As the summer shopping season kicks into high gear, take advantage of these retail tips to attract and convert customers. These tried-and-true strategies will help you grow your sales and build a loyal customer base that keeps coming back.
One of the most important Retail Sales Tips is to know your product well. Your sales executives should also read a customer’s body language and expressions to understand how they are reacting to their pitch.
1. Make It Personal
One of the key Retail Sales Tips that sales executives must adopt is to develop strategies that allow them to create a personal connection with customers. This can be as simple as complimenting a customer or asking them about their day. By doing so, you are showing them that you care about their shopping experience and are not just focused on the sales transaction. This also helps to build trust and trustworthiness, which are important factors in influencing a customer’s buying decisions.
Cross-selling and upselling are also great retail selling skills that sales executives should practice. These involve recommending additional products that are complementary to the ones that the customer has already purchased. However, it’s important to choose the right time for these recommendations. For example, you don’t want to recommend add-on items when the shopper is still deciding whether or not they should buy the product. Moreover, you should ensure that the added product is not too expensive and it will genuinely add value to their shopping basket.
Another way to make the purchasing process more personalized is to offer curbside pickup for online purchases. This allows shoppers to skip checkout lines, which can be an especially grating experience during peak business hours, and gives them the opportunity to get their shopping done faster. Having a mobile point of sale (POS) system that handles curbside pickup orders will also enable your team to serve more customers during peak business hours without sacrificing the quality of their service.
Ultimately, the best way to increase retail sales during peak hours is to have a customer-centric approach. This means ensuring that your customers feel like you care about them, providing exceptional customer service and giving them a reason to keep coming back for more.
2. Make It Easy
A good sales executive knows that customers are looking to fulfill specific needs when they shop. Asking questions is one of the best ways to learn more about what a customer needs and how you can help them. For example, asking a customer if they have any specific events coming up that they’re celebrating soon can help you suggest products to purchase.
Retailers should always make it easy for customers to buy. This can be as simple as offering curbside pickup so shoppers don’t have to wait at the register during peak selling hours. It can also mean providing more product choices so customers have multiple options. For example, providing a wider selection of cheese types so that customers can choose the option that’s best for them.
Cross-selling — recommending add-on items to the original purchase a shopper is planning to make — and upselling — offering a pricier version of the product a shopper is considering — are important retail sales tips that can help retailers maximize revenue. Both tactics work well when the right timing is used. For instance, a good time to recommend add-ons is when a customer is finalizing the purchase or just thinking about it. And, the recommended item must genuinely add value to the original purchase.
3. Make It Fun
When it comes to retail sales, fun is key. You may be surprised by how many customers are happy to spend more than they originally intended when they’re having fun.
If you want to improve your sales, try keeping count one day of the number of people you interact with and the number of customers who buy from you. Then divide those two numbers to get your ratio of sales per visit.
You can increase your ratio by introducing new products to your store, or by offering a service like curbside pickup that makes it easier for customers to shop during peak selling hours without slowing your team down.
4. Make It Relevant
When it comes to retail sales, timing is key. Ideally, you’d like to recommend additional products when a customer is in the middle of buying something that goes with it—not after they’ve already finalized their purchase and walked away. But, that isn’t always possible, especially during peak selling hours. Whenever you can recommend additional items, make sure that they’re a good fit for the original product and add value to the shopper’s shopping basket.
Curbside pickup is a great way to help customers during rush times and offer the same superior customer service that your associates provide in store. Plus, it helps to reduce shipping costs and boost overall revenue. This is the kind of retail strategy that can work all year round. You just have to know how to maximize the results.
5. Make It Easy to Share
One of the best ways to increase retail sales during peak hours is to make it easy for customers to share your content. This could mean adding tweetables to your blog posts or videos, or using a social media management tool to help you schedule posts for optimal times. Pinterest pins with calls to action get 80 percent more shares than those that don’t, and tweets asking for retweets receive 51 percent more retweets than those that never ask.
Cross-selling is also a great way to boost retail sales during peak hours. However, it’s important to use the right timing when recommending add-on products. You don’t want to push an expensive product on shoppers who are already committed to buying a certain item. The recommendation needs to be something that would genuinely complement or add value to the original purchase.
