Customers that aren’t in your shop can’t buy anything. Earth-shattering, isn’t it? 

Still, lots of archery shops struggle with a slowdown when hunting seasons open and the attention of the customers turn to actually engaging in the pursuits. During the previous months, they used your shop to stock up, but you still need people coming through the door.

Making your shop the hangout, the place to be, the social hub, during the typical low-traffic days of hunting season can be the skeleton key to unlocking a successful end of the year.

What We’ve Lost

Just a generation ago, the act of taking your big game to a local archery shop to check it in and allow the gathered hunters to admire your take and offer congratulations was a right of passage for young hunters, and a time-honored tradition for those seasoned veterans. 

With online and tele-check options expanding, and some hunters looking to avoid the comments and sneers of hunters who think their opinion of how another hunter chose to fill their tags mattered, we’ve seen a drastic reduction in this type of physical social gathering. The community has taken itself online, along with all the toxicity, infighting, and backbiting that comes with keyboard muscles and the bravado of online anonymity. 

The days of celebrating a hunter filling a tag have been replaced by smart remarks like, “We wouldn’t take that on my lease,” and “Imagine what he would have been next year.”

The support and communication of the hunting community has evaporated, and the traditional hangouts that used to support that community have largely dried up as well. 

That leaves you with an opportunity. By making a concerted effort to create opportunities for the hunter community to meet and engage at your shop, you can keep traffic up, and hopefully revenue as well. Here are three creative ways to keep your shop top of mind after the hunting season opens so you can keep your customers coming through the door.

1: In-Season Contests or Raffles

Everyone likes prizes and competitions. Offer both with in-season contests for your hunters. Big buck contests aren’t as common as they used to be, but there’s no reason you shouldn’t look to bring this back. 

A top-notch backdrop can be had pretty affordably these days, and if photo record for inclusion in the contest requires the photo be taken on-premises, at the backdrop, you can help ensure traffic. Similarly, with something like a heaviest doe contest, mandating that the weight must be recorded on the scale at your shop and recorded there with a photo can do the same. 

Struggling to figure out how to grow your social media preference? Leverage those photos! Everyone likes to see the deer that have been taken in the area, congratulate a kid on their first deer or first buck, or rib their buddies. This is exactly the kind of shareable content that your shop should be leaning into, and at a time of the year where folks are looking for this type of content, you can become the clearing house for local hunter sentiment by showing who is entering what. 

For high-traffic days, like the afternoon of your firearm opener, you may not have enough parking for all the hunters that flock to your shop to record their entries, check on what everyone else is doing, and commiserate over the take of the day. 

One quick word of advice. Make sure there is as much incentive in participation as there is in logging the biggest and best. Wild card, or random prizes just for logging an entry, prevent people from skipping the process with an animal they don’t think can win. If there’s just as much chance of an 80-pound doe winning as one twice that, or a kid’s basket-rack 4x4 could win as easily as a 160-inch bruiser, your participants won’t skip out on logging every animal. That means more people coming through the door, and that’s exactly the goal.

2: Food, Food, Food

There may be no greater social throughline than food. People who eat together, come together. For as long as there have been people, the act of eating together has fostered community and togetherness. 

There are lots of ways to skin this particular cat, or deer, as it were. If you’re running a contest and expect a heavy day, you could have a food truck come in for an afternoon to be on-site for those hunters a bit peckish from a day in a treestand. 

This may be a good way to attract some folks to your shop that aren’t as likely to stop by, as well. Since during fall the food truck circuit at local fairs and events may be winding down, you may find that a parked food truck brings people to the shop that wouldn’t under normal circumstances. 

You might also consider some cookoffs. Best saved for later in the season, or right after, a well-promoted venison chili cookoff might be just the ticket for a traditionally slow late winter weekend. 

Most everyone loves a good bowl of chili on a dreary winter day. More than that, most everyone thinks their particular version is the best around. Lean into that spirit of competition and provide your customers and community members an opportunity to put their chili where their mouth is. 

However you choose to use it, food options can be a great way to put trucks in the parking lot.

3: How-To Seminars

You have experts in your circle. Maybe you have incredibly experienced customers who can share their knowledge. More than likely, you can partner with your state agency to come in and talk to or present to your customers about issues of importance. Your staff probably has wisdom to share. 

Use cabin fever and late-season days to give existing or potential customers an excuse to come learn something. As much as we like to think we all know everything, we all have more we can learn. 

Topical and timely learning opportunities can bring a good crowd. A late archery season session with a local butcher shop or processing group called, “Three ways you’re screwing up your field dressing” could make their fall a little easier.

That goes double for the taxidermists who get hacked up capes they are supposed to turn into works of wildlife art.

You might be able to get someone from your state agency to come talk to your customers and hunters about what they are on the lookout for this deer season to help monitor herd health and overall condition. 

