While Taylor Swift is the first solo performer to fill large arenas in Australia in twenty years, she can’t sell magazines in the volume of other solo artists. While we’re running the poster book featuring Taylor, it’s not selling. Maybe she needs to start misbehaving.
There are two types of shoppers newsagents could appeal to in the next few weeks with display areas and or services target at their very specific needs:
In both cases I’d suggest you promote the service in advance of launch. Make sure the offer can be seen from outside the business. Ensure your team members are trained on how to make these work.
By focussing on the needs of groups of unique shoppers we can drive sales and attract more shoppers.
Whether your newsagency is open Boxing Day or the day after, immediately after Christmas is an opportune time to quit dead stock – any stock that has not sold in six months or more. In fact, I’d class stock as dead if it has not moved in three months.
So, use your computer system to list your slow or not moving stock, decide on your rock bottom price, think about how your will display this and design appropriate SALE PRICE tickets to promote the discount.
If you’re in a shopping centre you will probably need to run a lower price than if you are in a high street situation. My experience over the years is that most retailers in a shopping centre will drop prices considerably in their Boxing Day Sales.
In considering the stock you will cut, target two or three items for cost or below pricing. make these your hero products. They need to be genuinely sought after products. It could be even that you buy in especially. However, the real value for any retailer of a post-Christmas sale is to clean out the dead wood and make space for new product.
The latest issue of Girlfriend is selling well for us, offering an example of a bagged magazine done well and riving sales. The packaging is the key – the promotion of freebies as well as $80,000 in prizes. They package looks like bonus value rather than what many others do in bagging old issues with a current issue. This bagged issue of Girlfriend should sell out for us.
The free puzzle book promotion launched yesterday with the Herald Sun was popular, we had plenty of customers asking about their copy. In a good change, our supplying newsagent provided stock. Key to the promotion is the good front page like on the Sunday Herald Sun today. While I would have preferred school holiday timing, I’m happy with this promotion. A side benefit is that it can reintroduce puzzles to people and newsagents are the go-to retailers for these when they want their next fix.
The OzLotto $50 million jackpot and Powerball $30 million jackpot will generate good additional traffic for newsagency businesses with lottery products this week. One challenge will be to leverage the additional lottery traffic for more than the lottery sale. Another challenge will be to ensure that the additional lottery traffic does not get in the way of what should be an excellent week for cards, gifts and other products in the countdown to Christmas.
I don’t have lottery products in my businesses and am not as affected by these jackpots. Weighing up the positive and the negative I’m happy to not have my plans for my business disrupted by such a considerable event as a major jackpot. That said, I know newsagents who love the jackpots and who make good use of the opportunity.
With the passing of Nelson Mandela yesterday and the unprecedented coverage on TV last night, especially two of the commercial networks (9 and 10), I’d expect interest on newspapers to be especially strong today. I suggest newsagents place newspapers into good locate to lift impulse purchases if your newspapers are not at the front of the business.
This Super Putty is another interactive product we love watching customers engage with. We have a tub open and actively encourage them to try it. Many who do buy because they enjoy the experience. How good they feel when playing with the putty or watching someone play with the putty is a key factor in their purchase decision – you can see it in their faces, especially parents and grandparents when they see their kids and grand kids having fun.
I love the terrific range of feel-good fun products we have in store at the moment. I love them because our customers love them. Their smiles are a delight to see.
These happy hoppers are a good example. You can launch them off your hand or any surface. They make kids laugh. We sell them to kids through to grandparents. We’re finding them to be a good stocking stuffer gift.
We have plenty of items like these that are interactive out on the shop floor. They add to the theatre of retail.
It feels like we are seeing more bagged magazines on the shelves in newsagencies right now than any time of the year. Even publishers who do not usually engage with bagging, putting an extra one or two issues with a current issue, are doing it. Some don’t make sense. take DNA magazine. This is a title with a high browsing factor. By bagging the latest issue I suspect sales will be hurt – or the bags opened. Newsagencies are browser friendly places. The more bagged magazines we have the less browser friendly we are. Magazines like DNA need to be able to be browsed.
The Supanews website, tagged as Australia’s Online Newsagency, is promoting magazine subscriptions. Promoting magazine subscriptions as your only magazine offer is not something a traditional newsagency would pitch. hat this Supanews business is pitching is frustrating because is misrepresents the traditional (online and high street) newsagency business.
My understanding is that this website is operated by a business called Supanews Limited out of Hong Kong. I have no idea who owns that business and their relationship with the owners of Supanews.
People’s Friend magazine switched distributors from Gordon & Gotch to Network Services today and several newsagents have contacted me about the impact of this on their business. Some received less stock and one received more. It’s not hard for a change of distributor to be handled better than this. One newsagency was so short supplied they could not satisfy put-away requests.
I love the Express Post yourself with a Video Stamp promotion being run by Australia Post at the moment. It’s very clever – right from the QR code through which you can get to the site to the process of loading and sending the video. Well timed with the Christmas launch, this campaign engages the government owned business with Christmas in a more personal way. Kudos to the people behind this.
I criticise Australia Post regularly here but can’t find anything wrong with this campaign. It’s supporting why they exist – mail delivery.
We jumped on the Pilot pen opportunity pitched to us through GNS. I like for small format counter unit. These pens are an easy add-on item where people are purchasing boxed and single Christmas cards. We’ve kept the price below $5.00 to drive volume. Adding s $4.95 stationery item to a basked with the average card purchase of over $20.00 is nice icing on the cake. Counter placement is key.
