Top 6 Point Of Sale Marketing Tips To Increase Your Store's Average Order Value

As a retailer, grabbing your shopper’s attention whilst in the store will not only help you to sell a few last-minute products, but it will keep your inventory constantly running in order to be able to display new items on a regular basis – keeping products from accumulating on the shelves simply because they are out of sight.

With these 6 point of sale marketing tips, you are able to provide a need that your shoppers may never have thought of having.

Use the right message
Take advantage of the checkout aisle
Product bundling
Make shoppers stop
Keep your POS displays fresh
Ask brands for POS displays

1. Use the right message

Studies have found that consumers make more than 70% of their purchase decisions in stores. This increases the importance of point of sale displays to give shoppers that push to add that item to their basket.

To verify this result, a study was conducted to find out whether the right message on a point of sale display can increase sales.

The result was retail stores with the winning message had an increase of 43% in sales!

Here is the link to the study for anyone interested.

2. Take advantage of the checkout aisle

Have you ever waited in line at the checkout aisle waiting to pay for your items only to add something else to your basket? We all know what’s waiting for us when wanting to pay for our products, yet we tend to fall for the same marketing strategy anyway. Why not join the bandwagon?

Place your point of sale displays at the checkout aisle in the hopes of catching last-minute sales before customers leave the store. High margin low priced products tend to work best here.

3. Product bundling

The third tip is to think about complementary products from different categories and place them next to each other. For example, a torch won’t work without batteries so placing batteries in the torch aisle will help improve your sales of batteries. Shopify has a pretty good resource on product bundling which you can read here.

Did you know? Nintendo actually sold more Game Boys when it was bundled up with a game compared to when it was sold individually. With bundling, Nintendo’s hardware sales increased by approximately 100,000 units! Because of Nintendo selling 100,000 more units, their video game sales jumped by over a million units. You can read more about Nintendo’s bundling strategy here.

Here is a real-life product bundling example here in Australia (apologies for lighting). Coles is cross-selling their Family Hot Roast Chicken with a bottle of Coke.

4. Make shoppers stop

Helga's point of sale counter in Coles — Helga’s point of sale counter in Coles

According to POPAI, most shopping is done in autopilot mode. When a POS display grabs a shopper’s attention they will switch from autopilot mode to “manual control”. Kraft Heinz’s European president, Matt Hill recently claimed that supermarkets were turning into ‘libraries’ with shoppers on autopilot as they go through the store. Because of this, they are not purchasing new products other than the ones they have been used to buying.

The primary goal of a point of sale display is to grab the shopper’s attention, make them stop, pick up the advertised product, and put it into their shopping cart. Your POS display needs to be bold and creative to grab the attention of shoppers.

5. Keep your POS displays fresh

A point of sale display needs to be constantly evolving in terms of design and its placement in the store. The longer the POS display remains unchanged, the less effective it becomes. Return shoppers will soon unconsciously ignore it similar to the banner blindness phenomenon.

6. Ask brands for POS displays

Ask the brands you are promoting to see what point of sale displays they can offer. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a custom cardboard display stand. It could be something as simple as a brochure holder with brochures in it.

For example, if you are selling cream cheese, you can ask the vendor to supply recipe flyers which you can promote next to the item. Another common marketing strategy that food brands use is in-store food demos.