Shopper marketing is the practice that focuses on promoting products by addressing the customers directly while they are already in the physical store. It is extremely important as it can make a difference between a product being sold quickly or not. Shopper marketing makes a direct and instant impact influencing the behavior of customers.
Shopper marketing strategies can range from simple to very complex, but in this series of articles, we will be focusing on very practical tactics that you can easily implement in your store to increase the sales of your products. We will touch four pillars: product, placement, pricing and promotion.
In the first part of this article, we’ll look at product and placement related tactics.
But first, you need to make your store appealing to the customers. Here are some tips on how you can do that:
- Get the biggest space you can afford. Crowded stores make people uncomfortable. It’s no fun trying to shop when you’re shoulder to shoulder with dozens of other people. Everything gets hot, it’s stifling, and you can’t really see everything. So getting a bigger space means that everyone can fit. It also lets you display a larger inventory which improves the number of choices customers have, which improves their chances of buying something.
- Create a nice ambiance. Give your shop a nice smell that your customers will recognize by using a perfume diffuser. Play some music to put customers in the mood to have fun- people who are having fun are also spending money. That’s why stores will often play music inside of their stores – it puts you in a better mood and encourages you to buy things.
- Put some shopping baskets at the entrance. Getting a cart when entering the store will encourage customers to purchase more items than planned.
And now here are some easy tactics related to the product and its placement you can apply to make sure your products sell fast!
- Put your biggest money maker up front first on the shelf. They will draw the customer’s eyes because they look attractive.
- Put the essential items toward the back of the store. Do you have some basic products that people regularly come to buy? Place them at the back of the store. That way your customers will have to walk through the entire store to get to them. That exposes them to a bunch of the store’s inventory. This way there is high probability they’ll buy something else other than what they came in to buy.
- Group product by category. Try to create some attractive categories for your customers – this will help them navigate the store easier and it will also create a more organized, out together look for your shop. Why not create a “gifts” category? People are always looking for last minute gifts for their friends and relatives and this way your shop will become their first stop.
- Put the most profitable items on eye-level on shelves. If you put the more desirable and profitable items at eye level, your customers will see them easier. This increases your chances of them buying the more profitable items. Do also this at the eye level of kids so that they’ll try to talk their parents into buying those things.
- Keep products in reach by using displays and demos. Studies have shown that people who touch things are more likely to buy them than those who do not touch things. This is especially true with clothing: you put your hands on an item and feel the fabric. You may pick up something in the store to look at it. All these things help you make your decision to buy something. If your customers can touch the products, that’s higher odds that they’ll buy at least some of it.
- Place small impulse purchase items at checkout. Placing cheap products near the cash register makes them sell fast because the customer acts on impulse and they don’t really feel like they’re spending any money.
- Use secondary placements for products you want to sell fast. Secondary placements or cross merchandising means putting a product in a different category that its own, next to complementary products. This enables customers to link the related products at the time of purchase, saving their time of travelling to another area of the shop and luring them into buying additional items that they would not have done otherwise. One example of that could be placing bags of coals next to barbeques or bags next to clothing items.
Next week we’ll share the tactics related to pricing and promotion. Stay tuned for part 2 of this article!
Now you can go and make your store more appealing for your customers! We’re here to help you sell your products and make profit fast. To learn more, please contact our sales team.
