Part 3 : How to encourage customers to explore the whole shop?
How to pique the curiosity of your customers?
24. Create a “visual magnet” to subtly steer your customers towards a certain area, namely the products you want to highlight. The idea is to use displays and lighting tricks to catch their attention, without them even realising. Once they reach the centre of your shop, customer motivation falls. This is perfectly normal, as they have already seen a large proportion of your range.
25. Be careful not to block access to the “visual magnets” with display units or partitions.
Making your shop easy to navigate?
26. Make sure your aisles are pleasant to browse and free from obstacles. In practical terms, they must be 1.20 m wide with a turning area of 1.50 m, in order to allow people with reduced mobility and parents with pushchairs to move freely... as well as anyone wearing a rucksack or weighed down with shopping bags!
27. Use your furniture to create a vanishing point. These lines of view add structure to your space and naturally steer customers towards the cold areas of your shop. They will instinctively follow these visual lines.
28. Place appropriate items at the end of these lines of vision. The classic mistake? A line of vision that guides the eye towards... the stockroom door!
29. Create virtual “corridors” using contrasting pale colours on the floor. These strong visual cues allow you to subtly guide customers through your shop, from beginning to end. The idea is to use a carefully-designed pathway to encourage them to explore your entire product range.
How to make the buying experience easier for customers?
30. Think about how to make life easy for your customers! For example, instead of arranging products by brand, try arranging them by “solution to a problem”.
Originally, this beauty and wellbeing boutique organised its stock according to brand. They forgot that not all consumers are looking for a specific brand, but they are all seeking a solution! They also prefer to compare similar products from several brands. In this layout, the customer must walk back and forth across the shop several times in order to compare two similar products from different brands... as must the sales assistants! To make matters worse, the brands found in the hot area sell better than those in the cold area.
In his new concept, the shopkeeper decided to create areas based on solutions. He has identified four and marked them clearly with signs and images. He immediately noticed that customers became more independent, that his shop was easier to manage and that his turnover increased.
How to reduce customer waiting times ?
31. Prevent areas of congestion, which waste your time and that of your customers.
Originally, the traditional layout (in which customers queued to be served), meant customers were waiting for up to 20 minutes at peak times. Staff were also wasting a considerable amount of time fetching products from different areas of the shop. The result: irritated customers and lots of sales assistants!
After the refit, a self-service area was created to the right of the entrance, in addition to counter service at the rear and on the left, and a till near the exit. Thanks to this layout, there is hardly any queue and customers move freely. The result: customers are served in 5 minutes, even on a Sunday morning, and less staff are required.
