How To Grow Your Retail Business: 11 Proven Ways (2024)

Aug. 19, 2024

How To Grow Your Retail Business: 11 Proven Ways ()

Retail business growth doesn't just mean expanding inventory or opening new locations. It involves embracing technology to help you scale and meet changing customer expectations.

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While there's no one-size-fits-all approach to retail business growth, there are tried and tested methods.

Whether you're just starting out or have been in the game for a while, taking a fresh look at your growth tactics is always a smart move. Here we'll delve into 11 proven ways to amplify your retail success.

11 ways to to grow your retail business

1. Analyzing your retail business

The first step to growing your retail business is understanding your business's current state to determine the next steps you can take to reach your goals.

You need to get a broad perspective of your business as well as have a more in-depth analysis.

Here are the main areas every retail business owner needs to focus on:

Financial analysis

Take the time to review your cash flow.

Total sales: Measure monthly, quarterly, and annual sales.
Sales by category/item: Identify high performing and underperforming items.
Sales by location (if multiple locations): Determine which outlets are most profitable.
Sales trends: Track sales growth or decline over time.

Operational analysis

Review these key metrics of your operations to unlock opportunities for improvements.

Inventory turnover: Work out the cost of goods sold and average inventory.
Inventory management: Check for stockouts, excess stock, dead stock, and inventory holding costs.
Supply chain efficiency: Assess lead times, supplier reliability, and procurement costs.
Employee performance: Evaluate sales per employee, customer reviews, and overall staff productivity.
Customer traffic: Use foot traffic counters or web traffic tools for online retailers.
Conversion rate: Out of the people who enter your store or website, how many make a purchase?

Customer analysis

Your customer metrics can offer key insights into where your business is falling short.

Customer satisfaction: Use surveys, feedback forms, or face-to-face interactions.
Customer retention: Track repeat customers and determine retention rates.
Customer acquisition: Understand where new shoppers come from and the cost to acquire them.
Customer segmentation: Identify different customer groups and tailor strategies to each segment.

Competitive analysis

New competitors enter the market all the time. Take a moment to analyze your competitors, and see how you compare.

Competitor benchmarking: Compare your metrics against key competitors.
SWOT analysis: Identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats relative to other businesses.
Mystery shopping: Send individuals to assess competitor services and products firsthand.

Strategic review

Ensure you're following your business strategy and keeping track of your goals by reviewing:

Business goals and objectives: Are you on track to meet them?
Key performance indicators: Monitor KPIs related to sales, customer satisfaction, and inventory management.

By digging into inventory turnover or studying sales trends, you uncover invaluable insights about your current retail business performance and where you can improve.

Analyzing your retail business is an ongoing process, so build it into your schedule. Make time to check in on your business's metrics on a monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis.

2. Understanding your customers

Every successful retail business has a solid understanding of its customer base. Deeply understanding your customers goes beyond recognizing their buying habits; it means digging into their needs, preferences, and behaviors.

Retail analytics help you understand the challenges your customers face and how your business can solve them.

Start by tapping into data from the following sources:

Point-of-sale system: Your retail POS provides plenty of data on sales, customers, and products to understand consumers better.
analytics: Platforms like Shopify help you understand order rates, products purchased, and CTRs.
Foot traffic analysis: Foot traffic counters like Dor let you see how many people visit your store. You can then compare this to Shopify POS data. This data will help you better understand why and when customers come to your physical store.

Use the Shopify POS to collect and manage customer data.

Retail analytics can tell you more about why customers choose to shop with you and what else they may need or want from your business.

Once you've gathered customer data, sort and segment them by grouping your customers based on similar characteristics or purchasing patterns. This allows you to tailor your retail marketing efforts and product offerings more accurately.

Start by categorizing your customers by:

Age
Gender
Location
Interests
Life stage (single, married, retired, etc.)
Shopping frequency
Average order size

Customer segmentation helps you create more personalized experiences and a better overall customer experience.

Segmenting customers allows you to:

Upsell and cross-sell products of interest
Create targeted marketing campaigns that resonate with customers
Choose the best type of communication for specific customers
Create personalized loyalty programs to boost customer retention
Find ways to improve products or customer service

Tapping into customer data helps you better understand what potential customers and existing shoppers want and need from your business. From there, you can use that information to make strategic changes to improve the customer experience and better target your most valuable customers.

