One of the most important aspects of running a retail business is creating effective displays on the sales floor. Good displays drive retail sales and boost customer interest. A good display will capture your potential customers’ attention and draw them into the merchandise. Having the right Display Racks for Retail Stores and implementing good visual merchandising techniques can make your business successful. Here are five visual merchandising tips to boost your company’s sales and performance.
1) Create a Display That Engages Your Customers’ Ears
One of the biggest amateur mistakes that business owners and managers make when creating a visual merchandise display is forgetting that customers need to be engaged by as many of their senses as possible–not just their eyes. Music is one of the most important aspects of visual merchandising, particularly for clothing and apparel. Different types of music communicate different things to your customers. Laidback easy listening music, for example, tells customers that you want them to slow down and observe your products at a leisurely pace. Playing Top 40 music sends the distinct message that you want teenagers in your store. Coordinating the color of walls, shelves and display areas with the type of music you play is a tactic that is used by brands such as Spencer’s and Hot Topic.
2) Create a Display That Entices Your Customers’ Nose
Unbeknownst to most people, there is actually an entire science behind what kind of scent makes your visual displays most effective. This science–known as scent marketing–is used by major global brands such as Samsung and Verizon. It is said that scent is the strongest sense tied to memory and emotion and is, therefore, one of the strongest factors involved with influencing customers to choose one brand over another. Successful brands like Hollister or Abercrombie & Fitch have a very distinctive smell, as do unsuccessful brands, such as Blockbuster Video.
3) Create a Display that Engages Your Customers’ Taste
This is absolutely critical if your business is a restaurant, grocery store, delicatessen or any other sort of food-related business. If you’re selling anything that gets consumed orally, providing a sample for them to taste is absolutely the most important thing you can do after giving them a good visual and a good scent. Remember when preparing food samples that people eat with their eyes first, then their nose, and then their mouth, so it’s even more important for a sample to look and smell amazing as it is for it to taste that way. Giving potential customers a sample to taste in the retail food business is the equivalent of letting them try on clothes or test drive a car.
4) Create a Display That Your Customers Can Touch
Nothing builds desire for a product with a potential customer like being able to know what it feels like in their own hands. When a customer puts something into their hands that makes them feel good, it releases dopamine in their brain and creates an emotional memory that they will naturally want to return to. Giving your customers a display that they can touch and try out is obviously important when it comes to clothing, but is perhaps of even greater importance for businesses that sell things like handguns, sporting equipment or mobile phones.
5) Create a Display That Appeals to Your Customers Eyes
There is an enormous difference between giving your customers something that they can see, and giving them something that is visually appealing to their eyes. Inmate uniforms, police line tape, and road construction barrels are all examples of things that people can see, but none of them are actually appealing or visually pleasing to look at. Study and experiment with how color and lighting affect your displays, as sometimes the key to holding a customer’s attention is literally displaying a product in just the right light.
The most important thing that you can do to make a sale in a retail environment is to attempt to engage your customers in every way that you possibly can. Follow these five visual merchandising tips today to increase your company’s sales potential.
