Why You Should Be Driving Incremental Sales

Incremental sales matter because they increase your revenue, allowing you to surpass goals, invest more back into the business, and enjoy bigger profits. Incremental sales are a matter of basic efficiency and capturing market share before others do.

You’ve likely worked hard to gain customers’ attention. If you’re a retailer, you’ve invested in selecting merchandise, training your staff, constructing displays, arranging layouts, and creating targeted promotions. If you’re a brand, you’ve invested in attracting top talent, product development, packaging, and creating engaging campaigns. All you need to do is encourage shoppers to spend now, and as much as possible, and incremental sales are your proof—shoppers are spending more than you expected.

Turn Browsers Into Buyers

Half the battle is getting your product in the consumer’s hands. Once shoppers can touch, feel, and explore your product in-person, the conversion is not such a far leap from there. In-store sampling, guerilla marketing promotions, and demos are traditional methods of putting your products on center stage. These methods have a more dramatic and sustained impact than mere aisle displays. On average, a demo provides a 150% boost in same-day sales and a 90% boost over the following three months. It’s evident that meaningful engagement turns browsers into buyers.

Increase Transaction Value

Performing better-than-expected on a campaign is not just about increasing the number of sales, but about increasing the amount of money people spend on their transactions, too. Bundle your products in new ways. Take products that complement each other, but are typically sold separately, and try offering the complete package for a single fixed price to create irresistible value. Offer added value at the point of purchase, when buyers are most receptive. Upselling a newer model or cross-selling a complementary product or service at the point-of-purchase can entice 30% to 50% of shoppers to spend more.

Create More Demand

Shoppers don’t necessarily have to need a product to justify their desire for it. There are many ways brands can create demand. Releasing engaging new products is one way to keep a fresh stream of demand lining up around the block. Consider how Apple does this each time the tech giant releases a new iPhone. Building meaningful and personal relationships with shoppers will make them more likely to buy from you even if they weren’t originally planning to do so. Thoughtful data collection and routinely reaching out (via mobile, email, and social media channels) also lets consumers know what they want or need even before they are aware of the void.

Provide Multiple Touchpoints

It takes anywhere from five to seven touchpoints to make a sale. Ideally, you want to connect with a shopper at multiple touchpoints along the journey to purchase. In the early stages of awareness, you might advertise online to get mobile users into your store. During the engagement phase, you might advertise a sale or hand out informative flyers to let shoppers know what you have to offer. Once shoppers are in the store and considering your offers, nurture these leads by greeting them with highly trained sales professionals who serve as the friendly face of your retail establishment and helpfully answer questions as customers peruse the aisles.

Attract Mobile Foot Traffic

Increasingly within the last five years, retailers have had to adapt their marketing methods to reach consumers wherever and whenever they are planning their shopping trips. Mobile devices are the next frontier for marketing messages. Retailers can use SMS push notifications, mobile-optimized websites, scan codes on packaging, online advertising, retailer-specific apps, and third-party shopping platforms to reach consumers surfing for deals on the couch or planning their trips to the store. Once they’re in the store, shoppers are accessing mobile to learn more about products, compare prices, and snag deals; retailers can capitalize on this.

Reward Loyal Shoppers

High-value offers combined with low purchase requirements are highly effective in driving trial among first-time shoppers. Going one step further, a rewards program is a powerful motivator in encouraging larger purchases and sustained business. Customers are willing to invest more when the perceived value they get in return is higher. They might earn points toward desirable gifts or automatically receive a percentage off a future purchase. Increasingly, top retailers are including partner offers, in addition to offering VIP services and members-only invitations, to enhance the exclusivity of their programs. You can develop your own in-house rewards program or partner up with a rewards platform shoppers already use. 

When Shopkick’s retail partners wanted to know of the sales, transactions, and customers that Shopkick was driving—how many would not have occurred without the Shopkick program—they conducted research to measure program incrementality. The findings were that Shopkick is a highly incremental program for Shopkick retail partners as a whole and these results stood true across different retail verticals. 

• Fifty-seven percent of all sales driven by Shopkick were incremental. That incremental spend was driven by new customer acquisition as well as increased loyalty of existing customers. 
• Fifty-five percent of department store sales were incremental, 49% of electronics/big box store sales were incremental and 67% of specialty store sales driven by Shopkick were incremental.

