Retailer Perspective
Retailer’s Perspective: Shoes of Prey Discounts for Results
- 3rd October
- Michael Fox 19
Discounting product is not usually a retailer’s preferred tactic, but Michael Fox shares how Shoes of Prey targeted its sale to achieve exceptional results.
Late in August we held a Shoes of Prey Friends and Family Sale to see if we could sell some of the shoes that have been returned to us by customers.
Results
We held a mid-week sale and sold $6,475 worth of shoes followed by a Saturday sale where we sold another $12,075 worth of shoes, a total of $18,550!
This was about 200 pairs of shoes. Approximately one in two people who attended the sale made a purchase. The average customer who made a purchase, purchased two pairs of shoes.
Marketing
We marketed using six different channels to spread word of the sale. On Saturday we tracked how purchasing customers had heard about the sale.
The channels and percentage of customers who came through them were as follows:
- Sharing between friends – 33%*
- Email to Sydney based Shoes of Prey account holders – 19%
- Facebook Ad targeting Sydney based fans of Shoes of Prey – 26%
- Old school letterbox drop to 500 residences in the local Surry Hills area – 11%
- Blog post on 22michaels.com – 7%
- Posting the sale to various Sydney based online sale sites – 4%
*We encouraged people to share the sale with their friends. We’re not sure how the original friend heard about the sale, so this result should partly be spread across all of the five other channels.
All channels delivered a great return on investment in relation to the time spent on them, so we’ll repeat offers through them all next time.
Shoes of Prey's Family and Friends Sale not only resulted in profits from excess stock, but strengthened its brand reputation.
Brand Impact
One of our initial concerns was that the sale might have a negative impact on our brand with customers devaluing the shoes after seeing them sold at a cheaper price. We helped relieve the negative impact of this by only advertising the sale to people in Sydney.
However, based on comments from customers on the day, the sale, if anything had a positive impact on brand perception. A number of customers were thrilled to be able to come in to the office, try on the shoes and see the vast range of styles and colours we offer. Many said they now felt more comfortable to purchase from us online.
Customers could still see the added value that being able to design their own shoes offers them, they could clearly see the distinction between our ready made pairs and custom shoes and so the price difference is justified in their minds.
This approach won’t scale as our business does, so we’ll need to work out other methods for selling returned shoes in the future, but it should work nicely in the short term.
