While online shopping continues to grow, retailers still want customers through the doors of their stores. Why? Well, a whole host of reasons, including the difficult to measure and even harder to get the right – brand building. Retailers know how important image is, so how can they drive people to their brick-and-mortar channels?
Brand building not top of your priorities? Well, how about more opportunities to upsell? We thought so – boosting the top line always gets attention. Between image and income, there’s enough benefit to want to drive foot traffic in your physical stores, so let’s show you exactly how to get that done.
Demonstrate Your Value
OK, so you want more people in your shops. He’s the secret: make it appealing. That’s it. Everything you do to drive foot traffic should be around it being valuable to your customer. That sounds obvious, but keep it in mind as we dive a little deeper.
Physical stores give you the opportunity to offer services that customers cannot get anywhere else. The digital space might be super convenient for spur-of-the-moment purchases or mindlessly browsing, but for intentional actions – you can’t beat an in-person shopping experience. As a retailer, you have the opportunity to seize this fact and use every tool in the box to leverage the opportunity to upsell and build your brand.
First, make sure your staff are up to speed on the importance of their job. They are the face of your business, so train them on how to carry out any customer request, and make sure they’re confident using their knowledge to improve the customer experience, either through recommendations or just smiling and being a warm part of the store.
Next, make returns in-store free and seamless. Have a specific area toward the back of your shop where customers can process their own returns quickly and easily. You’ll pull them past all your great products on the way to bring back an item, and at that point, you can show them that they can easily exchange, then and there, for something that suits their needs better. By doing this, you can cut down on the cost of refunds and on the number of customers using parcel return services that cost you money.
You might not be able to roll out beta testing like cool new SaaS platforms, but you can hold events. You can bring customers new and old into a curated experience of your brand, your products, and your value to them. If you sell food or drink, run taster evenings, and make your physical store pay for itself.
Finally, loyalty programs are nothing new, but you can tailor them to give additional and/or unique benefits to customers who shop in-store. It’s a small motivator, but this list of actions in combination can be a powerful force to drive customers into your stores.
The Tech To Make This Happen
So you know what you need to do, how can you make these things happen? Well, to enable this sort of functionality, you’re going to need to knock down your data silos and have systems that really speak to one another. Connecting your digital channels with your physical ones means being able to take payments, process refunds, and manage stock centrally and with almost instantaneous updates being pushed to every channel all at once.
With Wolfpack, you can tap into our market-leading omnichannel retail platform (ORP) and bring together each and every channel and tie them together to work in line with your POS systems in-store along with the handhelds that sales operatives are using to pick, pack, exchange, and refund. That seamless integration is exactly the platform you need to be able to drive people into your stores.
Want to get more customers through your doors? Wolfpack can help, contact us today.