There are a number of vital statistics that business owners use to determine their health. For businesses operating on the high street, one of the most important metrics is the conversion rate. Here are four tips for maximising the number of visitors that you convert into paying customers.
Layout Your Store Carefully
The physical layout that you choose for your store will have a profound impact on the experience that your customers have. This should be obvious intuitively, but it is easy to underappreciate exactly what this means and how you can use the information for your own benefit. There are a variety of techniques out there for using the physical layout of a store to drive conversions. You won’t be able to implement them all simultaneously - you will have to be able to identify which techniques are going to work best for your store.
An idea that we will revisit again later in this article is the notion that shoppers’ expectations are shaped by their country and culture as much as their economic needs and wants. Shoppers in different countries have very different perceptions of what constitutes a good shopping experience. Some things are universal, but don’t be afraid to put your own localised spin on things if you think it will enhance the impact in your favour.
Camouflage Your Queue
If your store is popular then queues are an inevitability. Fortunately, you are running a store in the UK. There is a reason that our great empire was once known as “the empire on which the sun never sets” - it’s because the sun is perpetually queueing. British people are good at queueing, but it isn’t something that most of us want to do. If a queue stands in our way then so be it, as a nation we have the constitution needed to stand still and be quiet in an orderly fashion until we reach the front.
And yet, even the best queuer among us is going to think twice about shopping somewhere that already has a substantial queue. While a queue is a solid indicator of popularity, it is also a solid indicator that you have a wait in store for you. You want your queue to be visible enough that customers can see people are buying things, and where within your store they are buying things. You want it to be obvious where people join the queue and what direction it goes in.
However, you should try to minimise your queue’s footprint in your store
Choose Your Payment Infrastructure Carefully
When Apple first began opening its own Apple Stores in the UK, the experience on offer stood out from what we were used to in the UK in a number of different ways. Many US brands run their UK branches a little differently to the way they do things at home. The reason for this is simple: Americans and Brits are used to quite different shopping experiences.
For example, in Walmart stores throughout the United States, there are greeters at the door to welcome people in and receipt checkers checking people’s shopping against their receipts when they leave. Neither of these things would be expected in the UK. In fact, they would both seem so out of place that they might ultimately deter shoppers and detract from their experience.
Another easily overlooked difference between shopping in the UK and the USA is that chip and pin is a standard feature in every UK debit and credit card. In the US, swiping a card and signing the receipt is still more common. It’s another small thing, but you need to choose a card machine that is suitable for your market. For example, in the UK, your customers will expect you to have a card reader that supports chip and pin payments, like the machines from this card machine provider. UTP Group provides card machines and advanced infrastructure, thanks to their partnership with Barclays. This partnership enables them to resolve transactions much faster and more efficiently than their competitors relying on smaller institutions.
Design Your Layout For Traffic Not Sales
The volume of sales that you are making through your store will be proportional to your overall traffic volume. The more people who are coming into your store, the more chances you have to sell things to them. However, average conversion rates can vary wildly from industry to industry, sometimes even from place to place. Your store’s layout should prioritise accommodating the number of people that you expect to come through your doors, not the number you expect to buy things. Remember, just because someone doesn’t buy something today, it doesn’t mean they are a permanently lost sale. If you can provide them with a good experience, they will come back to you.
If you want your business to survive on the modern British high street, you need to play your cards right. The rules of the game have changed with the times and it’s all about your in-store design in 2020. The tips above are a great place to start but don’t be afraid to go even further.