Small business tips: Five Strategies to Boost Summer Spending


Smart marketers are boosting sales by promoting not just the obvious items associated with summer, but the obscure as well.

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With strategies like the five that follow, any brand manufacturer and retailer can swim with the tide this season rather than struggle against it:

  1. Encourage local purchasing: Summer draws people outdoors, with shoppers more inclined to visit brick-and-mortar retail shops after first browsing for goods online. Take advantage of their increased excursions to malls and shopping centers by ensuring your website is up-to-date with real-time inventory that can direct your shoppers to stores where they can buy your products locally.
  1. Plan for families: Because families with young children comprise a large segment of summer’s biggest consumer population, a successful marketing strategy should include both parents and children, many of whom enjoy a long break from school. By promoting products and services that provide entertainment for children, brand manufacturers and retailers also help ease the anxiety and stress parents sometimes feel with the additional unstructured free time. Work backward by thinking about all the possible activities that normally take place during summer, then plan the optimum time to run promotions on all of the products associated with those events. From swing sets to splash pools, nothing drives a purchase like necessity and convenience.
  1. Define what’s hot and what’s not: Hot is a relative term. Ask a Minnesotan what temperature is suitable for buying and wearing shorts, tanks and swimsuits and you’ll likely get a response that’s 20 degrees cooler than one from a resident of San Diego. That’s why it is imperative to understand the varying definitions of hot weather from state to state. Knowing what’s hot and what’s not will increase your chances of successfully promoting the right products at the right time. Run dynamic ads online that are location and/or weather based, and watch your sales climb.
  1. Build a weather-driven email campaign: People love to talk about the weather! So, talk to them through clever and engaging email campaigns. Capture new traffic that comes to your site and convert visitors into buyers through thoughtful, relevant email content. Get creative. Starbucks does a great job with seasonal email campaigns—it’s easy to entice consumers with an iced latte on those dog days of summer when high temps tend to slow people down and increase their need for a refreshing beverage to pick them up.
  1. Set sale! Launch your own unique summer sale. In 2015, Amazon implemented Prime Day, which set sales soaring through the roof! Worldwide, the online powerhouse achieved an increase of 60 percent, with U.S. sales multiplying by 50 percent. In addition to focusing on back-to-school promotions—as early as July—think outside the box and offer those kinds of atypical products that land on Kiplinger’s list. Sales that include everyday household necessities and wardrobe staples are a safe bet to increase summer sales.

Brand manufacturers and retailers who have traditionally relied solely on demographic data are quickly grasping the emotional sentiment associated with seasonal changes and the impact of a marketing strategy that accentuates the positive aspects of high temperatures and extended time outdoors. Particularly as the world evolves toward Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things, e-commerce and traditional retailers will likely benefit all summer long by focusing on simple and creative solutions that successfully connect consumers to their products and services.

About the Author: Mike Fioravanti, vice president of sales, PriceSpider, has prepared these 5 Strategies to Boost Summer Spending below. PriceSpider is a retail technology company specializing in products and solutions that provide invaluable insight into consumer purchasing behavior. Powered by proprietary “spidering” technology that collects a wide range of data from thousands of e-commerce sites, PriceSpider discovers—with precision—what, where, when and how people purchase.

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