Did you know that there are over 1 million retail establishments in the United States? If you have a retail business and want to keep your customers coming back time and time again, you are in the right place. We have put together this short guide sharing how to create a winning retail experience.

Keep reading to learn how you can improve your retail customer experience ASAP.

1. Engage

Customers like to feel acknowledged when they walk into a store. Training your employees to immediately say hello to customers in a polite and sincere manner is crucial. Study your customers, this will make it easier to train your staff on how to greet and interact.

Colourful, eye-catching digital signage for retail is one of the most cost-effective ways to engage with your customers. Displaying new products, sale lines, and loyalty schemes can give customers all of the information they need in a beautiful display.

When you know how to engage with your clientele they will leave with a positive experience and will want to come back to your store. Customers will usually feel like they had a great experience simply from being listened to.

2. Add an Online Experience

Because of how much access people have to the internet it is important to extend your brick-and-mortar store into the digital world. Focus on making the digital experience an extension of your physical location or locations.

When you can blend the in-store and digital experience it will give your brand a cohesive feel that will make the customers feel more comfortable and familiar. With technology advancing, you can also take advantage of new opportunities to create a more immersive digital experience in a physical location.

For example, you can use virtual reality, facial recognition, or augmented reality to give clients an even more unique and memorable experience. For more out-of-the-box ideas you can check out Decibel.com.

3. Community

Take advantage of the fact that physical spaces can bring people together in ways that a website or a mobile app is simply not able to do. Using this to your advantage will increase your store’s traffic tenfold.

Think about how you can use your store to build communities. Maybe you can hold events or hold classes that bring people together. For example, you can offer yoga classes on certain days of the week if your retail store sells yoga gear. Or, if your retail store sells art supplies then you can offer different art classes or workshops and even hold an art event once a month.

Creating these types of communities will bring people together and usually they will continue attending future classes, events, or workshops and they will bring along friends.

4. Bundling

If you sell products or services you can bundle the two to create an even better experience for those that visit your store. For example, if you sell hair products you can offer services to style, wash, or cut hair. A great example of stores that do this already are Ulta and Sephora.

For those with a store that offers furniture, you can add a home installation service as well. This will help improve the customer’s experience because they will not have to worry about going somewhere else. The chances of coming back to your location are higher when they know you are a one-stop-shop for their needs.

5. Entertainment Fusion

You can get really creative and fuse retail and entertainment together to enhance the shopping experience for your visitors. This will help grab your customer’s attention and make them curious as to what you will have going on next time they visit.

You can bring in professionals related to your products and have them sign autographs in-store, or hire a DJ to play for a few hours on a weekend night and turn the store into an inviting lounge atmosphere, etc.

An example, of a creative retailer, is New York & Co when they used real people in their window displays instead of mannequins. This unique idea gave everyone an experience of something that is not normally seen every day.

6. Efficiency

You want to make a customer feel like the time they spent at your store was an efficient experience. Make sure that there are always employees available to check out your customers to shorten the waiting times when they are ready to leave. One of the most frustrating experiences for a customer is having a long wait at the checkout line.

Consider adding self-checkout options to ensure that if people feel comfortable enough to check out on their own they do not have to wait for an employee to check them out (especially if there is a long line). You can also add maps to navigate your store so that customers can quickly find what they are looking for instead of walking through every single aisle.

Offering hassle-free returns is another way to make someone’s time more efficient. They do not have to make a final decision on a product while they are at the store. A customer is more likely to make a purchase when they have the option to change their mind without repercussion within a certain time frame.

Ready to Level Up Your Retail Experience?

We hope that now that you have our top tips on how to create a better retail experience for your customers, you can start applying everything you learned right away. Applying the tips above will keep customers coming back and will also help with getting new traffic to your store because current happy customers will always tell their friends about you.

Did this blog post help you out today? Please keep browsing the rest of our business section to read some more tips and tricks.