
With a lot of determination and planning, it’s possible to boost profits even in times of crisis. With that in mind, we’ve put together 8 retail sales strategies you can start applying today!
According to IBGE, retail sales in 2016 saw their steepest drop in 15 years. In such a challenging landscape, it’s essential to come up with creative, innovative solutions to improve results, and, of course, to keep an eye on the competition. Check out the tips below and give your business an upgrade!
1. Get to know your audience
Knowing your audience is essential to any strategy. Once you know who your customers are, you can create more effective marketing campaigns, make better inventory decisions, and train your staff properly.
Generally speaking, planning for the entire store becomes more focused and effective when managers identify their customer profile. That’s why finding the answers to a few basic questions is key to building successful initiatives. Here are some examples:
- What is your customer looking for when they walk into the store?
- Does your audience usually shop online? How often?
- Do they care more about price or product quality?
2. Set goals
No strategy will be effective without a well-defined goal. For that reason, determine the growth rate your company aims to achieve, assess your team’s productive capacity, and lay out what needs to be done to reach the expected results.
To do that, however, you need to understand the challenges your finance and sales teams face. After all, there’s no point in telling your salespeople they need to sell X per day if they’re already overloaded. Likewise, you won’t be able to invest in solid expansion marketing if you don’t have the financial resources.
It’s important, therefore, to set goals that match the reality of your business. In the first example, instead of setting a daily sales target for employees, hiring new staff may be a more effective solution.
3. Build customer loyalty
You probably already know that winning a new customer is extremely time-consuming and expensive for a company. That’s why retaining existing ones is a highly effective retail sales strategy.
This is because your current customers have already been convinced to buy from you. All you need is for them to stick around. To make that happen, you need to invest in good after-sales service so they leave fully satisfied with the experience. On top of that, there are countless ways to build customer loyalty, such as hosting exclusive in-store events.
It’s up to you to develop the best initiatives based on your customer profile. Remember that a loyal customer can promote your brand organically, through traditional (and still effective) word-of-mouth marketing.
5. Invest in great customer service
A study by Accenture found that, in 2015, Brazilian retailers lost around 217 billion dollars due to poor customer service. In other words, 86% of consumers switched to a competitor because they were dissatisfied with the service they received at a given store.
Given this scenario, it’s impossible to ignore the importance of investing in strong customer relationships. Train your team to be proactive, polite, and well-informed. It’s also very important that salespeople know how to serve customers in a personalized, empathetic way, understanding what each one really needs.
Adopting a best practices manual is a strategy that has proven quite effective. Ideally, you should create one for your own store, establishing how the sales team should act when serving a customer with special needs, wrapping up a phone call, handling a complaint, and other situations.
6. Come up with creative ideas
Creative thinking is also essential for anyone looking to stand out from the competition in retail. With that in mind, consider what you can offer customers to add value to the type of product your store sells.
A women’s clothing store, for example, could offer a customization workshop for its customers. A store that sells video games, on the other hand, could create a gaming area with tournaments and prizes. The idea is for customers to stop by even if they aren’t going to buy anything at that moment.
So study your competitors, see what they already offer, and try to find a differentiator. And when you do, don’t forget to take your audience into account, OK?
7. Harness the power of social media
These days, almost everyone has a social media profile, right? That means you need to use these tools to promote your brand online.
To do that, you need to find out which platforms your audience is on: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, etc. From there, it’s important to build a posting plan, with dates and times for publishing each piece of content.
The type of post will depend on your audience profile and the social network you’re using. Still, generally speaking, users want to see promotions, cool news, and interesting articles. In short, content that truly adds something.
If your store sells cosmetics, for example, a good option is to create short posts with skin care and hair care tips, hairstyle ideas, and so on.
8. Bet on digital experiences
The world is constantly changing, and retail is no exception. Today, many points of sale are using interactive tools — such as apps, chatbots, digital tables, etc. — to attract, engage, and retain customers.
Have you ever thought about creating an interactive counter to showcase a new smartphone launch, for example, where customers can activate the screen of the very device on sale? It sounds hard, but it isn’t! Solutions like this are becoming more and more common in consumers’ lives. To avoid falling behind, staying up to date and constantly innovating is a must.
There are even tools that can help with store management. With them, you can serve customers automatically and process orders quickly. There are also options that let you get to know customers as they interact.
As you can see, there’s no shortage of ideas you can apply in your store. Pick the ones that best fit your business and happy selling!
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