3. Effective inventory management

A retail store's success is often tied to how well it manages its inventory. Effective inventory management is essential to retail growth, serving as the bridge between supply and demand.

When managed properly, inventory ensures product availability and reduces overhead costs associated with excess stock or emergency replenishments caused by a stockout. Well-managed inventory can help you save on storage costs and improve fulfillment, while also contributing to your business's cash flow.

To improve your inventory management, adopt best practices such as:

Regular stock audits (including physical inventory, spot checking, and cycle counting)
Leveraging inventory management systems for real-time tracking
Maintaining a balanced safety stock and understanding par levels
Understanding seasonal trends in your market
Forecasting demand accurately
Keeping an organized stockroom
Maintaining relationships with suppliers

Adopting these best practices can make the difference between a missed opportunity and a sale. In the retail world, where profit margins and customer satisfaction hang in the balance, a solid inventory management system is not just a best practice'it's a necessity. Improving your inventory management could be the key to growing your business.

4. Improving in-store experience

The physical space of a store remains a cornerstone of retail success. A thoughtfully designed store layout does more than just showcase products; it shapes the customer's journey, dictating the ease of browsing, the flow of foot traffic, and the likelihood of impulse purchases.

For example, research shows shoppers usually look left first and then right when they enter a store. Customers also like to move right and walk counterclockwise around the store space.

It helps to start observing how customers currently interact with your store layout. You can monitor the customer flow, keeping an eye on how many customers come into the store, where they stop, how they behave and how much they buy.

This can help you identify areas of the store that get the most attention and sales, and those that are avoided.

As you think about adjusting your retail store layout, consider how you can optimize these in-store elements to increase customer flow and sales:

Store layout
Lighting
Signage
Window displays
Product placement

Great store design appeals to you customers in a variety of ways. It:

Has an engaging window display
Avoids key products at the entrance where shoppers will miss them
Incorporates breaks or stopping points
Displays the right amount of product and leaves enough space to browse
Uses cross merchandising
Regularly updated displays

If you want to drive engagement with your brand, try creating memorable shopping experiences with experiential retail.

Some 35% of customers shop in-store because they enjoy the experience, so tap into the desire for better physical shopping with these engagement ideas:

Host masterclasses
Create seasonal pop-up shops
Hold community events
Host interactive workshops
Showcase relevant exhibitions

Alongside this, retail management and excellent customer service play a pivotal role in growing your retail business.

Knowledgeable staff who can assist, advise, and answer questions make shopping more enjoyable. Friendly team members have the power to turn potential returns into exchanges and hesitant customers into confident buyers. Invest in training your staff so they are confident and knowledgeable about your brand, products, and policies.

By optimizing store layout and investing in stellar product and service offerings, retailers can elevate the in-store experience, ensuring customers leave not just with products but with positive memories.

5. Expanding retail locations

It's not just about having multiple retail store locations but ensuring each one resonates with its target market. Before diving into expansion, you need to assess whether there's a genuine need for more new stores.

This involves understanding:

Market saturation: Has your product or service reached a maximum level of consumption? Or is there still room for growth in the existing market?
Regional demand: Is there enough demand in the geographical location for your product or service?
The logistical implications of branching out: Can your business reasonably scale without hindering other areas of growth?

Successful retail expansion relies on thorough research, understanding local demographics, and adapting to market changes. You need to consider the different types of retail location and what will suit your business. Types of locations include:

Brick-and-mortar retail
Mall space
Shopping centers
Business parks
Downtown
Home-based

A strategy to consider when opening a new store is choosing a location that can also be used for fulfillment. Consider a location with more storage so it can additionally be used for in-store pickup of online orders, local delivery, and in-person returns. Likewise, you can consider a smaller location to use primarily as a showroom where customers can experience your products, then place orders online.

Another approach to reducing risk is to test demand with pop-up shops. These temporary shops can gauge customer interest and sales potential without the commitment of a full-fledged store.

For example, direct-to-consumer beauty brand Glossier tests out new retail stores with seasonal pop-up shops. In , its London Covent Garden pop-up shop was so successful (100,000 customers came through the doors over two and half months), the brand decided to open a permanent store there.

