If you have been trying to attract more customers and drive sales, you must have planned a retail strategy. Remember that your marketing strategy is at the center of all activities you practice starting from website design and offline integration to traffic building and conversion analysis.
As such, trying to generate sales without marketing is not possible especially in today’s fast-paced and competitive world. Effective marketing strategies will not only attract more potential customers but will also help to generate referrals by word of mouth.
So, here is a list of top 7 retail strategies you can adopt to boost sales.
- Design an attractive storefront
For retail businesses, the first and foremost interface with your customers is the store itself. If your visitors spend productive time on your website even if they are not planning to buy, it is enough to make them want to visit again. Moreover, this positive experience will also be communicated through word of mouth and you will start getting organic visitors in no time.
You also have to take into account considerations like website loading speed, easy navigation options, informative and useful blog posts, attractive and descriptive images, and mobile optimization when creating an impressive storefront.
- Motivate your employees to work harder
When your employees are motivated, you get a huge return on investment. You can offer them various incentives and compensation packages as well as discount and voucher codes if they want to buy your products.
Remember, you need employees who will stay with you for a long time. It’s not easy to train new employees after every three months or so. It’s not only time consuming but also very expensive to hire new people. So, the best way to boost your sales is to retain your existing employees and make sure they are committed and devoted to your business.
- Engage your customers
If your storefront and your products are the two main pillars of your business, your customers make up the third pillar. Without them, your business is sooner or later found to fail. So, make sure you value your customers and show them that you really care.
You can make use of CRM tools for this purpose and also try to outsource your call center services so that your customers are always taken care of.
Make the whole buying process a memorable experience for them by offering support throughout. Thank them when they have made a purchase and remain in touch with them even after the order has been delivered.
- Have an impressive social media presence
If you don’t already have a social media presence, you better start planning one. Without connecting to your customers on various social media, the other retail strategies will not have a profound impact.
Leverage your social media capabilities by hiring the right people for the job. It is also a great idea to set aside a good share of your marketing budget for social media advertising. This is an excellent way to find potential customers and then retain them through other strategies.
- Invest in remarketing
Remarketing, or retargeting, is a relatively new concept in the world of digital marketing but it has been found to be very effective and impactful. By using this strategy, you can target users who visited your website or added items to the cart but didn’t checkout.
If you want these people to come back and take a specific action, you can run ads that are visible to only these people. These are your potential customers and if you keep showing them ads and the products they showed interest in, they will most likely purchase them in the future.
While running ads on social media, you are given the option of choosing an audience. During this step, you can choose people who follow you on social media or people who have visited your website to retarget them.
- Plan sale events and offer discounts
One of the most successful retail strategies that always works is to offer discount deals and other sale offers to attract customers. This can be achieved through social media and by running ads especially when there is end of season or a special occasion coming up.
You can also offer permanently reduced prices looking at what your competitors are offering. If your prices are competitive and you have a huge inventory, your visitors will likely buy from you instead of going anywhere else.
- Conduct market analysis
This is probably the first step you will conduct when planning a marketing strategy but it is something that has to be done repeatedly. Analyzing the market not only involves finding the right keywords to target and tweaking your pricing to go ahead of your competitors, but it also encompasses looking at your performance and your sales/clicks stats to see which areas need improvement and what pages or products should be promoted more.
Conclusion
In order to determine the most suitable retail strategy for your business, you have to try and test different marketing tactics and leverage them to the best of your skills. The retail strategies we discussed in this post are all proven methods to generate more sales and make sure your customers visit again.