Beat the High Street: 4 Tips to Keep Your Store Afloat

High street shops

It’s no secret; the high-street is struggling. In fact, that’s putting it mildly.

Every week we seem to hear countless stories of businesses either struggling to stay afloat or worse still, closing their doors.

If you currently operate on the high-street, there’s no doubt that it’s an incredibly difficult time. Sometimes, there is little you can do to take control of the situation as well; it can be just due to terrible market conditions.

On other occasions, there are things you can do to turn the tide though. Let’s not forget that not all businesses on the high-street are struggling, and today’s post will take a look at some quick tactics you can implement in your store to perhaps turn things around.

Take advantage of upselling whenever possible

If there is just one tip that you take out of today’s article, it’s the art of upselling.

This is something that we have become more used to in the online world over the years, but the same rules have existed on the high-street for years as well.

There are all sorts of ways you can upsell, although one of the common favorites is to group items together to create multibuy offers. If you can market these near the cashier, using Cenareo’s digital signage solutions, your average order value amount will soar. It’s here where customers are more likely to pick up the extra item if they see the small savings on offer.

Staff your store based on traffic (not just sales)

A lot of stores are used to staffing their stores based on peak sales hours. This sounds logical in some regards, but never forget the potential of traffic. There’s every chance that your figures are telling a misleading story, and the reason certain hours might not be performing is because you don’t have the required staff numbers to cope adequately.

Do anything and everything to keep customers in-store

Over the last few years we have seen some really interesting studies in relation to the length of time in which customers spend in store. These studies have concluded, put simply, that those customers who spend longer in store are more likely to spend more.

As such, the solution is simple. Keep your customers in store for as long as can be. This might be by engaging staff members with them, or hosting events in your store that can just clock up the time as well.

Have a plan for when products are not in stock

We’re going to assume that you don’t have facilities like Amazon, so there are only going to be a limited number of items that you can keep on-site. It’s for this reason that you need a plan for when a customer can’t get hold of a product they are looking at.

Some companies will get around this by offering free shipping, sometimes even to the customer’s home address! Some will go a step further and make this next-day delivery, just to make sure they convert a sale when all initially seemed lost.

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