(Newswire.net — May 16, 2018) — Over the years, customers have grown accustomed to getting personalized attention from the companies they choose to do business with. Unfortunately, many retailers aren’t pulling their weight in this department, which leads to less brand loyalty and lower sales figures. If you want your business to remain competitive in today’s marketplace, you need to focus on enhancing in-store engagement.
4 Tips for Boosting In-Store Customer Engagement
For better or worse, today’s customers are narcissistic. They’ve been shaped by a world where experiences are tailored to personal preferences and interactions are customized according to individualized needs. As a result, there isn’t much room for businesses that prefer a hands-off approach.
When it comes to brick and mortar retail, businesses must place an emphasis on in-store engagement. It’s the only way to truly satisfy customer needs and develop a strong connection between the brand and shopper. But where do you start?
Every retailer has its own unique style and needs, but the following tips will help you formulate an in-store engagement strategy that works for your brand.
1. Prepare Your Employees
There are a multitude of elements that must come together in order to create a compelling in-store experience for your customers, but none of them matter if you don’t leverage the power of the human touch. Your employees need to be trained and empowered to engage shoppers – otherwise, everything else falls apart.
The key is to set your employees up for success. This starts with supplying prominent name badges that clearly identify them as being representatives of the brand. You also need to invest in strategic training that coaches employees on the sales floor to be engaging without overstepping and disrupting the shopping experience.
2. Be Strategic With Store Layout
Store layout is obviously an important part of successful customer engagement, but few retailers actually take the time to create purposeful paths for customers to traverse.
“Shoppers usually walk through a store following the natural path in a counter clockwise fashion,” explains RICS, a cloud-based retail POS software system. “If you don’t form a natural and purposeful path for shoppers, they’ll create their own and could end up missing a lot of the inventory you’re trying to showcase. Create a path with tables and racks to steer shoppers where you want them to go.”
It’s also important to give your customers some room to breathe. Stacking too much inventory into a small space can make shoppers feel stressed and overwhelmed. Establish aisles, breaks in racks, and spaces for sitting.
3. Use Signage to Direct Focus
It’s easy to view something as simple as signage as an afterthought, but successful in-store engagement is made from the details. Not only does good physical signage help from a branding perspective, but it also helps direct the flow of traffic within the store itself. Signs help customers feel like they’re part of the experience, rather than just aimlessly wandering through the store.
4. Launch a Loyalty Program
Loyalty programs serve a number of purposes, but they actually help improve the in-store shopping experience for customers that choose to participate.
“Retailers have several opportunities to use different loyalty programs as part of their customer engagement strategy,” entrepreneur Sara Sugar believes. “Outside of physical loyalty punch cards, there are several apps and technologies that enable a more seamless customer loyalty program.”
Try a loyalty program and see how it works for you. If it doesn’t seem to have a positive impact, ditch it. Holding on to a failing customer loyalty program can actually be quite detrimental.
Focus On Your Shoppers
“The aim of customer engagement is to develop a mutually beneficial, ongoing relationship between a customer and a brand; it’s not a one-way street,” entrepreneur Phil Cave notes. “You can build a community of followers through their loyalty to your excellent customer experience – and then empowering those same people to respond to your detractors and those people looking for conformation that your company can do what it says before they hand over their wallet.”
When it’s all said and done, the objective of an in-store engagement strategy is to create customers that are so satisfied and loyal, they actually begin to advocate for your brand. Once you reach this point, the sky is the limit.