Increased incremental sales represent true success in your latest marketing efforts. Shopkick offers you yet another platform for advertising, metrics, consumer engagement, and personalization. Whether you have an existing loyalty program or not, you can add value to your brand by partnering with one of the most popular mobile shopping apps at a time when mobile marketing is on the rise.

How is brand recall achieved?

• A Visual Presence: Colors, songs, logos, mascots—there is a reason these ingredients are part of every sports franchise. The same rings true for the most memorable brands today. Neuroscience tells us that visuals light up the emotional response centers in the brain, which in turn leads to more vivid memory processing. Visual learning, pattern recognition, and decision-making are all closely intertwined.
• A Meaningful Ideology: Shoppers gravitate to brands with unique selling propositions and meaningful messages that match their core values. They want to know your mission statement and what you stand for before they turn over their hard-earned dollars. Establishing your brand’s ideology and offerings can bridge the gap between unaware audiences and what you stand for, thus reinforcing your brand’s importance.
• Direct Engagement: Your marketing efforts should focus on ways to transform passive audiences into engaged prospects. For instance, a person is more likely to remember your brand name if they are writing with a branded pen that has your logo on it every day, as opposed to someone who simply walks past a branded sign. High attendance at your brand-sponsored events, newsletter subscriptions, social shares, and loyalty program app downloads are all signs that you’re actively engaging consumers and positioning yourself for better brand recall. 
• A Consistent Effort: Awareness is not something you can set and forget. Establishing reliable, long-term communication channels to facilitate continued awareness is crucial in becoming someone’s go-to brand. The most successful brands are omnichannel sellers that take their business from social media and online marketplaces to mobile devices and brick-and-mortars. While your brand may evolve in purpose and imagery over time, you want to keep your marketing generally consistent across channels over time to form a cohesive picture in consumers’ minds.

Content

It’s no secret that consumers flock to the internet in search of content that is tailored to their personal interests. Increasingly, they’re searching for local content. You’ll need to invest in regular publishing of professionally-generated content that contains both industry- and location-based keywords designed to attract the right crowd. There are plenty of places to peddle content these days—your homepage, blog, email newsletters, social media sites, third-party niche sites, and video platforms. 

Performance Tracking

Powerful data collection will form the cornerstone of your branding strategy, as this information offers a window into the minds of your prospects. Who are you targeting? What are their pain points? What do your buyers have in common? CRM software can help you track a person’s engagement with your enterprise across all channels so you can move from short-lived single-serving interactions to sustainable relationship building. In physical stores, you can install beacons or in-store sensors to understand how shoppers are experiencing your brand.

Collaboration

Data analytics, keyword research, social listening, and customer relationship management will likely lead you to discover potential partnerships for your brand. You may find organizations that share the same goals as you, though they may not be direct competitors. Sports teams, charities, community groups, service providers, retailers, or tech providers can all make valuable partners. With newfound partners, you can get your brand out in front of new crowds, launch mutually-beneficial campaigns, and take advantage of your partners’ existing marketing infrastructures.

Shopkick is one of America’s top mobile shopping rewards platforms. The app has a highly engaged, highly loyal user base who shop on a regular basis. Here’s how the rewards platform works: Shopkickers begin their purchase journey by browsing engaging in-app content from several brands and retailers, whether they’re at home or on-the-go. This content includes curated lookbooks, informative video ads, and more. For partners, this content helps build pre-shop awareness and consideration and cements your brand in shoppers’ minds. Users can check the Shopkick app to see which brands or retailers offer “kicks,” or rewards points, which incentivize shoppers to visit a store or browse online. In-store, Shopkick utilizes an engaging gamification strategy that drives shoppers to products at-shelf and encourages physical product interaction in exchange for kicks. This allows brands to boost product awareness when it truly matters most—in-aisle, with the product in hand. By offering users an additional kick incentive for making a purchase, Shopkick closes the loop and drives sales. Eventually, Shopkick users redeem their kicks for free gift cards, which builds a positive affinity and loyalty for the brands and retailers that awarded them, aiding in the ability for consumers to recall those brands.