Category: Shopping mall

Suggestive selling is one of retail’s greatest strategies. Shoppers are already through the doors, they found something they like or need, and suggestive selling gives you the opportunity to boost sales, increase ticket size, and encourage the shopper to walk away smiling with even more of your great products and services.

Are You Managing Labor Effectively?

Before you can implement a successful suggestive selling strategy, it’s important to have your store properly staffed. Nothing frustrates customers quite as much as wasting their valuable time waiting for assistance.

One way to ensure you have your store properly staffed, is to schedule employees according to the amount of foot traffic you’ve projected your store will receive. Installing people counters, sometimes called customer counters, is the best way to gather the data you need to make your customer foot traffic forecasts. Arming yourself with a solid understanding of when your business is its busiest and its slowest will help you adequately schedule staff and ensure customers are given the best service possible. When your customers feel appreciated and valued, they’ll be in a positive mood, setting the stage for suggestive selling.

Be Genuine When Offering to Help Customers

Let’s be honest — shoppers can spot a phony upsell a mile away. They know when your sales staff is just trying to earn a commission versus really trying to understand and serve customers. Instead of spouting off the same canned upselling and cross-selling lines, train your staff to listen to customers and determine exactly what they’re looking for and to customize suggestive selling approaches to individual shoppers. Your customers will appreciate your staff taking the time to truly serve them instead of just “phoning it in.”

Make Relevant Suggestions

One mistake retailers can make with suggestive selling is to push products or services that are of no interest to the intended consumer. Imagine the awkwardness of a sales associate recommending a buy-one-get-one deal on bath towels when the customer is only interested in new fashion arrivals. Relevant suggestive selling recommendations are more likely to be well received and to result in upsell. Store staff should pay attention to the kinds of items the shopper is already purchasing. For example, if she has a trendy new blouse in hand, she might want to know about a scarf or necklace that complements the top and completes the look. Or the customer buying the latest tablet PC likely will be receptive to hearing about useful peripherals and accessories, such as a printer, wireless keyboard or stand, which will help him get the most out of his cool new device. When suggestions are relevant, you open your customers’ minds to new possibilities while keeping the focus on helping them to have everything they need to be satisfied with their purchase. Customers get better, more comprehensive products and experiences — while you get bigger sales.

Are you getting the most out of your suggestive selling techniques? When your staff cross-sells and upsells efficiently, expect your sales to rise — and your customers to return for more great shopping experiences.

Giving your shoppers a high-quality and highly enjoyable shopping experience is the key to ensuring that they visit your business again. Shopper counting and understanding how foot traffic moves and flows through your store can help you drastically improve your customers’ experience.

1. Display Promotions

Using people counters in separate sections of your store allows you to count how many people visit each area per day and, on a larger scale, per week, per month, and per year. This data can very easily help you to identify peak times of the year, month, week, and day for each section of your store.

With this information in mind, you will be able to determine which areas of your store are ideal for displaying promotional items. When you know which entrances and sections of your store receive the most foot traffic, you can strategically place your promotional displays where you know the highest number of people will see them.

2. Create Timed Promotions for Peak Visitor Times

You will also be able to identify which times of the year, month, week, and day your promotions would be the most successful. With your shopper counting data in mind, plan out your promotions ahead of time. If you get more traffic during the holidays, prepare a promotion for that time of the year. If you get a lunch rush, have daily lunch promotions. If you get more people in your establishment on the weekends, plan weekend promotions.

Depending on your business and customers, peak times are going to vary due to each business’s unique needs.  Placing people counters within your establishment will help you determine what your business’s unique peak times are.

3. Increase Staffing During Peak Times

Short staffing is a pain for everyone involved. A customer who has had difficulty finding help on your sales floor is going to be an unhappy customer. When you’re short staffing during peak times, this is going to be a big issue. One or two people can’t be everywhere at once.

It’s easy to predict these peak times and schedule more efficiently when you understand shopper counting. With people counters installed, you will be able to determine the peak times during the week and day during which may need to schedule a few more staff members. Preparing for peak times like this will assist you in reducing the number of unhappy customers that walk out your door and increase the number of satisfied customers that will bring you their return business.

4. Measure Conversion Rates to Determine Promotion Effectiveness

Without data provided by shopper counting, it is difficult to accurately measure conversion rates in order to determine the effectiveness of your promotions. However, with the data that people counters provide your business, you can compare the number of people who entered your store to the number of sales you made within the time frame of your promotion. In doing so, you will be able to easily and accurately identify how successful your promotion was.

