Bring Customers In Store: Parties
Welcome to the Material Retail Dumps podcast. If you've listened to us before, thanks so much for coming back. If it's your first time listening, welcome Material Retail Dumps is a short form podcast with brief but valuable content for independent retailers. As business owners, we don't have time for a 30 minute lesson with a ton of banter, so we get straight to the meat of the topic and aim to give you actionable information that will help you optimize your retail operation and make more money every day. Welcome to Material Retail Dumps, episode 38. This is gonna be the first episode in a series of episodes designed to help you get customers in store and when those customers come in store, to have them shop more. So, obviously, you know, that's the name of the game, right? As a retail business, fashion retail business, or any other type of retail business, you need to get foot traffic in your store.
You need to get customers walking through the door, and you need to get those customers shopping. So in this first episode, we're gonna talk about a semi unconventional way of getting customers to do that. So, you know, most people, when they think about, you know, marketing and advertising, they think about let's do, you know, social media ads, let's do Google ads, let's do our seo. Let's take out a, you know, a newspaper or magazine ad and let's get customers to, to come into the store. Um, and those things work, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying those things don't work, but they tend to be very saturated and you tend to have to pay, pay a toll. You have to pay a tax, you have to pay the company that's doing the newspaper to get you in front of customers. I think a better way to do it is to have your customers be that voice and that sounding box to get customers in the door.
So in this episode, we're gonna talk about events and parties. So it's super underrated and some businesses do it, but some bus businesses just completely ignore it. And what I wanna recommend is you just host some parties in your store, and these don't have to be extravagant parties. They don't have to cost thousands of dollars. You get, you know, 50, do 50 to a hundred dollars worth of food and drinks. You keep the store open an extra hour or two after hours, or you could even do it during the day and just create a little bit of a buzz. Send out an email about it, send that text about it. Have your customers and your cashiers share it with everybody. Post it on social, and before you know it, you have some customers in the store. So that being said, let's dive a little bit deeper into types of parties that you can do really easily, really quickly, how we're gonna get customers to come to those parties and how to make sure that when you have the party or events that customers are actually spending. So first thing is, what, what type of events and parties should we do? Well, the answer to that is whatever you want, but there are some obvious ones. So you can have parties around, um, holidays or times of year. So in the beginning of spring, you can have a spring party, you can have a Christmas party around Black Friday, Saturday, Monday time. You can have a New Year's party around New Year's, and you just wanna make sure that these parties are somewhat themed.
For example, if you're having a New Year's party and you're having that New Year's party, let's say three days before New Year's, maybe you want the theme to be all about, you know, dresses that you would wear to a New Year's Eve Bash, and you put those dresses in the window, you, you dress up as a business owner and the, and the employees of the store. You can get dressed up in, you know, cute fancy dresses with high heels and you just, you know, make it like you're having a real New Year's Eve party. And, you know, you just make it a little bit themed. Again, you don't have to go crazy, but you wanna do that. If you're having a party around spring and the theme is spring is here, put up some flowers in the store, um, bright colors, things like that, you just wanna be a little bit themed.
Um, so again, anything you can think of to have a party around, I think will work in terms of food and drink, again, you wanna just spend, you know, 50 to a hundred bucks, get some, maybe some champagne, maybe some non-alcoholic champagne, some soft drinks, some seltzers, um, some cookies, some cake, you know, nothing crazy. Um, and it'll just be fun for customers. So the next thing is how do we get customers to come? So this is really the easy part. So all you gotta do is use your existing channels. You send an email, you send a text, you're gonna post it on social media. You are gonna tell your customers at the store. When your customer comes in, say, Hey, by the way, we're having a party this week. You know, can't wait to see you on Thursday night. Bring your friends. And the idea is to hopefully get customers to come, but also bring a friend.
Um, whether it's after work or during the day or something like that, you wanna just get customers into the store. So you just wanna tell customers about it. It doesn't cost much, so you don't have to bet the house on it. You don't have to worry if only five extra shoppers come, only even two extra shoppers come. Now the last thing is, how do we get customers to actually shop when they're in the store? So this one is, I think the easiest part, but it's also easiest overlooked and only wanna do is have some sort of promotion attached to the party. For example, for the New Year's party that we spoke about earlier, you're gonna have this New Year's theme when everybody's gonna be dressed up and, you know, dresses and high heels and as if they're going to a party. And maybe you make the promotion 25% off all New Year's apparel.
And, you know, customers are excited because New Year's is coming up. They're coming to your store for this New Year's party, you guys are dressed in theme, they're drinking some champagne, and then boom, the dress that they need for their New Year's event that they're going to is 25% off. So what are they gonna do? They're probably just gonna buy it. So that's it. Just gonna wrap it up there. And it was a really quick and really straight to the point episode, but you know, that's what we like to do. Um, again, don't overlook parties, parties in any way, shape or form. Just create a little bit excitement about the store. Don't go crazy and just be creative. The goal, again, is to just get customers into the store and get them shopping. So, good luck and I'm looking forward to the next episode.
