Adding experience to your store

It’s no secret that customers want more than just service now when visiting your store. If they just wanted the goods, they’d buy them online (which many of them do), get them delivered, and have no interaction with you.

Stores now need to offer their customers something more and to do that they need to provide them with an experience. But what kind of experience do they want? It’s not just about excellent service with a smile, or being able to offer a personal shopper experience. Your store needs to be somewhere that people want to come and see.

They want to be able to touch, feel, look and listen in your store and also it is no secret that people love taking photos, they want to document their every move, and if you can offer something in your store that’s instagrammable then you’ll have people not only flocking to see you but also talking about you on social media – win-win! But just one instgrammable feature is not enough, so what else can you do to get those customers turning up in their droves?

Offer hands-on fun

This is all part of the experience; people need to be able to come down to your store and try things out. There is no point in things just sitting on your shelf; you need to work out how you can present your products to them so that they can come and try them. With toys, it can be pretty easy because you can offer kids to come and play with them, but with other audiences, things can get a little more challenging. For clothes, you might need to invest in some VR so that people can try things on without having to get changed, and offer them a virtual dressing room.

Think outside the box; it’s about getting people to visit and getting people talking. You might have to redesign some of your stores and think of it differently. Just like a restaurant, it is now a place where you will want people to be able to chat and do things together so the acoustics may have to change which you can do at https://thatsoundsbetter.co.uk/, and also the layout will probably have to be reconsidered. 

Change the checkout experience

Remember when self-checkouts started? How exciting was that until it became increasingly annoying? Don’t just think about what you can do because of what tech now exists, think about what would get the customer excited and what you could offer them instead of queuing up in a long line to pay for their items.

Research has found that people will abandon a checkout line and leave a store without making a purchase. Ways to combat this would have more tills open, or what about using iPads and POS systems around the store? Or could you offer an in-app checkout? A Scan and Go app, perhaps? Have a look and see what others are doing and what you could do too. 

Provide “retailtainment.”

Yes, this is a word, and in the Vend HQ 2017 Retail Trends and Predictions report, it was stated that “retailtainment” is expected to pervade the industry. The fusion of retail and entertainment is the idea that retailers need to provide customers with fun, unique experiences that elevate shopping above anything it’s previously been.

So, what kind of retailtainment could you offer? It can just mean giving your customers something they don’t see every day, for example, people flocked to the NY&C store in Cerritos, California when they used real people instead of mannequins in their window displays.