A few of my clients realised too late that they had missed out on extra sales due to World Chocolate Day. One that did promote it, told me that the sales today are very good on chocolate, the public really got behind it.

What it shows is that you have to follow the latest trends, it is not enough to use your reporting in the point of sale software with its low-stock alerts, because some days can if you push it, produce extraordinary sales.

If you are going to send SMS in bulk to promote your shop please be careful of what time you are sending it. One of my clients yesterday sent a few hundred SMSs to his clients advertising a sale for some products for Wimbledon tennis.

The SMSs went out at 2:00am. Although we do not think that any law was broken, I doubt many of their clients would be pleased with getting SMSs at that time. If you are using SMS, which under our group deal is now even more economical, please send them, it at a reasonable time, you may find this useful as a guide on this question.

Product bundling or group sell is probably the second most common marketing system in retail today. The wikipedia has an article on it here.

You can find it in our software in stock pricing under group sell.

What you are doing is grouping certain stock items together, to sell them as a group. Here are some typical scenarios, which can show you the power of this concept.

1) Make a group with a slow-moving item that few want, add it to a fast-moving item and try to sell them together. Often people wanting that fast item, will grab the pack for a little more.

2) Put several slow moving items together at a reduced price and hope that someone wants them.

3) Put many of the same items together and make a bundle for people that want large quantities.

4) Putting several items together to up sell e.g. most people in a coffee shop only want a coffee, make a special item a cake and a small coffee and people tend to order it, so giving the coffee shop owner overall a better sale.

5) Create a pack for people that makes a solution for people so making it easy for them to buy e.g. a set of paint brushes, canvas, etc. for people thinking of doing some painting. This works great with kids.

I do suggest that you look through the options available in our software as you will find there is much you can do with it. Of course as with all business strategies, you will need to experiment in your particular shop.

Over the years with my clients, group selling has proven to being the most successful method of getting rid of unwanted stock without excessive discounting.

Sometimes what happens is that a person gets a voucher like this and comes into a shop which has items discounted. Now if you allow the person to claim this voucher off the already discounted items, what you have is a double discount.

As expected studies have shown that these double discounts confuse people but what they also have been shown is that as a marketing tool double discounts are very effective. You can read about a study here.

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Here is a tip what happened today is a client asked me how could he print his poster for the shop. The advertisment he came up he wanted was much bigger then what his printer can print. I think it might be useful for many people.

I suggested you go to {site removed} and put in the details of the picture you want to use either by upload your own image or "cut and Copy" You then select your printer's paper size, and the number of sheets. You can have up to a 1000 pages but that might be pricey on ink and paper. I would suggest that eight is about as big as you want to go. You get quite a lot of options so it would be worth while experimenting first with the preview image before you print something.

They then give you the PDFs to download and print.

http://info.bondbrandloyalty.com/the-2014-loyalty-report-us

I think it had some interesting points.

Firstly, it stated that if a solid points program for purchases exist, they felt the consumer tend to stick with that company. I agree with that as both the Nextra and Lucky Charm programme show that in our marketplace it does work.

Now the study was done by interviewing 6,000 people in the US to determine what loyalty programs worked. I would expect Australian figures to be fairly similar.

According to the report, 63 percent of all consumers say they liked the brand/shop more than the loyalty program.

29 percent overall said they would not be loyal to the brand if not for the rewards program. Interestingly here report stated that for such people the programme would likely not be sustainable. Principally, as the report stated later these people mainly wanted discounts. I am sure as soon as someone is cheaper they are gone.

Most people depending on the popularity of the loyalty programme 18% to 61% LOVED communication from the loyalty programs they use. If you do not have the peoples' email or home addresses how are you going to communicate with this group?

Now this is the part that was really interesting.

22 percent said they made purchases of something they did not need in order to maintain eligibility for points or benefits, and 35 percent said they modify the brands they buy in order to maximize their benefits in the program.

The report is well worth reading, particularly if you are thinking of making a loyalty programme, you can find it on the above link.

This offer was made by Mark Fletcher in this blog site and also in his own website on Discount Vouchers stated.

I published what I published on the newsagency blog as a newsagent to share the results I am seeing. I did so in the knowledge that you claim to have the vouchers too.

Pick your most successful Lucky Charm store running your points based program and lets compare publicly.

Well, I did not have to pick a Lucky Charm shop as Lucky Charm are very proud of their VIP system. Both Lucky Charm head office and one of their members Cris jumped in quoting figures.

So I then requested that Mark as he agreed to share his data. The offer to share data was suddenly rejected. I was stunned. My first thought was if it is as good as you say, "Why not release the data?" If people do not see this data, they will start asking questions.

So before the questions start, I want to say it is not Lucky Charm and its not me.

So I am publishing here a correction to say that this offer by Mark Fletcher to share his data publicly for comparison purposes is withdrawn.

In a retail loyalty program, the big problem is you need to ensure that the incremental sales lift from this program are not caused by the cannibalisation of existing revenue by selling at a discount, product that would have been bought anyway.

The cannibalisation of existing revenue is easy to measure with a VIP system.

In your VIP marketing system, divide your customers into two arbitrary groups say A and B. Say all you joined from the 1st to 15th of the month are A and the rest are Bs. Check to see that in marketing they are about the same and if not adjust by putting a few from the stronger group into the weaker one.

Now give your offer a whirl by sending it to the A group. You should be able in a short period to compare the results of A to B.

Now make a table.
A purchased X times, and the profit was P.
B purchased X1 times, and the profit was P1.

Now do some figures, generally when you do this the results are fairly obvious say A's buy 20% more times and the A's profit is 15% up. Now is that good?

If you really have to think about it, then I would say the idea is marginal and it is back to the drawing board.

If it works, do not stop. Try to refine the idea further. For example, maybe you could try reducing the offer to group B instead of say $2.00, try $1.50 for group B if you are still getting good results at $1.50 try setting group A to $1.00 and so on.

As over time, the world changes you need to be continuously updating. The key to a successful marketing program is not just ideas but ongoing measurement over time.

This is the only way to ensure a positive return.

The following here is a list of the Touch products together with their margins. Optus I noticed if you are set up correctly is now 8% as is Telstra.

We were sent this marketing report on Australian newspapers, which I found interesting.

One comment certainly gave me food for thought.

Despite increasing internet usage, in 2008 substantially more people are reading a newspaper each week than are using the internet each month

I suspect it is true. I know my Mum, Dad and brother-in-law rarely go on the net but they read newspapers every day. Many like me that are almost wired to the net often read daily newspapers too.

I would also disagree with some of the section on “Recent trends in newspaper circulation”. I would say that currently, circulation is slightly down. Still starting from such a high sale figure for a typical newsagent, even a few percent down still leaves a big market.

There is a market report we have which is well worth reading about newspapers today if you are interested.

The people selling to collectors for newspapers are already out on ebay here.

For a Sydney Morning Herald with Obama on the cover, they want $1.51 and $64.71 postage.

I wonder what the publishers would think of that delivery fee. Maybe the publishers should think of issuing special commemorative issues as clearly there is a market for it.

Anyway I will enjoy seeing what price these newspapers go for.

Maybe one of my readers wants to try getting into this market too. After all many of you still have copies, have a plastic wrapping machine to wrap it and all you need is an ebay account, which is easy to get.