We are seeing some excellent sales numbers for August. Card revenue is up, so are sales of gifts, magazines, stationery and ink. It kind of makes me question all the doom and gloom people talk about.
We are making our own success through a number of campaigns driving traffic and some excellent in-store promotions running to drive not only traffic from the mall but also incremental business from shoppers in-store.
For magazines, for example, we are doing a lot of work around categories of titles, categories such as food, men’s, music and wedding. This category wide work helps drive the purchase of multiple titles in the one sale. This, coupled with our successful loyalty card, is driving a good magazine outcome for us. We are obsessive and opportunistic about magazines, taking every chance we can to sell a copy.
Being average will produce average results.
We are not running sales, no we refuse to get sucked into that game. Instead we are looking for ways to offer value and to leverage our customer service point of difference. Doing these things and using excellent traffic freeways to build a deeper basket works. Yes, it’s hard work. But it pays off.