Drive Foot Traffic: How to Increase Your Store Visits
More foot traffic means better and more frequent opportunities for customer engagement and sales, ultimately leading to higher revenues for the store.
The term “foot traffic” refers to the number of people arriving at your store at any given time. It provides you various insights into your store, such as:
- How well your sales efforts are performing
- Where your key points of sale (POS) are
- How you might increase your store’s productivity
- How you might improve customer management
The importance of driving footfall traffic comes into play before you’ve even opened the store itself. A well-considered location with pre-proven foot traffic is vital to a good start for any high street business.
Finding these prime locations has been made easier with improved access to location data. Location data is information from monitoring the geographical location of devices, and it is collected using tools like video surveillance, location signals, and mobile tracking technology. One key use case for location data is to quantify the amount of foot traffic to a location, which can be used when making a decision on the location of your future store. Top location data providers can help you with finding the optimal location to establish your high street store.
After founding a store, many companies then continue to use location data collected by WiFi/beacon systems and their company app to track customer behaviour throughout their business. This data provides the company with information related to visitation and customer movement patterns, which can be used to forecast sales across different store locations.
An attractive and well-maintained storefront can do wonders for your store’s appeal. It attracts the customer’s eye and practically invites them to walk in.
Here are some tips on how to keep your storefront in top shape:
- Sweep your storefront daily and clean your windows at least once a week to keep your storefront looking clean and inviting.
- Ensure your store’s paint job and decorations, are refreshed and updated throughout the year..
- To best check how your storefront will be viewed, step outside and take a look from the customer’s perspective.
- Make sure to frequently evaluate the state of your doors, walls, and windows to better recognize the things that need to be spruced up.
- If necessary, hire professional help to perform the mundane tasks, like cleaning, or even to assist with the more demanding refurbishments like painting and decorating.
A surefire way to increase the curb appeal of your store is to have an eye-catching curbside display. One cheap and simple way to do this is putting out a display board. The board could welcome customers as they come in, catch their eye with a funny message, or even entice them into thes store by hinting at something special inside.
Other interesting displays, such as a rack showcasing some colourful products, can also be very effective. In fact, a recent trend among London pubs is to create seasonal flower displays to draw massive attention to the store. These will also provide you with excellent social media content, which can further increase awareness of your store and drive more foot traffic.
Poor customer service can ruin your brand, prevent a purchase, and even create a harmful social media backlash. It’s therefore highly worthwhile to invest in proper training for your employees. If your staff cannot provide good customer service, you will be hard-pressed to increase foot traffic to your store.
All staff members must know how to interact with customers and the basic decorum expected of a store employee. Customers expect to be welcomed and helped when in a store, and it should be your staff’s goal to provide this for them and have them leaving feeling satisfied.
Coming back to the helpfulness of location data, this data type an also help you attract customers to your store once it has been established. The key technique behind this is geofencing: tracking mobile phones as they move into and out of a defined area around a specific location.
Geofencing can be used in marketing to personally reach out to customers near your store, make better decision regarding product placement and points of purchase (POP), entice customers who’ve become distant, and lure customers away from competitors all by sending them notifications and emails based on their location in relation to specific points of interest. This will then attract more customers, increasing foot traffic to your store.
Nowadays, the majority of people spend their time researching products online, yet over 90% of transactions in the US still take place in a physical store. As a high street store, it’s therefore vital to make use of the attention to be gained via the internet as a way to drive foot traffic to your ground-based stores.
You should set up a website for your store that showcases your products and storefront. It should also allow people to browse and buy items online. You can also gently push the location of your physical store so that people know where it is. These methods will boost your brand awareness, increase online sales, and ultimately ramp up the foot traffic to your physical store.
If your store or business is not listed on websites like Google, Facebook, and Yelp, then you are missing out on a lot of potential customers.
For the best results, you must set up your listings online and make each listing as optimized and detailed as possible.
To make your listing sufficiently eye-catching and informative, be sure to include the following things:
- Always incorporate essential details such as company address, name, and phone number.
- Provide up to date business hours.
- Include positive testimonials to foster trust among customers.
- Add loads of visual content like recent photos and a virtual tour of your store.
You should also consider adding your store items to Google's Local Inventory Ads.
The most compelling benefit of this is that your products and services will be displayed on top of Google if anyone searches for similar keywords. This puts your product right in front of the customer and helps your product to stand out among the competition.
With your products and store now listed on the largest websites around the world, customers will more frequently come into contact with your brand and be encouraged to visit your store locations.
A great way to keep your brand in people’s minds is to keep your customers informed via email newsletter about any ongoing offers, in-store promotions, or events. This would also help you to send your most dedicated customers unique promotions to build a more personal relationship.
- For the best results, your newsletters must be tailored to your customer's demographic information, purchase history, and location.
- You can collect this data from audience data providers or your own data collection methods, such as your store app and website.
- As well as promoting to a general audience, always make sure that your most dedicated customers know of any store events or updates so that they feel involved.
So there’s our top 8 ways you can increase foot traffic to your store. The keys to properly implementing these tips are consistency and broadness. It is important to remain consistent in cleaning and decorating your store, as well as updating its online presence and regularly reaching out to customers.
Making broad use of all of these techniques will give you a significant presence online and offline, giving you a wider net to catch potential customers. Ultimately, increasing foot traffic means cleverly picking your location, and then standing out by appearing as often in front of customers and having your store being viewed as appealing as possible both inside and out.
