In retail design, a good shopping experience is essential for customer satisfaction. A satisfactory customer experience is the first necessary step to gaining customer loyalty and, subsequently, making them a prescriber of your business. Both steps are crucial to achieving a profitable business. Knowing the tricks and techniques necessary to offer an excellent experience to your customers will allow you to improve the financial results of your company.
6 Tricks and techniques to improve the shopping experience in physical stores
1. Make things easy for the customer
When you consider how to improve sales in a store, start by exploring as if you were visiting it for the first time.
For example, would someone who has never visited you before know
- where to find the type of item they are looking for?
- Is it easy and comfortable to walk between aisles?
- Can you easily access to pick up the product you are interested in?
It is interesting that you ask yourself these types of questions before starting. And others related to the ease of the visitor obtaining what he wants on his first visit to the store.
Because it will give you many clues about the shopping experience, you will know its difficulties in order to solve them You will identify serious errors, essential to decide what changes to implement in order to correct them, you will check your strong points to assess if you can reinforce them in some way.
2. Use the appropriate signage
The proper use of signage facilitates the shopping experience for different reasons. These are some of them. It makes it easier to find what the customer is looking for.
The sooner it takes to find it, the better. Allows you to identify products on sale or promotion, highlighting them.
Allows you to create cross-selling strategies or encourage the customer to add a complementary product to the one they want to buy.
3. Avoid queues and add value to your waits
One of the biggest causes of dissatisfaction in retail design is that of purchase are queues.
They are generally boring and make the customer feel like they are wasting their time. Both at the time of payment and in the fitting room, in the case of clothing or footwear stores.
Create strategies that speed up queues and make them more enjoyable. How to achieve it? Offering extra value to the public. It is an effective measure to improve the shopping experience.
The options for this depend on things like your customer profile, what you sell, and the size of your store.
But there are solutions that are shared by many businesses, such as the currently implemented single queue with several cashiers for payment. In addition, solutions that provide added value are always interesting.
Like, for example, the offers and promotions stand next to the payment points. And in fitting rooms, virtual reality and digital devices can be ways to offer customers options to complement the products they want to try on.
All this will make the visitor not have the feeling of wasting time and will take away a sense of positive experience. Because you are obtaining information and living a value-added retail experience.
4. Provide an immersive environment for your ideal client
When a person enters an establishment and the environment catches him, it improves his attitude and receptivity to its offer.
This good attitude makes it easier for you to be less demanding, more flexible and enjoy a pleasant shopping experience. In order to achieve this, it is essential that you know your ideal client very well. What does it mean?
That you ask yourself what he likes, what he values and what he does not support. If you can answer these questions with confidence, you can work to create an environment that helps you have a positive retail experience from the moment you walk into the store and beyond.
5. Create irresistible flash offers, but ones that you won’t regret the next day
Flash offers are undoubtedly very attractive to the public.
The sense of urgency, that they cannot miss this opportunity, is a buying impulse that many cannot pass up. But what happens when after a while or the next day they realize that it is not what they wanted?
That their customer experience leaves them dissatisfied and upset. This does not mean that you have to give up flash offers.
Not much less. But you do have to make them a satisfying purchase for your customers. And that makes them even happier with the purchase they made a few days after leaving the store.
Also, offers are an opportunity for the customer to come back because they think there is more that they haven’t seen yet.
For this reason, it is interesting to appeal to the fact that there will be products being renewed. To do this, you must create an offer in accordance with the needs and tastes of your ideal audience.
And also place it in the appropriate place for him. Avoid trying to sell products that are unrelated to the other items you sell or consistent with your brand image.
6. Offers impeccable customer service that provides added value
Being nice is not enough to offer a satisfying shopping experience. But it is necessary. In addition, the attitude of the staff is key to providing a good customer experience.
When you consider how to improve sales in a store, assess what the template can do to provide this good experience.
We share some ideas with you – Be friendly, but without losing naturalness – Respond to the visitor’s request for information – Make it easier for them to find what they are looking for.
Be available to help the customer, Ask the customer if they want something else or if they have already completed the purchase Offer or suggest the purchase of a complementary product but without insisting on it if the customer is not interested.
In addition, you can design strategies aimed at improving their retail experience while facilitating sales and achieving customer loyalty.
So, for example, staff can signal that a product is on sale if the customer objects to the price.
Or invite you to a temporary promotion or event that will take place on an already assigned date, it can also be interesting to suggest that they become a follower of your business on a certain social network and even offer a discount for a future purchase if they register at that moment to receive the newsletter with information about your company.
In this way, they will also generate a deeper relationship and, therefore, greater loyalty to the client.
There are many actions and strategies that you can implement in this regard.
These will help them complete the purchase and leave your establishment with the feeling of having had a positive and satisfactory shopping experience.
And even better, that the customer wants to come back. Conclusions Always keep in mind that a good shopping experience is key to improving sales in a store and customer loyalty.
These tips will certainly help you take action to achieve it.
