One of the most popular strategies almost every business reaches for during a festival, in the hope of lifting sales, is the special promotion: a discount, a coupon for next time, a free item with a purchase. And even if you are only a small business, anxious about getting confused over prices, sales and margins, a tool such as a POS programme from Qashier makes running a festival promotion many times easier than it was.
Why festival promotions are worth running
1. They prompt people to buy, lift sales and build awareness
Everyone likes a discount. So when a major festival comes round — seeing out the old year and welcoming the new, Father's Day, Mother's Day, or even the shoppers' own festivals such as 11.11 and the mid-year sales — and you choose a marketing strategy built on a festival promotion, it works well at prompting people to buy. New customers get to try the product for real, sales rise, and, importantly, awareness builds: if a customer is impressed, they will keep coming back.
2. They suit a business that has only just entered the market
A festival promotion builds awareness among customers remarkably quickly, because your price is lower than everyone else's. If the product is good, growing quickly is not difficult at all, because a discount or a promotion makes it easier to persuade a customer to try a product or a service. And if the product is genuinely good, or the restaurant's food tastes good, it is no great feat to get the customer back. Beyond discounting, promotions that ask customers to follow, share or like the page and tag a friend make a shop easy to get known through social media.
3. Festival promotions build brand loyalty
The reason here comes down to the product being good. Once a customer likes it and is impressed, they will happily buy next time even without a discount or a promotion, no conditions attached — that is brand loyalty, plainly. And a membership scheme builds a further bond between brand and customer: getting a customer's name right, remembering what they buy or which promotion they like, makes a shop easy to love even when the price is higher than a rival's with much the same goods. Recognising exactly this, Qashier POS includes a membership scheme and a customer loyalty system, both easy to use on the POS terminal
4. Festival promotions help you launch new products
Plenty of shops release special dishes or seasonal products during a festival, and customers are often reluctant to try or buy something new and unfamiliar. A promotion or a campaign during the festival gives those items a push and lets customers try a new dish or product at an approachable price.
Festival promotions: some examples
- Discounts : discounts in various forms, whether money off or a coupon valid for a set period, to prompt customers to come in during that window.
- Samples : let customers take the product away and try it. If they like it there is every chance they come back and buy — and it doubles as a gift to the customer during the festival.
- Free delivery : delivering an order to the customer at no charge. A customer may be hosting a celebration at home and would rather have it brought round, so a free delivery offer improves the chances of them choosing you over someone else.
- Free gifts : buy one product or service and get another free, which prompts customers to take other items you want to push. A shop can use this to give a push to something newly launched that people are not yet familiar with, so customers feel more inclined to try it. You can also bundle or pack it with other products to put new items forward at a special price.
- Buy one get one free : the promotion technique we see most often. Whatever the customer buys, they get another of the same free, which persuades them they are getting good value and makes buying from you that much easier.
- The more you buy, the cheaper it gets : similar to a discount, but aimed at getting customers to buy in greater quantity. Buy one at 50 THB and the next drops to 40 THB, say, or use price tiers.
- Collect points and redeem rewards : a promotion in the form of customer loyalty, building a bond between shop and customer so they become a regular. Buy ten times and get one free, say, or earn one point for every 100 THB spent, with points redeemable for rewards at whatever level the shop sets. Qashier POS lets a shop run a points scheme easily, directly on the POS terminal, which is enormously convenient.
- Members-only privileges : give members a better price, much as with price tiers, so customers grow fond of you and stick with you — which improves the odds of them signing up as members. The shop can then use that data to suggest promotions and prompt them to come back again.
- More for the same price: a promotion applied to a product, most often in food and drink. A special offer during a festival where a large cup costs what a medium usually would, for instance.
- Special occasions: a birthday discount, or a New Year discount. Take a family photo in the shop and get a further 10% off, or a special dish on the house.
- Participation campaigns: asking people to take a photo and share the brand's or the shop's content in return for something special, such as a small gift or a discount. A festival participation promotion might be: take a photo at the Happy New Year arch with a special dish from the shop and tag the shop on Instagram to receive a free drink.
Small shop, festival promotion, worried about getting it wrong? Try a QashierHQ POS terminal
As everyone knows, a festival promotion can take any number of forms: buy one get one free, up to 50% off, free delivery with no minimum spend, points towards special privileges, points redeemed for something exclusive, and so on. But plenty of small shops worry about the system behind it. That worry disappears entirely when you use a QashierHQ POS terminal: one device is enough to take the headache out of it completely.
The programme's back office lets you set a discount percentage, set product prices, or set a time window so prices change according to the promotion you specified — none of it a problem. One of the real highlights is that you can also decide which items are in the promotion and which are not: a discount on certain dishes only, say, or a discount when buying coffee. Or a shop that wants to discount food but not drinks can cover that easily, directly in the POS system.
So if you run a small shopfront business and would like to move with what everyone else is doing but have no idea where to start, the QashierHQ POS system is glad to take part and make all of it more convenient than ever. However bold the promotion, you can have it exactly as you like.
If you have questions, we have staff on hand to help and advise you throughout. If the product interests you and you want to push your retail business forward, ask us for more details on Line Official: @qashier.th or call 02-506-1934