The design of your store layout plays a key role in how shoppers find their way around the store. This directly influences the customer’s shopping experiences and in-store sales. If your store is congested and confusing, customers do not want to visit it often. This is the reason it is important to ensure that your customer flow is done correctly.
According to reports, research into customer flow in the U.S. reveals that 70% of shoppers only saw a maximum of 30% of products displayed in stores. Designing a store for proper customer flow requires the positioning of the products, right category flow, and store fixtures. Providing such an enticing shopping experience can significantly contribute to increasing sales and profitability. This has prompted most retailers to use planograms to deliver encouraging shopping experiences to shoppers. Planograms are visual representations of a store layout that dictate a retailer’s merchandise display plan. This helps retailers with the right product placement for increased visibility and sales.
Planogram Customer Flow Strategies to Boost Sales
- Use store fixtures strategically: When used strategically, your store fixtures can help drive customer flow in the store. How? It helps create a pathway across the store that allows customers easier shopping. The products you sell and wish to guide customers from category to category can influence the layout design you choose. Do you want to guide the shoppers on a specific path? Or would you want to let them wander around your store? Fixtures such as grid, loop, free-flow, and herringbones can be used to encourage shoppers to make purchases. Avoid placing fixtures directly in front of or next to the door that leads customers to the shop. This can give others the impression that your store is overcrowded. The height of store fixtures can also help with the traffic flow of your store. You can place custom fixtures that are below eye level using planogram software where you can lower the shelving for specific categories, so that your customers can reach items. You can also add higher and lower shelving units so customers can easily navigate through your store and find what they need.
- Logical category flow to follow: The well-designed layout of your store depends on the logical category flow of items. That is because by having the correct product categories, you ensure that your products are in the right place on your store shelves, ready for shoppers to find them. But how can you present a logical category flow to provide customers with an appealing shopping experience? For example, placing different breakfast options, such as jams and spreads, and cornflakes, can offer customers a hassle-free shopping. Since you are showing them more items, it can also encourage them to spend more time in your store. After all, who would not like to shop in a store where they could easily find everything? Imagine trying to shop in a store where your dairy products sit alongside cosmetics. Furthermore, if your store has multiple departments, let us say, you sell clothing and cosmetics. You can place cosmetics at the back of your store and your clothing section near the front. This helps customers walk past this section before reaching the cosmetics section.
- Create a hot spot for impulse purchase: In a retail store, hot spots get the heaviest foot traffic and result in increased sales. Retailers can decide on the distinct types or categories of products to be grouped together. Retailers can place hot spots in frequently traveled areas of a store where store displays are in direct line of sight of customers. This helps retailers receive special attention from customers and has excellent potential for store sales. For example, including clip strips with ketchup sachets in your bread aisle. If you have a promotion on breads, you could place them at the end where you stock milk or chocolate spread. This helps your shoppers to expose more of your merchandise to customers.
Nexgen POG is a robust and user-friendly cloud-based visual merchandising tool. It is designed for quick and efficient planogramming with minimal effort. Planograms in retail can be designed by easily dragging and dropping the products. The multi-device compatibility feature of POG allows you to obtain, share and edit planogram on any device, including your phone. It helps in designing store-specific planograms for increased product visibility and sales.