Glossier's London pop-up shop was such a success it turned it into a permanent store. Glossier

Previously, Glossier opened seasonal pop-ups in cities like New York and Los Angeles before opening permanent year-round stores.

6. Leveraging ecommerce for retail business

What began as a convenient in-store shopping alternative has morphed into a primary shopping channel for many consumers worldwide.

For brick-and-mortar retailers, it presents a golden opportunity. In , US online sales hit more than $1 trillion, while the only other country to reach the trillion mark that year was China. Retailers who don't tap into this demand for online shopping risk losing money to their competitors.

Successfully integrating ecommerce into a traditional retail business requires a blend of strategy and adaptability.

This means:

Optimizing mobile platforms for online shopping
Ensuring consistent branding across all touchpoints
Creating a seamless user experience that mirrors in-store shopping

Using tools like integrated inventory systems can help manage stock across both online and physical storefronts. By embracing ecommerce, retailers aren't merely staying in the game'they're reaching customers in new markets and tapping into the vast potential of the digital marketplace.

7. Adding a new product or product line

Adding new products or product lines gives customers more choices. Think about how you can better meet different customer needs and preferences with multiple options. Sometimes it isn't about developing a brand new product from scratch but reworking a current offering to meet shoppers' needs and provide more value.

For example, bath brand Happy Hippo Bath Co. lets shoppers choose between purchasing one unit of its product or a five-pack for less. Customers can also choose to subscribe for even greater savings.

Happy Hippo Bath Co. makes it simple for shoppers to choose the right pack size.

This might mean adding a new variation to your existing product line. Instead of selling just red shirts, you might start offering blue shirts in the same style, or expand your sizing options.

For example, sock brand Bombas sells the same style of ankle socks in multiple colors.

Bombas is known for offering customers plenty of size and color choice.

You can also create a new product that fits within a popular existing line. For example, wellness brand Olly creates lines of related supplements that complement one another and support customers' health.

Shoppers can easily purchase similar wellness supplements on Olly.

Some other product ideas include:

Create a new product line to complement an existing one: Start offering quirky pens to go with the quirky notebook you sell.

Create a new product in the same vertical: Start selling casual shoes in addition to formal shoes.

Expand to a new vertical: Start renting out your store space to related groups or businesses as an event venue in the evenings when the shop is closed.

8. Marketing strategies for retail business growth

Social media marketing is an indispensable asset for retail businesses. Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest showcase products and craft a business brand's story, build community, and drive instant purchases through shoppable posts.

For example, the homeware brand Jungalow promotes its products through shoppable Instagram posts:

marketing remains an effective strategy for retailers. Through marketing, you can offer:

Personalized promotions
Loyalty rewards
New product announcements
Brand updates that foster deeper customer relationships

For example, insole brand Fulton shares a discount via for first-time shoppers who sign up:

Really Good Emails

By using the combined power of social and marketing, retailers can craft cohesive strategies across sales channels that drive traffic, boost sales, and elevate their brand in the competitive market.

9. Loyalty programs and customer retention

In the ever competitive world of retail, it's not just about acquiring new customers but ensuring they keep coming back. Loyalty programs help encourage customers to become loyal fans.

Loyalty programs reward repeat business, fostering a cycle where customers feel valued and are incentivized to continue purchasing.

For example, menswear brand Mizzen+Main has a loyalty program that gives shoppers one point, or company coin as they're known, for every $1 they spend with the brand.

To get customers excited about the potential rewards, the brand highlights what customers can get in exchange for company coins. It offers a variety of features to appeal to different customers, including birthday gifts, free shipping, and early access to sales and products.

Shopper can quickly see what they need to climb the corporate ladder.

Redeeming points or coins means customers must visit your store for another purchase, which increases the chances they'll spend again. It also builds customer loyalty, as it incentivises them to choose your business over a competitor, as they'll earn more reward points.

Loyalty programs can help you grow your business when used as a customer acquisition tool. Offer points for referrals, and encourage loyal customers to act as brand advocates by encouraging them to show off their perks.

An effective loyalty program is only one facet of customer retention.

Strategies like personalized offers, consistent engagement through feedback loops, and quality post-purchase support play equally crucial roles.

