Spending hours poring over schedules? That’s the Prepare your discounts last thing you need most of the time, let alone during a busy business season. Integrating automated scheduling software into your management system will reduce the time you spend creating schedules so you can focus on other important back-to-school preparations.
To be truly effective,
add a data analytics component to understand instagram data when you need more staff in the store. By scheduling sufficient staff during peak periods, you’ll reduce queues and meet the needs of customers who, after a year of e-commerce growth, have become accustomed to not having to wait to pay.
Lightspeed users can easily set up an automated, data-driven planning workflow with two tools: Planday and Lightspeed Analytics.
First, a Lightspeed customer should open Analytics to determine their staffing needs. To do this, they can run a report on sales by hour of day to identify the busiest days and periods. By default, this report displays data for the past three months. To track back-to-school growth, the user can set a narrower date range and rerun the report every few weeks.
Once the Lightspeed user knows how Prepare your discounts many employees they want to schedule and when, they can go to Planday and enter the desired shifts and employee availability. And voila, the schedules are planned, with additional revenue data compared to Planday’s labor cost data.
Prepare your discounts
For most customers, the best part of the back-to-school sale is the sale itself, of course. Offering great discounts can make the difference between best practices for improving core you and a competitor for budget-conscious shoppers.
A commerce platform like Lightspeed allows you to set discounts so they’re automatically applied at checkout. Consider offering a mix of sales and discounts, for example:
- Sales. The tried-and-true 25% off (or more, or less) sales. Consider reporting excess inventory and surplus items, which, while useful for back-to-school, aren’t necessarily the latest shoes or notebooks. You can discount them and leave your newer items at full price.
- Buy one, get one discount. Back-to-school shopping often involves buying supplies in bulk. If a customer can get four packs of pencils or two pairs of sneakers by buying one product at half price, they could use their savings to continue shopping at your store.
3. Inform your customers about your back-to-school promotions
Once your employees are scheduled and your sales are organized, it’s time to let your customers know they should visit you for their back-to-school needs.
You can send an email or post on alb directory social media—and it’s in your best interest to do so, as the wider the reach, the better. But in addition to these methods, try sending SMS messages to let your loyal customers know what you have in store for them.
SMS is your secret marketing weapon. It has an 82% open rate (much higher than email), meaning you’re sure to reach your customers.
But don’t waste your customers’ goodwill. Using a customer relationship management (CRM) program like Lightspeed Loyalty , create one or two messages—one for now and one for the end of the back-to-school season—featuring your best sellers. This way, you’ll attract customers without annoying them. You can also ask your best customers to sign up for a VIP customer type through Loyalty so they can receive special offers and discounts via text message.
