Tipple Co-Founder Eoin Bara addresses core strategies to help turn travel retail sales into long-term repeat business across multiple channels.
Travel retail is costing alcohol brands a fortune, writes Eoin Bara.
And I don’t mean all the cash you fork out on in-store displays, travel boxes, and airport floor fees.
The real cost you should be worrying about is lost sales.
Selling overseas and in airports is a great way to shift bottles. But successful alcohol brands are not built on one-time purchases. They are built on long-lasting customer relationships.
So if you’re handing over cash to sell your products further afield, only for customers to buy your brand once, love it for a week, then never find it again, you are barely scratching the surface of the profits travel retail can offer you.
If you want to see real returns from travel retail, you must channel that excitement when someone discovers your bottle, and convert it into a lasting love of your brand.
How do you do that? By merging your direct-to-consumer and travel retail strategies.
(Haven’t managed to break into travel retail yet? Keep reading, we’ve a solution for that too.)
From romance to retention
There are three core strategies to make sure you turn one travel retail sale into multiple, repeat business:
- Connect physical and digital touchpoints
Every time a new customer buys your brand in duty free, that’s an opportunity for repeat sales. But if you don’t connect those physical purchases to the digital ecosystem of your business, you’re letting money go down the drain.
So find ways to connect the physical and digital touchpoints with your products to bring more customers into your orbit.
For example, you could include a QR code on your packaging with a special offer for holidaymakers. They scan the code, enter their email address, the offer is theirs and you have their details.
- Prioritise the post-purchase experience
Whether a customer buys in person or online, the post-purchase window is a golden opportunity to deepen your connection with them. And increase your chances of turning one sale into many.
This is where things like email and SMS marketing automations come into play.You can set up pre-written comms to go out to customers after they’ve bought specific products.
Use a combination of nurture content and sales content to both improve the shopping experience, and squeeze more ROI out of each purchase.
- Respond to your customer’s habits
And this is where things come full circle.
Once your customer has bought from you, and they are part of your digital ecosystem, you can use historic data to get much more targeted and precise with your strategy – and bag yourself more profit in the process.
Now you’ve got more customer data, you’ve got more visibility of your customer’s purchasing habits. Both on a collective and an individual basis.
You can then use your understanding of these habits to make your marketing and sales tactics much more effective. For example, you can calculate when your customer is likely to buy another bottle from you, based on things like the actions they take on your website, and purchase data on customers with similar habits.
From there, you can make a very smart estimate of when the customer is considering buying from you again (even if they’re not aware of it themselves) and serve up timely ads, emails, and other marketing comms to nudge them closer to that buy button.
At Tipple, we don’t just help brands break into new markets, we help you sell more bottles, in more countries by giving you access to expert ad managers, content creators and other digital marketing specialists. Click here to learn more.
But D2C isn’t just a tool to maximise the results you get from travel retail, it’s also a useful way to break into it…
The secret passage into travel retail
For drinks brands, getting into travel retail is a chicken-and-egg situation.
To stock your product, travel retail distributors and partners want to know you’re already selling in the countries you plan to enter. But to start selling in a new country, you typically need the help of a distributor.
I got stuck in this ‘Catch-22’ myself when I founded and scaled Mor Irish Gin. What I didn’t know at the time was there’s a secret third option: Make distributors come to you. How do you do this? Sell direct to consumers.
By selling direct to consumers, you can prove there’s a thirst for your booze overseas. You can prove market demand. And you can prove your brand is an investment, not a risk.
And that’s just the benefit for travel retail. While selling D2C, you’re also:
Making sales while growing your brand awareness
Meaning your ads start to pay for themselves with sales.
Controlling and owning your customer data
Giving you a better understanding of how to sell to them.
Keeping more profit
By paying less out in fees to retailers and distributors.
It’s a win-win-win:
- A win for the travel retail partners who can see proof you have market demand in the country they’re stocking your product
- A win for your customers who can easily purchase your product
- A win for you and your brand (because you’re making more money)
Summary
- For drinks brands, merging travel retail and D2C is a seriously profitable strategy.
- It maximises ROI from travel retail by channelling the excitement customers feel when they discover your brand and converting it into repeat sales.
- The three core strategies to multiply your travel retail sales?
- Connect your physical and digital brand touchpoints
- Programme post-purchase automations to squeeze more revenue from every sale.
- Use historic customer data to guide your marketing and sales tactics, and serve up content when they’re most likely to buy again.
Selling D2C also gives you an easier route into travel retail by showing distributors there’s sufficient demand for your product. Plus, it brings the added benefits of owning your customer data, repeat sales covering your ad spend, and more profits for you to keep.
Ready to sell more bottles in more countries? Tipple makes selling across borders possible. Click here to learn how. ✈
*This article first appeared in The Moodie Davitt eZine. Click here for more.
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