By intertwining the allure of loyalty rewards with genuine, customer-focused strategies, retailers can create a magnetic pull that not only attracts customers but keeps them engaged and invested in the brand's journey.

10. Using data analytics in retail

Retail data analytics provide a clear snapshot of consumer behaviors, purchasing patterns, and market trends. But collecting data is just the beginning.

It's key to use this data to make informed decisions. By dissecting analytics, retailers can pinpoint what resonates with their audience, tailor marketing campaigns for maximum impact, and forecast future trends.

Whether it's adjusting pricing strategies, refining product assortments, or enhancing the customer journey, data-driven insights offer a roadmap for growth.

Here are a few places to start with using retail data analytics:

Online retail analysis

Website analytics: Monitor metrics like bounce rate, conversion rate, and user flow to optimize the online shopping experience.
Cart abandonment analysis: Identify reasons customers might be leaving without completing a purchase.
Customer review analysis: Use sentiment analysis tools to get insights from customer reviews and feedback.

Marketing and advertising

Campaign effectiveness: Measure the ROI of marketing campaigns by tracking metrics such as conversion rates, click-through rates, and customer acquisition costs.
Customer retention analysis: Understand which strategies keep customers coming back.
Social media analytics: Analyze engagement, reach, and sentiment on social platforms to refine your social media strategy.

Operational efficiency

Sales performance: Analyze daily, weekly, or monthly sales data to identify trends.
Employee performance: Track employee sales performance to identify training needs or staffing adjustments.

Predictive analytics

Churn prediction: Identify customers who might be at risk of not returning and find ways to re-engage them.
Sales predictions: Use past data to forecast future sales, helping with planning and stocking.

11. Leveraging automation in retail

When you decide to pursue a growth activity, you need to consider how to optimize new product development and production to reduce variable costs while increasing output.

Simple automation is anything that allows you to lower the cost of making decisions. Scaling allows you to increase capacity within a given process while either maintaining or reducing the variable costs of that process.

With competitive price and timely delivery, THE MIDI. sincerely hope to be your supplier and partner.

Additional reading:
How to Choose the Best Retail Franchise for Your Dreams?

For example, you might scale your sales by hiring additional floor staff for your store.

As long as those new employees sell at the same rate at the same base salary, your relative costs will remain stable.

You might start ordering your materials in bulk at a wholesale cost. As long as your other production costs don't increase, your overall cost per unit would be lower because of the discounted rate.

This prevents loss of profit margins, operating at a loss, or increasing waste alongside the increases in revenue and output that come with growth.

Grow your retail business sustainably

Growing a retail business sustainably is not an overnight job. You'll need a long-term strategy of embracing tech and adapting to evolving consumer behaviors.

Start by thoroughly analyzing your business's current state and customer expectations. Then, using the strategies in this article, you'll be on the path to achieving long-term retail business growth.

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO RETAIL MERCHANDISING

Visual Merchandising Displays

Nothing moves a product like a compelling, unique visual merchandising display, whether it comes from splashes of color, haute designs for luxurious tastes or ingenious attention-getters.

In this section of the guide, we'll explore visual merchandising displays and strategy and their place in the arc of product sales, including a special focus on:

Product placement marketing;
Next-Gen planograms;
Designing and managing retail product displays;
Exciting new retail display ideas;
The tools and processes that work;
Optimal shelving strategies; and
Boosting sales with retail signage.

These topics are designed to benefit the entire range of players that operate with one goal:

Fill that shopping cart!

So if you're designing your latest product, planning out your store's latest new retail execution strategy or plotting your next grand scheme to ignite the world with legendary (yet efficient) merchandising ' we've got something to offer you, right here, right now.

We'll also sprinkle in a dash of psychological strategy, add a dollop of layout and store design, and create a sturdy base of practical tips, tools and insights along the way.

Get Started with a Quick Read: The Good, Bad and Ugly in Retail Product Displays

Product Placement Marketing

Brands, merchandisers and retailers put massive time, thought, energy and negotiation to ensure everyone benefits from their symbiotic ' sometimes contentious ' relationship with one another.

Meanwhile, customers are bombarded with options that can pull their attention from the delightful experience of seeing, feeling, touching the product in real life ' a proven (and enjoyable) process that leads to a better bottom line for all involved.

