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The holiday season offers a prime opportunity to boost revenue for your martial arts school with a well-crafted special sale. By focusing on equipment and pre-paid program sales, you can easily generate thousands of dollars in just one day. Take a page out of the playbook of James Theros from Level 10 Martial Arts. After nearly 20 years of perfecting his “Student Appreciation Shopping Day” in Baltimore, MD, James has refined his approach down to a science. A single well-planned event like this can inject $20k or more into your business, and it’s all about strategy, timing, and delivering value to your students. Be sure to check out the re-breakable boards and other unique gifts for martial artists at our partners Sparring Sports offer.
Ten ideas to pump up Holiday Shopping Day:1. Create a wish list of products that students can fill out and give to their families. Yes sure the check out the deals offered by our partner, SparringSports.com 2. Distribute catalogs to your students so they can see the wide range of products available to them either online or via order. 3. Post specific deadlines for ordering products. 4. Decorate your school for the Holidays. 5. Mount a Christmas tree six weeks out and stick your products under the tree. 6. Emphasize practicing at home in class. Demonstrate various training products that students can get as gifts to help them practice at home. 7. Partially wrap some of the larger gifts ideas to plant the idea of it as a gift. 8. If you can administer it, launch a Holiday Gift Layaway program on October 1st to help students plan and budget for gifts. 9. Remind your students every class that your school is a great shopping destination for unique gifts. 10. Teach your staff and leadership team to make suggestions to parents for gifts for their kids. For instance, if a kid has worn gear a suggestion that, “Maybe Santa will bring Johnny some new gear…” might result in a sale that Mom had never considered otherwise. Remember that you have a relatively captive audience in your students. They are not usually able to go anywhere else to purchase the products that you have available through your school. Keep this in mind when you are developing your fall and winter lines of products. Try to provide as much apparel and products with your name and logo on them as possible. If it comes with your name and logo on it, then your school is the only place that the item will be available. Also remember that when an item has your name and logo on it, it becomes a specialty item, and then it has a greater potential value to the student. Many retail stores make between 70 and 90 percent of their total annual profits during the Christmas holiday season. During much of this season, people are looking for opportunities to spend their money. They will be much more open to suggestions than at any other time of the year. You should be able to do three to five times your normal monthly merchandise volume during the holiday season. But to do this you must start planning NOW! You must begin planning now to make the holiday season a successful and highly profitable one. If you follow the guidelines for running a "Friends and Family Shopping Day" you should be able to have your most successful holiday season ever! Decide today what products will come with your logo on it. This includes shirts, hats, coats, watches, mugs, pens, clocks, backpacks, uniforms, safety equipment, etc. Once you have determined what you want to sell this season, decide how much of each item you are going to stock. In some cases you will stock only one sample or a sample of each size. In other cases you may want to stock several of the item. This would especially be true of some smaller items that you could use as “up sell” items to fill out their buying list. In addition, your shoppers could take these items with them right away. Many times smaller items are impulse-buy items. Example: mugs, water bottles, hand targets, pens, and watches. Besides your regular stock of items, you should have a few items that are only available on the special shopping day. These can be purchased as surprise gifts. You could also have a couple of unannounced specials that day to encourage additional purchases. Don't hesitate to come up with additional ideas to stimulate the desire to buy. Example: How about offering an additional special FREE gift if someone buys a big ticket item, such as a stretching machine. It is essential that you begin promoting your Christmas holiday items as early as possible. Remember, children begin planning what they want as early as September and October. That is your time to begin promoting the products that you have available and what they need to do get them. If you are going to use catalogues, you need to get them out in early October. This will give the students an opportunity to put martial-arts related items at the top of their list. Your pro shop should be at its fullest by the beginning of October. Get all your samples in by the end of September and ready to be displayed by the beginning of October. Try to be especially creative with your displays during this time of the year. You may also want to put up a special display in your front window for passersby. You will be amazed by the number of people who are drawn in by an exciting display, people who otherwise may have spent their money elsewhere. We recommend that you give or send out copies of the "My Martial Arts Wish List" during the month of October. You need to choose a day or evening in November to be your actual "Friends and Family Shopping Day." We recommend a date between November 13th and the 30th. Remember, the day after Thanksgiving, is typically the busiest shopping day of the season. You want to give the friends and families an opportunity to do their shopping at your school before they do the rest of their shopping . On the evening or day of your event, you may want to cancel classes to emphasize the importance of the event for the students and their friends and families. Try to make the shopping day/night a very special event by providing beverages and snacks for everyone. Be sure to have enough staff on hand to help everyone. If you promote the event correctly, you should have an excellent response and you will need all the help you can get. Also, don't forget about selling upgrade and private lesson programs during this time. |
