Your patients expect their community pharmacy to supply the products they need to get healthy and stay healthy—and not just the ones found behind the counter. Vitamins and nutritional supplements are in demand for consumers like your patients. According to a 2011 report by Global Industry Analysts Inc., the global market for vitamins is growing. It’s predicted to reach $3.2 billion by 2017.
Your patients trust their hometown pharmacy, which means they’ll be hitting your pharmacy’s store shelves to find the vitamins and nutritional supplements they need to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Give them what they’re looking for! A well-stocked front end complete with the latest vitamins and supplements can add value to your store.
Reasons to stock vitamins
Before the days of marginal third party reimbursements, mail order, and huge competition from national chains, pharmacies didn’t need a front end to stay in business. Enough profit came from prescriptions. Now, a front end can be one of your most valuable sources of revenue.
You can go back and forth all day about what to offer in your front end. Should you stock cards and gifts? What about snacks? With vitamins, you don’t need to deliberate. Vitamins will always suit a pharmacy, no matter your market. Whether you’re located in a rural or an urban environment; whether your customers prefer to purchase camping gear or high-end cosmetics, vitamins can do well in community pharmacies.
“It’s part of the business that pharmacists have had for years,” said Bruce Burns, vice president of independent retail sales at Windmill Health Products.
Vitamins and supplements naturally complement a retail pharmacy, where you can cross-merchandise your products. As you know, when patients take an antibiotic they can experience unpleasant side effects, like an upset stomach. If they take a supplement, such as a probiotic, it counteracts those negative side effects, which means healthier patients and a healthier bottom line for your business.
“Not only are vitamins and supplements a profit center, they’re also a great way of keeping your patient compliant,” said Steve Sabella, vice president of sales at Windmill Health Products. “Pharmacists are in the business to help people. I believe that this is just another avenue to help.”
Finding the right mix
With competition from health food stores and other pharmacies, you have to give patients a reason to buy from you. Even though you can likely beat expensive health food stores on price, you don’t have enough purchasing power to offer the same discounts on brand name vitamins that health food stores, grocery stores and national chain pharmacies can offer, which is usually buy one get one free.
You need to team with the right vendors to offer the right mix of vitamins and supplements for your business. “You may just have one bottle of Centrum, for example, but you should also have several bottles of Centrum-comparable vitamins at an affordable price that are also being promoted,” said Gary Pigott, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Mason Vitamins. That way you can offer a limited quantity of the products consumers recognize, while also providing more affordable, comparable options. Pharmacy owners can’t wait until they get a request for a certain product to stock it. “Then, they already lost the sale,” Pigott said.
Promoting your products
Keep in mind that you can’t just line up a bunch of vitamins and supplements on your shelves and expect sales to skyrocket. “The key for community pharmacy is to promote it. Don’t just offer it,” Pigott said.
Promoting your vitamins starts with simply using your knowledge to educate your patients. Your patients trust your healthcare advice. After all, pharmacists were voted the second most-trusted profession in America in 2011, according to the annual Gallup survey.
Whether you have a patient who is concerned about vision health or who wants to know the best supplementary sleep aids, come out from behind the counter and talk to your patients about the right vitamins for them. It will mean a sale for your business, and a happy patient.
“Pharmacists’ ability to talk to their patients about the products that they’re taking is a huge advantage,” Burns said. “You don’t get that in food stores or a lot of the other outlets that are grabbing percentages of sales in vitamins today.”
You can also take advantage of the promotions your vitamin vendors offer to market your vitamins. Both Mason Vitamins and Windmill Health Products provide pharmacies with regular promotional opportunities.
“Whatever the vendor has accessible to you as marketing materials, it’s crucial that you utilize it,” Pigott said. “Don’t just let it gather dust.”
Instead of simply displaying vitamin brochures on a stand or on the counter, Mason Vitamins suggests that once a month pharmacy owners place educational material about vitamins in every bag that leaves the store, including scripts and front-end purchases.
Windmill Health Products works to make its vitamin line attractive to consumers by offering it at discounted pricing to pharmacy owners. “It’s very important to be promotional to make the product move off the shelves,” Sabella said.
Using trends to increase sales
When it comes to vitamins and nutritional supplements you can also increase sales by paying attention to the trends. “If you want to capture the nutritional business, you need to be on top of the hot trends,” Burns said.
For example, Dr. Oz is huge in the vitamins and supplements world right now. “We actually have sections we put up in the store now talking about ingredients that have been promoted by Dr. Oz and some of the supplements we have that contain those key ingredients,” Burns said.
Working with your vendors to promote vitamin and supplement trends in your store can mean a more successful front end. “Staying timely is important in the nutritional business to get your share,” Burns said.
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