From the moment your customers walk past the threshold into your store, you should be dictating their experience via directive stanchions and signage in order to take advantage of your captive audience. After all, you got them to enter your store, so now you need to make sure they get not only what they need, but what they want too. If you’re lucky and have some visual merchandising know-how, you’ll convince them to buy items they didn’t even realize they needed or wanted.
Visual Merchandising Tips
1. Create an experience; make customers want your products.
Design the store’s layout and customer path in a way that’s easy to follow and that properly markets your wares. A properly placed sign stand and wayfinding stanchions will go far in keeping customers at ease where they are and where they need to go. Make sure to create signage that’s easy to read and that boldly highlights features of the store section or product.
2. Prioritize your messages.
A well-placed sign stand can be really effective, but not if you’re overdoing it altogether. Instead of bombarding customers with signage, use it tastefully to lead them to the purchase. Overdoing marketing displays can have a negative effect; instead of buying, customers are inundated and will most likely choose to shop somewhere else. If they don’t leave for greener pastures, they’ll likely miss other items they were interested in before they entered the store.
3. Design for variation.
Utilize flat panel queue displays; they’re quickly and easily updated for changing seasons, new items, sales and events. Modular merchandising panels by checkout also allow you to sell both in and outside of the line by marketing to customers on both sides, doubling your selling space. For more information on flat panel queue displays, call us at 888.404.7892.
Employ these merchandising tips with signage on stanchions at your main entrance, dressing areas, product experience displays, register lines and any highly trafficked area of your store.
The Checkout Line
One of the most vital areas of your store is, of course, checkout. Sure, customers may come in and have a look around, but will they stick it through to complete the purchase? Properly designed checkout lines are proven to reduce walk-aways by up to 90% (stat from Bill Vetter, GM of Lawrence Metals). Don’t leave your customers annoyed by long lines and slow checkout times. Make sure to use great care and appropriate line management stanchions for painless transaction completion.
Furthermore, don’t stop selling. Just because your customer is no longer milling around the store doesn’t mean you can’t convince him to grab a few more things. Stanchion merchandising tools (and flat panel queue displays, mentioned above) are field-proven to dramatically increase impulse buys. Customers in line are positively bored until they reach the register. Take advantage of where they’re standing and sell via merchandising bowls, product racks and displays.
It’s your customer. From the entranceway he passes through to the line he stands in at checkout, do it right. Be helpfully directive, own the experience you create and don’t stop selling.
For information on any line management, crowd control or signage products you don’t see on our website, please call us at 888.404.7892 and we can get them for you from our selection of top rated vendors.