I was walking through a mall recently and at every corner, there was at least one shop shuttered and closed for good.

Bookshops, clothing stores, F&B, and any other retail businesses are dropping like flies.

It’s a depressing sight, seeing hardworking entrepreneurs losing their business, and employees losing their jobs during this crisis.

If you’re still up and running in retail, I salute you, and I understand there are some of you who are treading a fine line of survival where the future is uncertain.

This crisis has forced retailers to adapt to the new reality one which retailers cannot rely on foot traffic alone anymore, and have to shift their businesses online. Some have been postponing it for a long time and are scrambling now.

The question on every business owner’s mind is how to survive a recession in business now?

Like it or not, the key strategy to save your retail business is to go online right now.

During this crisis, a printer machine salesperson asked me, “Hanzo, How do I sell printing machines in this environment? I sell these machines to the printers to produce workbooks and name cards.”

Most of the time, when people are able to sell these kinds of products when:

1. Their clients are doing well and have a lot of business, so they have to buy another machine to cope with their rising demand.

2. Their old machine breaks-down and they need a replacement.

But right now, even though the old one is broken, they still have other spare ones that can cope due to the loss of demand. The whole economy is in turmoil because of this dynamic.

So my answer to him was “You cannot do a sell-in strategy, you got to do a sell-out strategy.”

Sell-in is trying to push more products to your customers, but because you’re in an environment of contracting demand and your product is tied to their growth when their business is down, your business suffers too.

So in this environment, you cannot do a sell-in strategy, you have to do a sell-out strategy.

Sell-out means, helping your customer increase business awareness through marketing. In this example, they sell to printers with a retail shop, which just typically opens shop, wait for walk-ins, and only converts the customer. A very traditional business.

Traditional retailers have no marketing strategies whatsoever. Most don’t think they even use their database effectively, nor do they even collect or have a database.

So that’s what retailers need to do as well, start collecting a database of the customer’s contact information so that new opportunities to market and reach out to customers opens up, rather than just relying on walk-ins.

In short, retailers need to go online, start actively using the sell-out strategy by marketing to them, and start building a database.

Share this article with a fellow retailer if you’ve found it useful!