We are promoting the latest issue of Men’s Health and the Men’s Health Summer Training Guide in prime position in our sports section. Both titles will feature in our RECOMMENDED MAGAZINES FOR CHRISTMAS GIFTS display from next week. Sales history shows Men’s Health sales are terrific in December and I think this is because it’s a good Christmas gift in many situations.
It’s through seasonal features, like magazines a gifts, where we can grow our magazine sales.
Both That’s Life and Take 5 offer excellent value this week that should drive impulse purchases. These are issues to get in prominent positions.
The Take 5 card Christmas card kit is a nice gift with purchase. Make sure customers can see the whole front cover. This is a good issue to feature at the counter. It’s also one to mention to appropriate shoppers when they are browsing magazines.
The That’s Life free cash opportunity will be popular – it always is when offered with the magazine. This, too, is a magazine to have in a prime second location like the counter. The REAL CASH pitch on the cover is the key – make sure it’s seen.
Both these titles have had a touch time in recent sales audits. The publishers are investing in making them more appealing. We need to equally invest to drive impulse purchases.
Charles warner has written an excellent piece for Forbes about Google. In Why Google Sells More Than Newspapers, Magazines, Warner simply explains why Google is winning the revenue race and speculates that print media will never win back its crown.
While print media companies want to retain newsagent attention, the indicators around us that encourage us to attract shoppers for non print media and other old-newsagent products grow in number.
More newsagents need to pay attention to this. While change is not occurring overnight it is occurring. We need to change as a result.
Last weekend a customers spent up big, really big, and received a $30.51 discount voucher. Her response: I like this, I could be dead tomorrow. That’s what she said. She added: I could be, I’m ninety next year. She was a hoot!
We talked a bit more. She was serious about the value to her of the voucher versus points. She said that when you get to her age your horizon is closer and you think about the short term more. The points don’t work she said because of the long time often involved.
I’m confident this customer will be back in the next week to spend the voucher. If she is true to her word she will be bringing a friend.
The experience had me reflecting on shopper engagement with the vouchers. There is no doubt that older customers particular like them. Maybe my 89 year old customer is not alone in focussing on the closer horizon.
I loved that she explained her fatigue with the points based loyalty programs. She’s the type of shopper I’m targeting with these vouchers.
Every day we see examples of the vouchers driving loyalty and helping us to continue to achieve valuable year on year growth.
I’ve seen evidence this week of employee fraud against a retailer where the EFTPOS terminal is not connected to the POS software used by the business. The employee recorded the sale in one was on the software and differently through the EFTPOS terminal. Poor back office management of the business meant that the behaviour went un-checked for some time.
I encourage newsagents using EFTPOS to only use it in an integrated way. You cut keystrokes, streamline sales processing and reduce the opportunity for employee fraud.
Some major retailers have boxed chocolates under popular game brands: Scrabble, Monopoly and Twister. I have seen them in several stores this week – on the shop floor in a high traffic location.
Maybe I missed the opportunity from one of our suppliers. I’d love to have had these available for Christmas – especially Scrabble given the other gifts I can get with this popular brand.
Brands sell – I’ll take branded product over cheaper imitations any time. They carry a better margin and are more trusted by consumers.
The free Christmas gift tags on the front cover of this week’s Woman’s Day are popular, driving a measurable boost in sales in a couple of newsagencies I have spoken with. This is an excellent issue to display at the counter and with the full cover shown.
Covering-up the headline with a stuck on not ad for Kogan on the front page of the Herald Sun today shows that News Corp. does not think headlines sells newspapers. It’s this disrespectful treatment of editorial content that maybe causes some newsagents to not regard newspapers as they one might have. Covering an AFL store in Victoria? Nuts!
I’m pleased to see pressure building on the federal government to retain the small business instant asset write-off. Killing the tax break with just a few weeks notice is poor policy in my view given that plenty of far greater and more direct financial assistance is not being cut or even reviewed.
The ACCI made a strong pitch yesterday for retention of the break and that story has been picked up by a bunch of media outlets today.
I understand the government pursuing its ideology but part of their election pitch was that they would support small business. This move has the opposite effect. An economist I heard this afternoon said that scrapping the benefit would have a higher cost to the economy than keeping it.
I am doing some work with a couple of newsagencies at the moment with two entrances: one at the front of the shop facing onto the high street and one at the rear facing onto a car park.
Each shop is long, has two counters, lotteries at one entrance, newspapers and top weekly magazines at both.
I’d be curious to read how others have dealt with the challenge of splitting products and employees between the two entrances. While register data from each entrance can help, I wanted to throw the topic open here to see what others have done.
Over to you…
Well done! to Dan Wickham and Rita McLennan the new owners of newsXpress Wollongbar for selling what is claimed to be the longest lotto ticket in the world (a fact currently being checked with the Guinness Book of Records). These first-time newsagents have attacked their business with energy. This very long lotto ticket is just one example of their approach.
Their local newspaper, The Northern Star, picked up the story of the long lotto ticket and featured it yesterday. other media outlets are chasing the story. The photo is from The Northern Star.
This is a great story for dan and Rita and their business. It’s also a great small town Australia story and a great story for newsagents all over.
Please pass on tips about stories like this – they’re inspiring!