Are you struggling to increase sales for your music store business? Although your passion for music might help, it’s important to solidify a sales plan to make your business a success.
Once you find the best sales tactics for your music store business, you can compete with other music stores in your area. But where do you start? How can you find sales tactics that actually work?
In this blog, you’ll discover five practical tips that will help you engage customers, manage inventory, and boost your revenue.
There’s a reason you hear “the customer is always right.” It’s because the customer should be your main focus in business. Without your customer, you don’t have revenue — and without revenue, you can’t find success.
So, what’s the best way to get your customers engaged? Connect with them. This is especially important in a music store business. Music is an experiential industry, and your customers want to connect with your music shop to feel confident coming back.
One of the best ways to connect with your customers is to personalize their shopping experience. Keep a record of their purchase history and preferences so that you can connect with them as they check out.
Customers usually don’t expect to be remembered by business owners — so when they do, they feel special. They’ll likely become loyal customers and tell their friends about your music store.
Another way you can connect with your customers is to follow up on their previous purchase. For example, if someone buys a guitar, text them a week later to ask how they like it and if they have any questions.
This might sound like a lot of work, but it doesn’t have to be. With the right software, you can send automated text messages to your customers. Follow-up texts help customers connect with you and your music store.
You can also host in-store events such as promotional events or live band performances to connect with your customers. If customers make good memories in your store, they’ll want to come back to make more.
Related Read: What Do Music Stores Sell? Stock Your Shop for Success
You might think inventory management doesn’t have much to do with sales, but it really does. Every customer experience, including the ability to find items in stock, impacts whether they’ll buy from you again.
Imagine looking up a music store business online and seeing that they have the exact sheet music that you’re looking for in stock. You decide to go into the store that day because you’re so excited. But then, the music store owner tells you their inventory was wrong and that sheet music is out of stock.
You probably wouldn’t want to go back to that store. At the very least, you’d never be able to trust if something was in stock or not.
If you have bad inventory management in your music store business, your customers’ experience isn’t the best that it can be — which means people won’t want to buy from your music store.
Use inventory management software designed for music shops so that you can add and remove items from inventory easily with preloaded catalogs.
With software that tracks your inventory, you rarely have to worry about your count being off. Conduct inventory audits at least once a quarter to ensure accuracy. Inventory management software can also set alerts for low stock, ensuring popular products never go out of stock.
Related Read: What Is the Best Instrument Rental Software? 4 Top Providers
People love loyalty programs. Building up points for deals on future purchases encourages repeat business. For example, if a customer earns a gift card through your loyalty program, they’ll likely return to spend it, often buying additional items.
Managing a loyalty program without software can be difficult, though. Make sure you find a music-specific software that will support your loyalty program, gift cards, and any other sales that you might have.
Rest assured: If there are loyalty points to be spent, customers will rush through your doors in no time.
Related Read: A Complete Musical Instrument Store Business Plan in 7 Steps
Marketing drives sales, but data-driven marketing drives success. Use sales reports to understand your most popular products, customer visit patterns, and seasonal trends. Tailor marketing campaigns to target specific audiences.
By regularly looking at your customer and sales reports, you can create tailored marketing and advertising campaigns that target specific audiences that you want to draw into your music store.
For example, if you have a sale on violin accessories like strings, resin, and shoulder rests, you can send a promotional email to everyone that has ever bought a violin from your store. That’s why data-driven marketing makes all the difference.
You don’t have to waste your time or money marketing to people that won’t resonate with your message. You don’t even have to guess if certain marketing campaigns will work. If you have the data and it’s worked for you in the past, chances are it will be successful again.
Related Read: 15 Music Store Promotion Ideas To Try Today
Diversify your sales channels to reach more customers. These days, you’re not limited to selling in your brick-and-mortar store.
It’s standard to have an e-commerce website now. Because it’s so popular, there are softwares that connect your actual store with your website so that you can still properly manage your inventory.
Online shopping is on the rise — so if you have a website, you can increase your sales by up to 50%. You don’t want to miss out on that growth for your music store business.
Another way you can expand sales channels is to sell on social media. From Facebook Marketplace to the TikTok shop, selling and shopping on social media has never been more popular.
Think about adding some of your products to your social media. At the very least, you can add your e-commerce site to your social media bio so that all of your visitors know where they can buy your products.
Many music store businesses sell their products on Reverb. Reverb is a music-specific marketplace that is designed to sell new, used, and vintage music equipment. Simply put, it’s the perfect place for you to expand your music store business.
Ensure your point of sale (POS) system supports multiple sales channels and integrates with platforms like Reverb.
Related Read: Is Guitar Repair Profitable? 6 Steps to a Better Bottom Line
As you pivot from your original business strategy to improve your music store business, remember these five sales tips:
Music Shop 360 is the perfect all-in-one POS system to improve your music store business. Not only is it made specifically for music stores like yours, but it can help you with each of these five sales tips.
By storing customer data, it’s easy to know each of your customers’ purchasing histories — which makes it incredibly simple to connect with all of your customers and personalize their buying experiences.
You can easily send texts and emails to each of your customers to ask them how they’ve liked their previous purchases.
Music Shop 360 also makes inventory management seamless by automating the entire process. You can easily add and remove products from your inventory with the click of a button. It syncs with your e-commerce site, too, so that all of your inventory is correct and live.
Loyalty programs are easy to manage with Music Shop 360 because it takes on almost all of the operational work. In the software, you decide how much money your customers have to spend to receive their reward.
For example, for every $100 spent, you can give your customers a $10 credit or 10% off their next purchase — the options are endless! Plus, it supports gift cards so that you can easily reward your customers.
Data-driven marketing has never been easier, either. With Music Shop 360 you can understand your customers in our reporting hub. With our clean and applicable data, you can easily market to all of your customers via text and email.
In addition to syncing your in-store and website inventory, you can build your music store business website all from one software. You can also expand your sales channels even more with Music Shop 360’s capability to schedule music classes and organize music instrument repair work orders. Plus, it’s seamlessly integrated with Reverb to increase your sales.
Don’t use a POS system that makes life harder as a small business owner. Music Shop 360 is made specifically for music store owners just like you.
Schedule a demo today to see how Music Shop 360 can improve your music store business in no time.