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9.1 Demos

One of the best approaches to boosting aromatherapy sales is to give your customers first-hand experience with the products. Product demos are ideal for showing customers the opportunities aromatherapy offers. Here are some tips for making your demos more successful:

• Always provide the customer with a take-away—a product sample, a sample of an item made during the demo, a coupon and/or literature.

• Make sure products are available to purchase in the demo area. Don’t send the customer off to look for the product after you've convinced them to buy—attention spans are too short. (Often you can use counter displays or shippers of various products to make set-up efficient and provide an especially attractive presentation.)

• Locate your demo in a high traffic area and make it visually appealing. You may even be able to use music or other sounds to get customers attention. If possible, set up the demo so it draws customers into your aromatherapy section.

• Design demos to promote other products along with the one being demonstrated. For example, if you create a bath salt and give customers samples, look to drive sales of accessories such as empty containers, bulk salts, and essential oils, ready-to-use bath salts, along with related "after –bath" aromatherapy items like foot-care, skin-care and mists.

• Choose seasonally appropriate demos—tune in to your customers immediate concerns by demonstrating eucalyptus during cold/flu season, mists in the summer, bath products in the winter, etc.

• Coordinate your demos with deals on the products and ingredients being featured. The demo will convince customers to try new items—the discount will convince them to buy on the spot.

If your demo focuses on a specific product, take it one step further and focus on a key feature of that product. Set up your demo to show the product at it's best. Here are a few examples for some often-demonstrated Aura Cacia products:

• In the summertime put our Aromatherapy Mists on ice and offer to mist customers as they approach. This simple demonstration results in a surprising number of on-the-spot sales.

•You can easily show customers the unique foaming action of Foam Baths using a small bowl or container. People can readily imagine themselves in a tubful of Foam Bath from this small-scale, but direct, experience of the product.

• A small-scale experience of Aura Cacia Body Polishes can be easily provided as well—just provide a large bowl with a pitcher of water, and have customers exfoliate their hands using the Body Polish of their choice. Feeling the product in action will prompt many to take it home for a full-body treatment.

• You can create a big event by coordinating and combining a number of product demos. For example, have a "Beauty Day" in your store with a single day of demos and special prices for a number of related products—loofahs, bath salts, skin care oils, lip balms, massage oils or creams, etc. Hand out samples and literature, do demos and—if possible offer something special like massages to draw people in. These events are effective and can be built around different themes—facial care, body care, aromatherapy, etc. (A key selling point is that customers can have their own "at-home spa experience.")

Product creation demos:

Demonstrating how to create custom products can be very effective, especially in stores that sell a lot of essential oils and skin care oils. Concentrate on simple, quick projects and send samples home with the customers. Make sure they see that it's FUN to do!

• Make your own bath salt demos are a big draw, especially in the winter. Create cards to hand out to customers with the "recipes" you're demonstrating. Try to get customers involved in creating their own bath salts whenever possible. This can be done cost effectively by using baggies, bulk salt or bulk Dead Sea salts and Aura Cacia essential oil testers. The customer makes a personalized bath salt and then gets to enjoy the aromatherapy experience that she has created.

• Room sprays: using containers from the store, add water and essential oils to create a personalized room spray. Frequently stores sell spray bottles in the accessories section of a store.

• Use unscented Aura Cacia products, (massage cream and body polish, for example) and a selection of essential oils for a convenient way to let customers create their own products at the store. The customer can mix a custom massage cream in the demonstrator's hands and receive an immediate massage with the custom blend.

"Passive" demos:

Even if you don't have personnel to dedicate to a demo area, you can still give customers some direct exposure to your aromatherapy products and demonstrate their qualities. In fact, it makes sense to keep these simpler approaches in play on a day-to-day basis even if you are doing regular demos—they're just another way to give customers that direct experience of the products that is a key in aromatherapy.

• You can "demo" essential oils continuously in your aromatherapy department by running an Aura Cacia vaporizer to diffuse an uplifting oil such as grapefruit, lemon, or sweet orange into the air—or choose multiple locations using different oils. (Always provide easily accessible free literature.)

• Offer your customers do-it-yourself demos with testers of a variety of products like essential oils, aromatherapy mists, massage creams, etc. Put them on an accessible shelf, and keep literature at hand to provide information and build interest.

• Don't underestimate the potential of a simple basket of product samples. This time the nearby literature can help the customer decide what she wants to sample. Good signage and a seasonal selection of products (as suggested above) can really boost the traffic to your samples.

• Another easy version of the do-it-yourself demo is to purchase a 25-count counter display, order a tester and set some literature nearby. Any way you get customers to experience the feel and scents of the products will help your aromatherapy sales.

9.2 Literature

Next to the actual experience of using products, the most powerful motivator for the aromatherapy customer is information. Helpful, well-informed staff is a key aspect of providing information (which we address with this course), but customers also look for well designed, informative literature, both specific to products and about aromatherapy in general. Aura Cacia recognizes the importance of good consumer information at the retail level and offers it both in separate brochures, such as our thorough Essential Oils brochure, other POP materials and on the product packaging itself.

