Fighting The Barriers

The retail landscape is fast evolving and with every industry change comes the opportunity for innovation and strategy. New technologies and processes have required retailers to be more agile and creative to differentiate themselves from their competitors, and it’s no easy task. To help you out, we’ve listed some of the greatest barriers retailers are facing and the efforts needed to overcome them.

Mastering Promotions

Today, a major hurdle retailers face is driving more storefront sales. With so many products available for purchase online, how exactly do you entice people to get to the store and buy? This is where the art of promotions comes in to play. When done correctly, promotions can build customer loyalty and drive heavy foot traffic to your storefront. Many retailers have had success in leveraging loyalty and rewards programs to entice already existing customers back to the store. This continues to be more efficient than efforts to acquire new customers as these programs strengthen the overall perceived value of your brand and drive customer retention.

Point-of-sale displays are also heavily utilized in the retail space. These displays draw attention to your products and attract the impulse buyer. When strategically placed, point-of-sale displays are a way for retailers to elicit curiosity amongst consumers and influence the details of a purchase.

Your promotional strategy should be objective to your business goals. Determining your goals, along with an understanding of your target customer demographic, will help you create promotions that incentivize the right actions. Promotional activity is a necessary expense with a huge return, driving market share and profitability.

Frictionless Checkout

The rise in e-commerce shopping has redefined consumers expectations of the ideal in-store experience. Today, consumers demand the same level of convenience and speed that online platforms provide. A tactic retailers are using to try to adhere to such expectations is through the use of frictionless checkout. Let’s face it, no one enjoys waiting in line to pay for something. This process aims to reduce customer access points during checkout in order to eliminate barriers that may make it more time consuming or complicated. In this Digital Age in which we live, retailers should be adapting new payment technologies, such as mobile checkout, to accommodate new and emerging payment methods.  Offering customers their payment method of choice reduces checkout wait times and adds to the overall customer experience.

Not Taking Enough Risks

Overcoming the reluctancy to take risks is a huge barrier in the retail landscape. Many businesses find themselves sticking to the status quo with old processes that have always worked for them. Retailers do themselves a major disservice by failing to make strides in innovation as it ends up being more costly than not. Failing to integrate retail solutions that leverage on new customer expectations is a greatly missed opportunity that will keep your business stagnant. You can’t reap rewards if you never take the risk.