From a much-needed errand to a day out, the shopping street has become the place to experience a brand experience and experience products that you might not even know you needed beforehand. As a retailer, you can respond to this perfectly by providing the customer with inspiring content the moment they find themselves in your store. You can give customers new ideas or move them in a certain direction. Or provide on-demand information about the latest trends. That way you can add just that little extra to your shopping experience. In this blog, I will give you five tips to inspire your customers in your store.
1. Cross-selling by actively showing suggestions.
Many online clothing stores have been using it for a long time: displaying matching accessories or items of clothing in a customer search result. The original search was a jacket. Through algorithms and settings in the software used for the web store, the customer is shown a matching handbag or trousers with his search. Of course, you can also do this in the physical store as a sales employee, but some customers deem this to be too forced. Moreover, unsolicited or non-expert advice is still seen as a major annoyance for consumers. Fortunately, there are numerous solutions that can provide this without the intervention of an employee. Let’s look at a smart mirror, for example. Smart mirrors are innovative solutions that extend store visits. Above all, you surprise the customer. Smart motion sensors and RFID technology can be used for multiple purposes. When picking up a piece of clothing, the mirror automatically shows product information, information about the available stock, or a matching article. That contributes enormously to cross-selling in your store. Also, perfectly suitable for an advertisement or atmospheric images, which appear when there is no customer in front of the mirror.
2. Compare products: omnichannel in-store experience.
A major advantage of online shopping is being able to easily compare products. Most online stores have convenient filter options that allow you to refine your search. The possibilities in the physical store are limited because no physical store can offer an almost endless range. Not counting the giant department stores. But even if you enter such a department store as a customer, navigating to your desired product is still difficult. An endless aisle solution or an information kiosk in the store can be of great value in guiding the customer in the right direction. The solution, often in the form of a digital kiosk, offers the advantages of online and offline in a combined solution. If a product is no longer available in the store, the customer can easily place an online order via the endless aisle application. The solution can also act as a decision aid, for example, by comparing different options and also mentioning reviews from other customers. That way, online and offline are completely intertwined.
A more visual and interactive solution is the Lift & Learn solution. This may concern a visually attractive display on which, for example, three versions of a product are displayed. Whether or not in the form of a miniature, each is equipped with an RFID chip. Maybe you sell barbecues in a garden center and want to show off in a striking way which variants you have at home. As soon as a customer picks up one of the miniature barbecues and places it on a tray near a display, information about that model appears on the display. If the customer also grabs a barbecue, information about that model also appears and the most important differences between the two models are also immediately made clear. In this way, the customer can see at a glance the price difference, the difference in weight, the heating source, and the material with which the barbecues are made.