With small-scale trapping on the upswing, having someone from the local chapter of the National Trappers Association or other like agency come in to talk about easy trapping for nest raiders or coyotes to help protect game species is a great idea and could draw a lot of interest. 

Reach out to your local extension office about having someone come in to talk about the most-needed habitat improvements in the area, and maybe even grant or support programs that hunters and landowners can take advantage of to support native wildlife. 

Last but not least, don’t be shy about reaching out to your sales reps about coming in to set up and present the latest from their brands. Hunters love gear, and rarely have the chance to put hands on as much of it as they would like. You may find interest in some brands or products you weren’t sure about bringing in, or pick up a few tricks or insights about how the reps talk to customers about products that you carry but haven’t moved as well as you thought they might. 

There’s a lot of opportunity to bring new information to your customers, and if they have to happen to come to your shop to get that information, then so be it!

When to Host Events

Putting a great event together is hard enough, but finding a spot in the calendar that has appeal, but doesn’t bring significant conflict that can hurt attendance, can be nerve-wracking. There will obviously be some local considerations I can’t possibly know, but here are a few dates or windows I would be keying on for event windows. 

Preseason: In states like Indiana that lead the archery opener with a youth season, I would be AVOIDING the youth weekend like the plague. The first weekend of hunting, coupled with what is usually warm weather, and kids of all ages, leads to a lot of short days. Ideally, you’ll have some successful hunters coming by to check game or take photos, but a major event? I’d lead it by a week or two while most hunters are trying to stay out of their properties and let the deer be. Hunters are likely to be in the mindset to hunt, but can’t be in the field. Bring them in for a season-kickoff event, maybe a seminar or presentation, and have those last-minute things they may need front and center. Doing field dressing demos or letting a taxidermist present? Now is a great time. 

Firearms Opener: I don’t know anywhere that the middle of the day of the firearms opener isn’t something akin to Christmas morning. Successful hunters are looking to show off their bounty, and those who have less to boast about are looking to see what others have accomplished. You might not be the only shop with an opener event, but with some planning you can have the best. Offering food trucks for famished deer hunters can be quite the draw. 

Season Closing: The last weekend of hunting season, or weekend after, is a great time to put a bow on the season. There are many hunters by this time who have had enough. For those who tagged out, it’s a good time to bring everyone back together. A reception announcing winners and choosing wild card winners can draw a lot of attention. If you’re offering gift cards or giving away products, it’s a good time to clear the shelves before new items arrive from show-season orders. Pivoting to trapping could be great here if there isn’t season overlap. 

Dates to Avoid: It might be tempting to run events around Independence Day or Labor Day, but summer vacations and family events often use these anchor dates as markers as well. You also want to be careful to avoid the college or professional football kickoff weekends, especially if you have a local team that is likely to pull interest. Similarly, Christmas and New Year’s are often full of other events.

Final Thoughts 

When it comes to pulling people through the doors at traditionally low-traffic times during hunting season, take advantage of what has set hunters apart for so many years — our sense of community. By providing a place to gather, share stories and information, and support that community, you can make your shop a hub of activity and an integral part of the local hunting scene. 

Sidebar: Where to Get Prizes?

Sure, running raffles and giveaways and contests sounds great until you have to come up with prizes for everything. You could run yourself out of stock and into the red pretty easily just yanking stuff off the shelf to give away. Here’s a few options to consider to help offset your own contributions so you stay in the black. 

Brand Donations: You’re lucky. You’ve got connections. You know reps, and marketing people, and probably a few PR people that you can reach out to looking for donations. Make a list of your good contacts and sketch out what your giveaway schedule or needs may be, and line up the best fits before you start asking so you don’t burn a good contact on a mediocre event. You’d be surprised how many products you can get just by asking. 

Slow Movers: People are often quite happy to win something they wouldn’t buy outright. Even the best managed inventories and the most tightly managed shops have things that for one reason or another just didn’t take off. Whether it’s a big raffle table at the end of the year, or a bundled prize package with odds and ends, bump up the advertised prize value by moving on from some of those skus you just want to see go away. Win-win. 

Gift Certificates: Let the customer choose what they want! And there’s also a chance you won’t have to pay off a gift certificate because it’s common for people to lose or forget about gift certificates. Also consider rebates: There’s a reason some retailers have gone to rebate programs rather than sales; instead of lopping profit off the initial sale, they leverage the idea that a lot of people don’t go through the rebate process.

Sidebar: What About a Major Sale?

You may already have your own sales cadence in place that you won’t want to mess with, and I’m hardly breaking any news here, but you can’t forget the appeal of a bargain. I think for the most part, anchoring a major sale ahead of or on the heels of a hunting season is better than during the season. That said, you may well be able to find a sweet spot between seasons that makes sense. Ideally, if you put on a major sale, I suggest pairing it with one of the other items I’ve discussed in this article.