Don't let the competition distract your market. Keep customers interacting with products, entering stores and filling baskets by getting your product placement fundamentals right.

Necessities: Whether a store focuses on specific categories of products or they run a one-stop shop for every need, carefully placed necessity items will draw shoppers to the areas where your highest-profit impulse items will jump into their baskets.

For instance, game stores can attract shoppers with essentials like controller batteries, cables and cleaning kits that emphasize an uninterrupted entertaining experience. Home improvement stores can keep a stock of high-replacement items like disposable gloves and masks. Home décor stores can stock well-placed consumables like air-freshener replacements, clean-up gear and Swiffer pads ' people still love that handy little broom' Or is it a mop? Is it a duster? We don't know what a Swiffer is ' but it's awesome.

Whatever you choose, the science behind layout mandates that you make these magnets visible from flow points and doorways, so that customers commit to a journey through your money-making impulse items as they meet their everyday needs.

Tip: Window signage product marketing that advertises discounts for these oft-replaced items will help get them in the door.

Impulse Buys: Visual product placement marketing allows some flexibility for impulse items, but it usually boils down to what kind of placement is possible ' more than one company will be vying for certain spaces.

Since you're forced to rank your options, the counter and checkout zones are top priority, always. End caps along necessity zones or a spot along the main thoroughfare make a great second.

Sale Items: You can't go wrong with sale items that deliver high-volume profit. But which product placement will market them the most successfully? Forced pathway layouts will give an advantage if you take care to position displays that 'bump' customers along their journey. Eye-catching visuals for your products will be more important than physically impeding their progress.

Execution Is Key: All of this planning won't mean much if your product placement marketing strategy never comes to life. Digital product marketing tools can help bring order to the chaos of product merchandising execution. How? Through visual confirmation on execution, easily managed merchandiser scheduling, and more. Read more about bringing order to the chaos of product marketing in our free guide.

Entryway Tip: One might think that the entrance area is a great spot for a fun grab, but experience tells us that the first 30 seconds or 10 steps through the door, upon entering, are more of an orientation and acclimatization zone: a great tip here is to ensure this area is inviting and has signage that encourages exploration or directs to a necessity.

The Advantages of Next-Gen Planograms

Have you ever wondered what it's like to build an engine from a schematic?

Better question: how do you think you'd fare building that beautiful back yard shed with only a blueprint to guide you?

In both of these scenarios, you're left holding the bag ' literally ' and have no guideposts to help you. With outdated strategies to instruct your merchandisers, these examples might just trigger annoying memories for field reps who used old-school planograms.

Worse still, these clunky old planograms jeopardize planogram compliance, turning execution into an all-or-nothing situation in the field.

Here's a few ways next-gen product merchandising planograms turn that antiquated process on its head. How?

Next-gen planograms isolate steps in execution and make them easy-to-follow, helping improve compliance, speed execution and break down the process into digestible chunks for hard-working field reps.

More Advantages for Retail Merchandising and Product Companies

The process starts with step-by-step, checkpoint-enabled instructions.
Employees or merchandisers then snap a photo to verify their work.
Photos are auto-tagged with time, date, location and more metadata to prevent gaming and falsification
Real-time verification and display status data is quickly searchable to keep a health check on all progress, deadlines, and inventory status.
The Natural Insight platform integrates this performance data with other data like attendance, check-in/check-out times, task completion, employee strength data and tagging, and more.
It's awesome. This is literally the science-fiction reality of product and retail merchandising.

Tip: Check out our blog post for more ideas on how to beat out competing retail displays.

Designing and Managing a Retail Product Display

What's the best way to design and manage a retail product display? Planning ahead and ensuring execution is flawless. Here we'll be exploring some principles of retail store display designs and the strategies that make them competitive and effective.

The Purpose of Eye-Opening Retail Product Displays

Retailers and the product companies all win when great displays work. When they don't work, however, the pain is felt on all sides. The first step to avoiding this fate and delivering a cash-box-brimming success is ensuring any display, be it storefront, free-standing or wall-mounted, is built with these three principles.

Entice: Turn heads and move feet (toward the store or the product).
Sell: Sell the product and/or increase sales on a steadily purchased product.
Leverage Space: Make the greatest use of space possible.