• Of course you'll want to keep a good supply of the Aura Cacia essential oil brochure in a visible location in your aromatherapy section, but you should also offer the brochures in other locations throughout the store—HABA, the customer service center, the bulk section, etc.—to attract new customers into your aromatherapy section.

• Make sure your customers are aware of the information available on the Aura Cacia essential oil bottles. Aura Cacia is unique in the amount of information about each oil that is provided on the bottle. There are even aromatherapy recipes. (These recipes, which call for other ingredients, offer ideal opportunities to upsell, by the way.)

• You can use small chunks of information to enhance your store display too. Go to auracacia.com and get interesting facts or aromatherapy recipes from our info pages. Print them attractively on cards and showcase the printed cards and recipes near the oils that are discussed or called for as ingredients in the recipes

• You can create your own information sources for your specific customers. You might create and laminate display cards based on specific uses of essential oils for laundry, baby care, skin care, etc. For example, you could place a shelf talker located in the baby section that talks about the soothing and calming properties of lavender for in the nursery.

9.3 Merchandising

It's important to present your aromatherapy products in a way that makes them both accessible and attractive. When customers are looking for products—either because of the interest you have generated in-store or because their popularity is bringing people into your store looking for them—those products should be easy to find. Eye-level placement of the most popular products and colorful, convenient packaging and displays will optimize your aromatherapy sales. (As the brand consumers most often choose in the aromatherapy set, it makes sense to merchandise Aura Cacia at eye level.) Here are some additional tips for making the most of your merchandising opportunities:

• Provide "one-stop shopping" at your essential oil display by merchandising complementary products—such as carrier oils and accessories—next to the oils. Putting diffusers by the essential oils, for example, makes it easy for a customer to imagine—and act on—filling a room with scent.

• Enhance your aromatherapy set by surrounding it with related products—display bulk lavender flowers, rose buds/petals, clay powders, potpourri close to the aromatherapy section to create atmosphere and make companion purchases easy for customers.

• Including fresh botanicals like lemons, fresh-cut lavender, and other plants that produce popular essential oils in your displays helps customers make the connection with the natural essence of your aromatherapy products

• Look for display solutions that suit your needs. Aura Cacia provides a wide variety of displays from efficient essential oil displays that stack for easy expansion and accommodate testers to attractive and versatile shippers (from 25 to 144 counts) that provide flexibility in displays and secondary placements. Ask your service specialist to help you determine the option that works best for your store. (Aura Cacia will ship you an empty essential oils display if you want to fill it through your regular distributor, and we'll gladly supply replacement parts to help you maintain your display.)

• Make sure you leave room for informational literature right next to the products. Put coupons on J-hooks, keep shelf talkers next to the products they're talking about, and make sure general info (like the Essential Oil Brochure) is nearby and catches customers' attention.

(By the way, we don't recommend placing essential oils behind lock and key—in most cases, the savings from reducing theft is more than offset by a decrease in sales from the loss of accessibility to the products.)

Secondary placement opportunities

Take advantage of the opportunity to boost your aromatherapy sales with secondary placements in areas of the store outside of the aromatherapy section. Whether it's an end cap, a counter display, or simple clip strips (which Aura Cacia will provide) in a related department—increasing the visibility of your aromatherapy products will increase your sales, both from sales at the secondary location and from increased attention to your main aromatherapy set.

• Make the most of end caps by creating specific themes for them—group relaxation or lavender products for example so the display doesn't come across as a random grouping of aromatherapy products. (Put essential oils on end caps or displays in or near high traffic areas to reduce theft.)

• Use smaller displays, like Aura Cacia's 25-count merchandising displays, creatively for secondary placement at checkout, the beauty counter, or anywhere space is limited.

• Use your knowledge of oils therapeutic values to develop secondary placements—tea tree in skin/foot care set, lavender in sun care (and skin care), eucalyptus in cold care, etc.

Highlighting quality—communicating quality/purity

Customers care about quality in aromatherapy products—that's one of the main reasons Aura Cacia is the number one aromatherapy brand. Don't forget to emphasize this in your presentation of Aura Cacia products and you'll see positive results.

• Use the package to show the quality of Aura Cacia products—every one of our packages guarantees in writing that we sell 100% pure products that contain no synthetic fragrances, colors or preservatives.

• Aura Cacia Essential Oil brochures provide customers with additional information about our quality program that helps convince them that Aura Cacia is the clear choice for quality and purity.

• Another effective way to communicate Aura Cacia's quality message is to utilize merchandising tools like the Essential Oil display header ("100% pure essential oils"), tier stickers, and others available through your service specialist.

Review Questions Section 9

1. List five things that make a demo successful?

2. What is the difference between a passive demo and a product creation demo?

3. What are some creative ways you can use literature and information to help you sell more products?

4. Describe some secondary placement opportunities for aromatherapy products in your store?

5. What materials can you use to emphasize Aura Cacia quality?