12 Visual Retail Selling Tips to Boost In-Store Sales

Sian Victoria © - Birmingham Bullring

Visual Merchandising Guide: How to Increase Sales in Retail

If you have ever walked into a boutique merely to seek shelter from the rain and emerged forty minutes later with three shopping bags of products you never knew you wanted, you have been beautifully manipulated by visual merchandising.

It is neither a magical feat nor a fluke. It is a quiet yet powerful language that traditional shops utilise to communicate with our minds.

For any small business owner managing a brick-and-mortar store, this knowledge represents the key to unlocking their greatest competitive advantage. Once you learn how to properly merchandise your shop floor, you will have nothing to do but sit back and watch people make purchases.

Regardless of whether you own a cosy clothing boutique, a busy gift shop, or an elegant homeware showroom. This guide will give you all the guidance you need to begin with twelve simple yet incredibly effective techniques that can help you make your shop layout more appealing to customers and increase your sales dramatically.

1. Perfect the Decompression Zone

The first thing that all customers do upon entering your store is acclimate themselves to your surroundings. In the retail world, this space is known as the decompression zone. It is the first three to ten feet that you walk into after passing through the entrance.

In this stage, customers are acclimating themselves to your surroundings and figuring out where to look. If you fill up this area with large banners or racks of clothes, you are going to instantly overwhelm your clients.

Leave this area completely clear for your clients to enter, so that they have the ability to look around and become comfortable with what they see. They will then be ready to start looking around.

2. Leverage the Power Wall

The moment people exit the decompression zone, it's a natural tendency to gaze to their right and walk in that direction. And for this reason, the wall at your entrance on the right-hand side is the most important piece of property you will own. It’s referred to as your power wall.

Since it is the point of initial eye contact, you need to make it count. It is the place to make your biggest impact with your best stories of the season or of premium new arrivals or high-margin heroes.

Be certain that the lighting is spectacular, the presentation impeccable, and your branding is clearly identified.

3. Master the Rule of Three

When you are displaying your merchandise on tables, shelves, and windows, make sure you use odd numbers, preferably three. Our brains are very interesting organs. They crave balance and order, but when they get an asymmetry, they stop for just a second to analyse the visual stimulus.

When you have two of the same objects displayed next to each other, it creates staticity. Three objects of different height create a more dynamic experience. One option you can try for your set of three would be to place the tallest object in the middle and put the other two on each side to form a pyramid.

4. Remember that Eye Level is Buy Level

It is one of the oldest principles of retailing, yet it is amazingly valid. Products that have been located within the natural gaze line of your customers get the lion's share of all their attention and consequently sales.

While planning the placement of the shelves in your store, put the bestseller, the new release, and your best high-margin products on eye level.

The uppermost shelf should be used for those products that create dramatic impact and can be seen from far away, while lower shelves are reserved for large bulky, inexpensive or very demanded products that customers would look for and reach for.

Sian Victoria © - Shops at Great Western Arcade, Birmingham

5. Curate Visual Stories Instead of Just Shelving Products

Customers in modern times like these are never interested in purchasing individual products but they wish to purchase lifestyles and solutions and identity.

This is why cross-merchandising becomes so amazingly effective. In place of organising your store simply by product types, create themed and bundled collections with the right narrative.

For instance, when you are selling kitchenware, avoid placing mugs and teapots separately on shelves. Rather, create an amazing weekend brunch display on a table where you can keep all your teapots, mugs, tea packs and even the cookbook together. In this way, the customer will get an idea of how they complement each other. It will also increase the value of the basket in their mind.

6. Adopt the Contrast of Colour Blocking

Colour is one of the quickest and most effective ways of impacting customers’ feelings and directing their eyes right to where you want them to look.

If your shelves are a confusing array of randomly arranged products in a rainbow of colours, the human mind will register that as visual noise and turn it off. To counteract this effect, you must use colour-blocking techniques. You should arrange products based on colour to create blocks of visual cohesion.