Design to Entice

Visual Research Advantage: Research by the University of Sydney noted that unexpected motion, changes in direction, visual jitter and changes in brightness all have a reliable effect on capturing attention. Here's a quick list of display features that make use of neurological attention:

Use reflective surfaces to create motion around the product.
Organize color and brightness in gradient fashion to trigger luminance awareness.
Try hologrammatic surfaces to trigger visual jitter cues.
For subtle color schemes, try layers with holes using a background with high brightness or intense darkness behind it. Also, a continuous pattern behind hole-punched surfaces will provide multiple visual effects that create motion and changes in direction.

Displays that Sell

Emotion and necessity are two of the driving factors behind sales in any display. We've covered a great deal on the aspects that turn heads from these angles, but what about a competition-based approach?

There's a way to make that happen. Start by gathering competitor information on displays and upkeep schedules to keep your own setups moving and get a solid idea of the replenishment regimes that work for each local area or store. Natural Insight empowers your field staff to do just that. Field reps can easily collect, report and monitor information that can help you make your own competition-informed strategic display choices. The platform helps you monitor:

Competitor pricing, pricing placements
Competitor hot sellers and items which never move
Display arrangements, designs and locations
Display takedowns and new build timing

Managing Displays and Maximizing Display Space

Retail display designs operate on some very straightforward principles. Generally, you'll want to always ensure customers can approach displays from every angle. That means that special attention needs to be paid to the proximity of nearby displays, walls and architecture ' customers can't buy what they can't reach (let alone see).

Also, make sure that displays don't obstruct walkways to and from the main thoroughfares. It can be tempting to use a huge display along these routes, but customers are focused on their needs, not a single product. If you cut off the route to something they need along the flow pathways, they will not only be unable to touch, hold and inspect the product (critical to sales in many cases), they won't even come close enough to see the display, no matter how awesome it might be.

You can ensure that this doesn't happen with any size display by having field reps take photos or submit reports on the general floor layout. Also, with the right tool, they can easily ensure displays are up to date, well stocked and looking perfect with the right field quality control tools.

Retail Display Ideas

Retail displays constantly need fresh ideas and new twists. Below, you'll find some research-based insights for displays that pop.

Entryways and Storefronts ' The Moody Debate

There is such a thing as too dark, even for luxury brands! A sultry, spooky or somber mood can fit a multitude of different products and store types. That being said, huge indoor shopping centers and outdoor storefronts will usually be flooded with light. Dark retail displays and entryways will absorb this light and necessary illumination for important parts of a display.

Take a look at this compressed footage of a journey through the Mall at Millenia in Orlando, Florida. In the first minute, this YouTuber passes multiple storefronts which are poorly lit, uninviting and ' in places ' struggle to properly illuminate their brand names, store names and interior.

Shoppers can't buy what they can't see!

An example of the right way to 'do dark' lives at 1:55 in the video. This is the Abercrombie storefront. It captures their white-on-black brand with heavy, dark windows ' but passers-by can clearly see their trending merchandise without struggling to see inside the store. You can see another imitable example of an on-brand dark storefront with Gucci, at 3:25 ' it's right after Michael Kors. Instead of white in the background, they use red as their highlighting layer. Red seems darker emotionally, but actually carries long distances due to its long wavelength and low dispersion ' a little red goes a long way, in other words.

Tip: Don't let your products go unnoticed. Have field teams conduct field quality control checks of storefronts or submit feedback forms that assess areas of improvement like lighting, setup compliance, and more.

Open or Closed Storefront Design

Walled-off or line-of-sight interrupting storefronts have both drawbacks and advantages. Boxing in the window display area can make for some very impactful, eye-catching displays. However, if you take this tactic, you'd better showcase your hot sellers.

With many stores having limited doorway views of the interior of the store, there's a risk of losing the magnetizing power that comes from open, browsable and experiential internal design. Balance your storefront display by knowing when and where you want to showcase a shopping experience versus driving sales of a particular product.

Find more ideas for your displays in the Natural Insight blog, or take a deep dive into the upkeep and execution strategy that keeps it all together in our free resource library.

Optimizing Retail Shelving

Ideal retail shelving optimization means high product velocity off the shelf. There's a little more to it than a tidy arrangement, however. Here you'll learn a few strategies that have made waves stores around the world.