Improving your customers’ experience is vital to the success of your business. Shopper counting enables you to do so through identifying trends and peak traffic times.

Are you a business owner looking to expand? Selecting a location can be a tedious, painful, and stressful experience. Choosing the right location for your business can be a nightmare.  However, many business owners overlook the benefit that people counting systems can bring when choosing a location.

What are people counting systems?

People counting systems are systems that allow you to view how many people enter and exit your store. There are also counters available that, when placed in separate areas of your establishment, can tell you which areas of your store are the busiest and which receive the lease amount of foot traffic. That’s not all, though. People counters can reveal your daily, weekly, and seasonal trends, as well as which of your promotions are the most successful. They can even help you to determine if the layout of your store is as effective as it could be.

How can people counting systems help you choose a location?

Chances are, when searching for a new location, you’re going to want to find one that has a high number of people moving through it all the time. High foot traffic means a higher chance for increasing your customer base and is definitely something you should consider when looking at a new location.

Some realtors and landlords are willing to share the traffic count of the location that you are interested in. However, you may also find that others are not so straightforward in presenting you with traffic flow data.  They may tell you that traffic counting systems are expensive and they cannot afford to place one at, or near, the entrance of the location due to the prohibitive cost. However, there are less expensive traffic counting options available on the market.

What happens when a realtor or landlord refuses to share the location’s traffic count?

When a realtor or landlord refuses to share the location’s traffic count with you, you should view it as a red flag. A landlord or realtor withholding information usually means that they have something to hide. If there is something to hide, then chances are you should know about it before purchasing a location or signing a lease.

In the event that you do not have traffic count information readily available, you can take matters into your own hands.  For example, some retailers seeking traffic count information for a new location have hired teenagers to enter malls and count the number of shoppers. Usually these teens spend three or four days at an establishment counting shoppers.  The teenagers look not only at the number of people passing, but also analyze how many of them are carrying shopping bags from neighboring stores. This additional information can reveal what prospective sales in that location would be like.

Traffic counting systems can help the business owner determine a new location. Traffic flow information is vital to predicting what sort of foot traffic you will have through your store. The higher the foot traffic, the better your prospective sales. Taking the time to find out what the traffic flow through a location is like before purchase is well worth the effort and the time.

Customer service is one of the top factors people consider when they decide whether or not to visit your store. The RightNow Customer Experience Impact Report notes that “89% of consumers have stopped doing business with a company after experiencing poor customer service.” A second statistic, from Parature, says that “it takes 12 positive customer experiences to make up for one negative experience.”

Tough competition

There’s more competition than ever before and the stakes have never been higher—it’s predicted that by 2016, Americans will spend over $325 billion online.  Online-only retailers are growing their market share leaps and bounds because they  don’t have the overhead of operating a B&M location and can offer rock-bottom prices on products delivered right to your door. This can be hard to resist, so stores are fighting back with improved loyalty plans, digital signage and omni-channel marketing.

The customer is still always right

Despite all of these technological advances, the customer is still king and it’s the face-to-face interaction in-store that will largely determine whether or a not a shopper returns. And as shoppers look to buy more and more products online, retailers are investing more resources to ensure that every customer service interaction is a good one.

Much of customer service begins with staffing and understanding the busiest times. You don’t want to be the retailer where the checkout lines are always long and people are frustrated because there’s no one on the floor to help them.

At its most basic level, retail traffic counters can tell retailers how many people are visiting the store and how long they are staying. Retailers may also employ these counters around the store to determine what the busiest departments are, and if more staff is needed at changing rooms.

Using a retail traffic counter helps to optimize a retailer’s staffing so there are enough employees on-hand during the busiest shifts and ensures you are not wasting money by having too many people on the floor during slower times.

Lost in Aisle 5

Another common complaint you may hear is that “I can never find anything!” If you have a retail traffic counter and you use it in conjunction with your point of sale system, you can identify what the hot selling items are and place those displays front and center so people aren’t wandering around aimlessly searching for a certain product.

Retail traffic counters can also determine what areas people are visiting  around the store and assist with the planning and resetting of displays. By evaluating the way people traverse your store, you can see which pathways are the most frequented, which areas are underutilized and where there may be issues like crowding.

Retail traffic counters help keep eyes on nearly every aspect of your retail store. Gathering these analytics can help you make the changes for a better, faster and more pleasant customer experience at your business.