Warm colours such as orange and red may be used to create a stimulating effect for promotional displays, while blue and green may be used to create a calming effect and a luxury impression for high-end products.

7. Light the Way to Premium Value

You could have the most amazing assortment of goods, but without great lighting, they will appear as if they are inexpensive. Good lighting is the best way to get people’s attention and create a comfortable environment of luxury.

Use spotlights with warm light to draw people’s attention to the displays with new items and highlight the goods themselves. When creating a little contrast between eye-catching product displays and dimmer lighting in the aisles, you will help customers find their way around your store. Studies have shown that people perceive the displayed products as much more luxurious when there is enough light on them.

8. Invite Touch and Interaction

The absolute greatest strength that real-world stores have over online retailers is the tangibility factor. As soon as the client touches, lifts, or even feels the texture of the product, their mind is starting to develop a feeling of owning it psychologically. This makes it so much easier to sell the product to the customer because they have engaged with it.

Make your store display inviting to interact with by removing all the products from the boxes, placing testers, and making everything available for touching. If you deal with homeware, leave a throw blanket haphazardly thrown on the chair so that people can touch it. If you sell cosmetics, make testers clean and easily reachable. Let people test the product.

Sian Victoria © - Shopfronts at Custard Factory, Digbeth, Birmingham

9. Consider the Art of Signage

The Signage must always function as a friendly tour guide rather than a pushy sales representative. Your store can’t expect to have a good shopping experience when the whole store is cluttered with too many flashy discount signs. Your signage must be clean, clear, and consistent with the branding of the store.

The Signage must not merely show price and standard sales language but communicate the benefits and tell stories. Handwritten signage saying "Our absolute favourite for comfortable Sunday mornings" will beat any regular signage saying "New Arrival".

10. Maximise the Impulse Zone near Checkout

The queue in front of your checkout register is your gold mine when it comes to retail sales. Since the consumer already decided to purchase at this point in time, they are highly open to additional sales. You can make use of the space near your checkout counter to put reasonably priced, portable, or very functional products.

This could be the perfect place to display additional gorgeous lip balms, sweets from your home town, funny key chains, or handy travel gear. Make sure that these items are presented beautifully, neatly, and in an easily accessible way. These small sales may not look like much individually, but when added together, they bring you huge profit over time.

11. Keep the Store Fresh with Regular Rotations

It may be among the quickest methods of losing the attention of your local community if your visual merchandising becomes boring. If an ordinary shopper passes by your shop window for three consecutive weeks and observes that the same mannequin dress or table set-up remains unchanged, they may think that you have nothing new to offer.

Of course, you don’t have to redesign your whole shop every week, but you must be ready to provide micro-updates regularly. So, update your main window displays on average every two to three weeks, and change the products in your internal display tables every ten days.

Shifting one product from the back corner to a display table may help boost sales and make the product look new to your clients.

12. Prioritise Pristine Housekeeping

Now this piece of advice might be very simple, but at the same time, this is the backbone that keeps everything in shape. Regardless of how genius your store layout is, just one speck of dust on your shelf, dirty mirror, and untidy display table would immediately destroy the confidence of your potential client.

When maintaining high standards of cleanliness, you send a clear message to your customers that you are concerned about the quality of your merchandise and value their shopping experience. Every day, make sure to inspect your display case for any dust, straighten up products that were displaced by your visitors, and make sure all your tags are either put away or in perfect order.

To conclude

Visual merchandising is not about attempting to fool your customers into buying something they don’t want. Instead, it is all about creating an aesthetic, intuitive, and thoroughly pleasurable experience for your customers while exploring your products.

When ensuring smooth movement within the store, constantly refreshing your displays, and using the power of storytelling in showcasing your products, you will naturally create the environment that customers would like to explore.

Leave the store premises, reenter it from the customer’s perspective, and see how your store looks from a fresh angle. Start with one or two suggestions mentioned above and see how your conversion rates increase.