Advanced: The Billboard Effect

Use shelf positioning to create the billboard effect.

What is the billboard effect? Simply put, it's using the packaging across several individual units to create a larger, on-brand visual message ' a billboard. But why try this approach?

For brand-loyal shoppers, it will help find the products they came to the store to buy. The billboard effect helps to identify product category and brand simultaneously, attracting customers directly to that aisle, shelf or display.

Think of the billboard effect as great marketing. You wouldn't use off-brand colors to promote your storefront ' and on the shelf in retail spaces, your only storefront is the shelf.

Coca-Cola, for instance, has no shortage of product innovation and new flavor launches. However, they found that their shelf space was lacking in brand recognition ' Coke Lime with its green packaging, Coke Zero, all black ' but the signature circular red logo commanded little of the visual real estate when stacked in a group.

How to Billboard:

Don't stress about your packaging design ' this can be achieved with great retail shelving execution. You could start by framing new products with on-brand, on-color product. Also, one of our researchers has seen soda and snack displays where new products were used within stacked items to spell the brand name. Try a twist on that by creating a display pattern that recreates the logo.

Controversial: The Starter Gap

Starter gaps are exactly what they sound like ' a gap in the merchandise that gets people started in picking your display clean.

This is a bolder move, too, so grab the safety bar as we click, click, click! up the rollercoaster of ideas.

Is knocking a hole in your display maybe the ultimate sin in display execution? The perfectionist in us says yes. Our inner accountant, however, knows a starter gap can kickstart product sales velocity.

Why does it work?

Well, people come in many shapes and sizes. Some are 'wait and see' shoppers, which means an untouched shelf could reflect a flawed or overpriced product. Other shoppers may see a flawless display, walk up to it, and reach for the messy shelf next to it, because' Who wants to make a mess?

Don't mistake our meaning ' displays must always be at their best. A little psychology, however, can kick off that fresh display's path to a restock.

Reliable: Data Collection and Analytics

Experimentation, innovation, brand-adherence and aesthetics all play critical roles in your shelf optimization. However, none of these insights could exist without solid, data-based refinement based on research.

Try in-store shelving optimization through data capture that includes images, qualitative information and customized surveys that capture real-time data about your retail locations.

With this strategy, you can continue to play with your field execution tactics to discover which arrangement, height, displays, packaging, pricing and sales work for your merchandise.

Boosting Sales with Retail Signage

Shoppers are pressed for time, and most would consider themselves equally pressed for cash.

If you fail to give them a compelling reason to come inside, they're going to follow their plan and emotional motivations past your doorway and on to their next stop.

That's why, when it comes to your exterior retail signage, it pays to know your market and connect with shoppers on an emotional level.

We've already pointed out (above) that one of the top pulls into any store is a financial motivation and necessity ' that's right: give them a sale. Why is that, though? Well, for most, they are thinking in terms of their financial motivations while shopping.

There are always more motivations to tap into, however. Here's a quick list of strong motivations to get your retail signage attracting more customers than ever:

Rest and Relief: Shoppers get tired and sick of chores, so offer them something that promises free time in the future. For instance, a huge pack of batteries on sale means less trips to market at inconvenient times.

Act on Caring: Birthdays, holidays, anniversaries ' these events fill people with an urge to express their caring for others. Offer them a way to make that tangible! Or play with the dark side and remind them that it's been a while since they spoiled the ones they love. In any case, signs which remind shoppers of the role of seasonal and annual gifts in any relationship will work to draw them in and around your store.

Make an Impression: Today's shoppers love being seen as much as they love shopping. Entice them with retail signs that show the impression they'll make with your latest product. Images should use wish fulfillment with items featured prominently ' try vacations, social events or life milestones to make a big impact and get them moving.

Accessorize the Trip: Signs suggesting a useful cross sell or offering a sale on an accessory to a more profitable item work. Think about your biggest draws and how you can enhance their purchase.

Regardless of whether you're enticing customers through the door or magnetizing your high-profit merchandise, flawless retail execution mean getting it done right ' and on time. The Natural Insight platform gives you immediate visibility and accountability in your retail execution. Try out one of our most popular check-up forms, today.

Are you interested in learning more about retail store product management? Contact us today to secure an expert consultation!

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