Nursery related sales are strong in newsagencies strong in this segment. It stands to reason since our shops are the go-to shops for baby cards.
Too often, though, newsagents with strong baby card sales fail to leverage the gifting opportunity. This is true across the card captions – we have excellent data indicating purchase intent that we miss to leverage for gifting sales.
In my own shops, nursery product sales are terrific. This is driven in part by out of store marketing, but very effectively through in-store product placement and display. Like this feature display.
And this one.
These displays are not what shoppers expect to see in a newsagency, in terms of the displays themselves and the range of products on offer. These displays have been done by a team member with a gift for creating visually appealing and engaging displays, ensuring they are shapable, and enticing.
The displays in the photos are next to each other, with related products the same shopper may find appealing on the wall behind – to maximise the visit value for us.
Currently in Australia, there are 200,000 searches online each month for baby and nursery related gifts, placing the segment among top performers of retail related product searches. This search engine dataset is useful in that it reinforces the value of the segment, proves interest among shoppers. But, we can see that ourselves in our greeting card data, as I noted above.
For me, greeting card data is key to exploring other product segments we could expand in. We have used it for years, and benefited commercially from its use.
Any newsagent can do what I have described here. It’s easy:
- Look at your card data.
- Expand, with a modest budget, based on shopper intent opportunities.
- Pull together existing product and modestly supplement with new product.
- Create visually appealing displays.
- Measure and adjust to need.
It’s all basic retail management really. It’s essential, especially in 2022 when we have the pandemic led opportunity to play outside what has been usual for our channel and when so many more people are living and working locally than prior to the pandemic.
If you’re not offering nursery related products check card sales in your newsagency … if they show opportunity, dive in.