Gone are the days of simple cash registers, credit card imprinters, and simple swiping. From chip readers to touchless payment methods like Apple Pay, there are a myriad of ways to make and take payments.
But your point-of-sale can do a heck of a lot more than manage your money. The 21st century has offered business owners and franchised companies the ability to leverage something they’ve never been able to do at quite the same scale: customer data.
Data gets a bad rap these days—especially as larger companies bend and often break the rules concerning the protection of user data. But standard data given to a customer in good faith to a vendor—information such as a name, email, and phone number—enable business owners to drive growth for their businesses while offering their customers lucrative deals and rewarding consistent patronage.
Here are five ways your point-of-sale drives growth:
Simplifying the Transaction
Let’s discuss how customer data simplifies transactions at the point-of-sale.
You see this approach often with larger companies allowing customers to sync a method of payment with their loyalty or customer account. That way, payments can be made quickly with a phone number or other method of verification.
Customer data also allows cashiers to quickly apply purchases to a customer’s rewards account. A quick phone number given to the cashier plus a quick tap of a contactless payment chip gives customers the rewards points they’ve earned; along with covering the transaction process in a fraction of the time.
Upselling Functionality
With a robust upselling feature set, offered on certain point-of-sale systems, you can present high-margin items to your customers based on what you know customers want to see.
For instance, if you can see that your point-of-sale has been selling a lot of product X recently, you can configure your system to show off that product on the customer screen during the final payment process. In the same way grocery stores show off snacks and magazines during checkout, this final temptation often results in higher sales.
For instance, Impulse Buy from Franpos allows vendors to showcase their products on the customer screen and allows them to add the product to their cart during checkout. This functionality has been proven to drive further growth.
Loyalty Programs
We’ve touched on this before, but now more than ever, loyalty programs enable patrons of your store to really reap the benefits of their continued patronage.
And with a loyal customer’s purchase habits preserved in your POS system, you can reward customers specific to the types of purchases they make. Offering loyalty programs in this light enables you to delight your customers by “reading their mind,” so to speak.
With this information on hand, you can also send messages directly to your customers when your store is offering discounts, deals, or hosting special events. This will further drive traffic and sales to your store, all through a mutually agreeable arrangement between yourself and the customer.
Growth Marketing Campaigns
Similar but distinct from loyalty programs are growth marketing campaigns designed to reward loyal members of your customer base and market directly to them.
With customer data, you can set up a series of triggers to automatically send messages to your audience. For example, if you set a certain high-price threshold and your customer surpasses that threshold, you can automatically send out a coupon for use during their next visit and keep that customer happy and coming back again and again.
Triggers can be set for a wide variety of different scenarios, including customer birthdays, certain item sales, and more. And with Franpos, you’ll be able to “set and forget” a wide variety of triggers, giving you the ability to drive growth without ever manually writing out an email or a text message.
Stronger, Smarter Reporting
Reports are the #1 way vendors are able to track the success or failure of their units, products, and services.
A robust point-of-sale will be able to generate reports over a wide variety of parameters, enabling you to be able to see both a micro and a macro-level view of your company. Your reporting can also allow you to see product that’s moving quickly and needs a restock.
You’ll be able to ensure you never run out of product and drive growth through smart reporting and better inventory management techniques.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, point-of-sale systems such as Franpos are designed with a large variety of revenue-generating opportunities for the end-user. And, with eCommerce integration, omnichannel sales, and integrations with CRMs like QuickBooks, it’s never been easier to run and scale your business on one holistic platform.
