So you sent out flyers for a special sale going on this weekend. The weather is nice, and your store is busy. You are quick to pat yourself on the back for running a great promotion, until you realize that you had an exceptionally large sale, which pushed your sales over the top. Now you are left second-guessing your promotion and its effectiveness.
If you had the use of traffic counters in your store, you might have realized that even though the store was busy, your traffic was actually down compared to other promotional sales days.
By using a traffic counting system of some kind, you would be able to start compiling hard data based on different sales, different days of the week, and even times during the day. From there you can determine if a particular sale is more successful than another kind.
Take an early bird sale for example. If you had great sales in the morning Friday after Thanksgiving, would you base your entire years sales on those same results for every Friday? Probably not, that kind of sale is an exception. That doesn’t mean that an early bird sale can’t drive traffic on other mornings.
When you run early bird sales days, compare the customer traffic counts to the same days of the week, but with no sales. Is there an increase in customer traffic? If so, early bird sales are a proven marketing tool. If they consistently do not drive traffic (based off of the traffic counter’s data) then you probably want to scratch that as an effective marketing tool.
Maybe you don’t want early bird specials; maybe your store has better results with a night owl sale? When you can accurately count the traffic at any given time or day of the week, you can drive your marketing to the specific needs of your business, resulting in increased sales and revenue.
