Maximize the sale of your products and services by optimizing your store environment to attract more customers. Creating the proper traffic flow with the ability to draw customers deep into your store will expose them to the most merchandise.
Customers entering from outside after parking their cars are walking at a more brisk pace than after they enter the store. Follow these sales techniques to better organize your store’s flow:
- Signage in the display windows should be legible from a distance with the additional consideration of the more rapid pace as the customer walks toward the store.
- Make sure you have a perpendicular sign to catch the eye of potential customers walking parallel to your store and entry door.
- Signage on the door should be limited to two or three word phrases (e.g., bigger portions) which can be followed by sequential more in-depth signage once deeper in the store.
- The first steps into a store are a transition or decompression zone for shoppers as they enter and adjust to the lighting, smells, sounds, sights and temperature.
- It’s best not to market in this area as you will not have the consumers’ full attention.
- Provide an adequately sized area if you have shoppers with strollers. This area may also be used by customers to remove outer coats or fold an umbrella due to exterior weather.
- Try to keep this area as small as possible so as not to reduce your merchandising space.
- Some things that help reduce the decompression zone are special lighting at the entry point or on the doorway.
- Sale items tend to be better placed at the back left side of the store to require the customer to walk through the store to experience new arrivals and higher margin items prior to getting to the sale rack.
- Make the back wall interesting to draw your customers to the deepest reaches of the store. This can be done with interesting graphics or a video which produces sight and sound so the customer perceives something interesting and wants to see what’s going on. Grocery stores have traditionally placed the dairy case at the back because it’s one of the highest volume purchases and it requires the customer to walk through the store and see other merchandise.
Once through the decompression zone customers tend to move to the right:
Look at your store in a fresh new way as if it was the first time you approached from the outside and see how the above sales techniques can be used and what can be improved to attract more customers in the door and then draw them deep into your store and your sales will increase.
By Tom Fraser
Source: Underhill, Paco. Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping. New York, NY [u.a.: Simon & Schuster, 2009. Print.
