Marketing Your Small Business with POS Software

What with all the talk of how bad our economy is nowadays, effective, inexpensive marketing of your retail store's products is now more important than ever before. However, for a lot of small business owners, affordable, strategic marketing opportunities can often seem few and far in between, but by using an electronic POS system your little store can now enjoy many marketing opportunities that, up until relatively recently, have only been available for the big boys. Indeed, although the fundamental purpose of POS systems is to make your business organized, easy to operate and professional, there are many marketing elements that it can bring to your small business' arsenal as well.

One great example of this is the ability to turn a receipt into something more than just an electronically printed record of a sale. I'm sure that all of you who are reading this have probably taken note of how most all large grocery stores pack their receipts with coupons toward the future purchases of items. Well; with POS software you can also do this, essentially creating a free advertisement on every receipt in the form of a coupon that can easily serve to beckon your customers back into your store sooner than later (due to the fact that an effective coupon always has an expiration date!). Also, depending on the flexibility and complexity of your POS installation, some store owners can configure their systems to put different coupons on different receipts, based on what the customer has purchased in the first place.

Of course, the logical next step after using POS to issue targeted coupons to customers, is the ability to have more targeted promotional mail. Indeed, although you do need to somehow get a customer's address in order to send them anything in the mail (more on that later), once you have that and use your POS software to keep track of your customers' purchasing habits, you can make up multiple promotional fliers or cards, and send different ones to different customers depending on what you know they are interested in the first place. And, once again; depending on how advanced your POS installation is, you may be able to just have the different cards printed automatically!

In addition to this, most POS systems have the ability to remember different "two-for-one"-types of promotions, which can help simplify the application of these specials, especially for the employees. With POS, you can be sure not to forget when there is such an offer going on within your store, and also, perhaps more importantly, you can be sure not to mistakenly give a customer more than they deserve by accidentally giving them a promotional discount on either the wrong product or from an expired offer, allowing you to ultimately run more offers at once by simplifying the application of these offers at the point of sale.

Last, but certainly not least, is the use of what is called "loyalty marketing". This can come in many forms, from the aforementioned targeted coupons on customer's receipts, to the creation of return customer VIP cards and special offers (having your customers fill out an info sheet to join your VIP program is a great way to get that address mentioned earlier). And, obviously, POS software can make bringing about all the different types of loyalty marketing much more easy and efficient than it would be otherwise, primarily due to the fact that your customer database can be so much more organized and thorough in the various forms of customer information it can store and even automatically analyze, as well.

So, there you have it; beyond their ability to streamline the inner- and outer-goings-on of your small business, POS software can definitely help give you the upper-hand when it comes to many different methods of marketing, which is an indispensable resource for making sure your business can thrive and even expand, even in the toughest of economic climates.