Visual merchandising draws on concepts of consumer psychology and works to enhance your customers’ enjoyment. Making layout and product placement more visually pleasing could encourage consumers to buy more, return frequently, and spread the word about what you offer.
Despite many potential benefits, there are many retailers who do not appreciate the importance of visual merchandising and that a properly executed visual merchandising requires time, effort, and investment.
Consumer Psychology
If you understand the customer journey, you would realize that it takes several impressions to get consumers to buy the product. This involves an audience member coming in contact with a brand in various ways.
Visual merchandising in retail stores allows the customers to interact with your brand another moment before the purchase. Bringing their attention to your product’s benefits, values and unique proposition can encourage them to buy, and you can do so by applying the visual merchandising strategies to get attention.
How do you start?
1) Know your customers
Every store has its own unique demographic of customers with different needs. Even the same store chain in different areas will have different types of customers. It is important to know what sells well and how are people engaging the product displays.
Visual merchandising can enhance sales of even the most popular items, and creating gifts with purchase, bundles and other offers, can increase convenience of the customers and “upsell” to them and make them buy more. Food and grocery shops, for example, can use the same ideas to place groups of ingredients on stands around their store – with recipe cards bringing all the featured foods together into an easy and delicious dinner plan.
2) Attractive Visual Displays
To get attention of customers, getting great visuals is very important. The aim is to make things more convenient and easy for customers to make purchases, thus increasing sales.
Well-executed promotions can be used as a starting point to drive traffic to the store. Having a promotion on the best selling items can bring in customers who will buy complementary products.
3) Customer Experience
Customer Experience is very important. Even for physical retail stores. The whole shopping experience is very important. Displays, offers, and layout of the store is just part of the experience.
It is also equally important to focus on the ease of payment. Today, we have many digital and cashless solutions, and it can be a deal-breaker if your retail store only accepts cash. It is essential that even make physical changes to make the payment area more inviting. These days, state-of-the-art contactless enabled card machines are no longer prohibitively expensive, and you can easily provide customers with a comfortable and secure way of making payments.
Another way to enhance customer experience is to build an effective eCommerce site. Consumers looking for the best site to spend their money with are even more inclined to choose a business that has made a clear and conscious effort to create an attractive online space.
The whole payment process must also be easy, especially for repeat customers. For hybrid businesses that have both physical premises and a website, an online payment solution could keep your shop up and running 24/7.
Conclusion
Visual Merchandising is an essential activity. Visual Merchandising can enhance the customer experience and it is an integrated effort along with ease of payment / checkout.
Today, more consumers are also expecting an online presence and an ecommerce site. This allows sales to continue 24/7 and for consumer who need the products immediately, they can find out if the business carries the product, and visit the physical store to make the purchase.