the extra space is resulting in a bump in sales and that’s what the gifts are all about. yes they are taking some extra space but the sales are worth it.
US stationery giant is introducing US Postal Service sanctioned postal service counters in some of its stationery stores and US postal workers are understandably angry. So far 82 Staples outlets have introduced the counters. Reports claim that the hourly cost of someone on the postal counter goes from around $25 an hour for the US Postal Service worker to $8.50 an hour for the Staples worker.
This is a story to watch on several levels: Stapes in Australia, Australia Post continuing to evolve its model, newsagents looking to expand foot traffic generators and competitors of newsagents looking to broaden their appeal. To explore this story from the US further check out the results of a Google search.
I know some newsagents have received copies of the Weekend Financial Review without a barcode. While this should not be a challenge because of touch screen hot buttons, I thought I’d open a thread here in case anyone wanted to comment.
Continuing my week-long series on newsagency marketing groups, today I’ll outline how newsagency marketing groups support the channel beyond the individual businesses the serve.
As with all the advice I have shared in this series, today’s advice is carefully crafted to NOT guide you to choose a specific group but rather to get you to cast your own critical eye over choices available to you. Like any business decision, there are many factors unique to your situation that will and should feed into your decision. My goal is to help you be broad in your focus so more factors are considered.
What I will tell you is that it is important you are part of a group that helps you grow and enjoy your newsagency business.
How do you choose the group that is right for you?
Joining a newsagency marketing group is a long-term decision that should add significant value to your business if you make the righter decision.
As a guide, you ought to expect the decision to be worth at least four times the cost of membership fees in terms of gross profit improvement in the first year.
If you have done your research and made a decision based on this and that meets your needs then you should be in for good times if you embrace all your chosen group has to offer.
Footnote: Regulars here would know I am a shareholder in and Director of newsXpress. Prior to that I was a member of Nextra and a shareholder in my later years with them following a capital raising. Prior to that my newsagency was a member of Newspower.
I was interviewed yesterday for Channel 31’s Newsline program about print media, newsagency businesses and our place in the community. It was a long interview covering a broad area. It will be interesting to see what ends up going to air.
The program is produced RMIT journalism students for public access TV. It’s terrific seeing uni students so interested in our channel and the role we playing the Australian community.
WA Today reports that tobacco laws in NSW could be amended to outlaw electronic cigarettes following a legal test case in WA.
It has always been illegal to sell e-cigarette liquids that contain nicotine under Australian law but in a big development last week, the Supreme Court of Western Australia effectively banned e-cigarettes outright in the state, prosecuting a company, called HeavenlyVapours, which had been selling the dispensers and nicotine-free ”e-juice” through a website.
This is a significant development of which retailers of electronic cigarettes ought to be aware.
Continuing my week-long series on newsagency marketing groups, today I’ll outline how newsagency marketing groups support the channel beyond the individual businesses the serve.
The newsagency channel in Australia is the last great independent small business retail channel in this country. In small towns and in cities our businesses provide a valuable service and a heartfelt connection to something uniquely Australian.
Many of us newsagents claim a local community connection is a vital point of difference for us. Equally, many newsagents rely on being connected to the newsagency channel for support and to leverage their point of difference.
It is likely that every newsagency business in Australia relies on and values being part of the newsagency channel in one way or another – whether we each know this or not.
Marketing groups support the newsagency channel in a range of ways:
Beyond supplier deals, seasonal marketing and other more obvious benefits, newsagency marketing groups can bring a considerable value to the newsagency channel that benefits not only member businesses but the wider channel. From this all newsagents benefit.
Footnote: Regulars here would know I am a shareholder in and Director of newsXpress. Prior to that I was a member of Nextra and a shareholder in my later years with them following a capital raising. Prior to that my newsagency was a member of Newspower.