What are the six 6 components of the retail mix that are ultimately the pieces of the retailers strategies?

Any retail business that does not generate sales is bound to fail. However, generating sales without marketing is virtually impossible. Marketing is concerned with how prospective customers and current customers, as well as the market or segment your retail business belongs to, perceive and talk about your business.

Using the right marketing strategies can be very advantageous to your retail business, driving awareness of your brand and producing a certain trust for the goods offered in your online and brick-and-mortar stores. Effective marketing strategies also deliver a steady stream of new customers, generate referrals attracted by word of mouth from satisfied customers and, of course, improve the allocation of scarce marketing resources.

There are a lot of specific aspects of your retail business that must be addressed with the right marketing tactics to boost sales, and below you will find eight marketing strategies to consider adopting.

1 - Create impressive storefronts

The growth of e-commerce stores has forced brick-and-mortar stores to increase their experiential appeal. Customers have multiple options when it comes to buying products, and for a retailer to stand out, it must offer a great experience. And although many businesses are fond of overlooking this important aspect of their retail marketing, the only way to attract passersby to your online or physical stores is to optimize the design of your storefronts.

For brick-and-mortar stores, you have to design your storefront for better visibility with custom designs and adopt a minimalist approach to the storefront design that subtly attracts customers instead of screaming at them.

Even for e-commerce storefronts, including your social media platforms and websites, considerations like website loading speed, website navigation, blog posts and other valuable content, mobile optimized user interfaces and SEO visibility can serve as a pull or push mechanism to bring in customers or chase them away.

2 - Motivate your employees with better wages and compensation packages

Your employees are your retail business' brand ambassadors, and you need to give them incentives in order to get the best results. When you compensate your employees properly, you can create an exceptional impression on your customers with memorable experiences.

If you're able to hire and maintain customer-oriented, long-term and committed employees, you're likely to increase your customer retention rate, reduce employee turnover and increase profitability. Also, if you motivate your sales team with compensation packages, they are incentivized to work harder to increase sales.

You can also encourage sharing of new marketing and customer relations management activations with your staff because they might just have a better contextual understanding of your customers and potential customers because of their one-on-one dealings with them.

3 - Provide adequate employee training

Substantive employee training can make the difference between you and your competitors. The experts from EssayOnTime recommend arranging regular training sessions and conferences to retain employees and keep up with industry trends. If you neglect to train your employees, your company will be left behind in your niche.

A retail business that neglects the training of employees will eventually struggle to stay in business. A good practice that will ensure you have great employees with good customer relationship management, retail selling and upselling skills is to train them as soon as they're hired and conduct recurring training annually or every six months to reorient them based on new consumer trends.

4 - Understand the market

To increase sales, you need to do market research to get in-depth retail market data relating to sales performance, store portfolios, and competitor analysis, as well as keeping track of rapidly changing retail and consumer trends.

5 - Engage your customers

Give your customers a reason to love you. This does not involve ineffective, non-subtle marketing techniques like situating a greeter at the storefront to greet incoming customers with scripted lines like, "Hi, how are you doing?" The best way to make customers loyal is to be helpful to them. Answer their questions as truthfully as possible. Relate from their perspective and answer product questions from your own user experience or from real customer user experiences.

When your customers are leaving, thank them for their purchase and invite them to return, leaving a memorable experience with your customers. You should also solicit feedback from customers, post questions and answers online, engage your customers in your market research, and respond to customers' positive and negative reviews. Additionally, you can offer discounts and coupons for returning customers among many other engagement techniques.

6 - Leverage social media capabilities

Almost all businesses, retail or not, have some form of social media presence. However, very few of them have fully leveraged social media capabilities. You can invest in social media advertising which makes it easy for you to get in front of people likely to buy your products and convert them or send them into your sales funnel. With the importance of social media to many people's lives, you can start targeting customers who are specifically interested in the products and services you offer in your retail business, online or offline.

7 - Smart remarketing

You can increase your customer retention rates through remarketing. Shoppers are usually distracted and can easily forget their positive shopper experience, whether at your online stores or at your brick and mortar stores. You need to remind them of their positive experience by engaging previous shoppers either with promotions and/or discounts based on past purchases or current consumer trends.

8 - Tweak your pricing strategy

There are always changes in product demand due to seasonal or market changes, as well as consumer trends and competitor actions. Thus, you need to stay on top of your pricing game to keep your inventory moving. To do this, you must frequently change retail prices strategically in a way that attracts customers while covering costs and bringing in reasonable profit.

Conclusion

Not all marketing strategies will work for you, so it's important to experiment and be creative in using or combining different marketing tactics with a personal touch to make your retail business grow in awareness, popularity and, ultimately, sales.

About the writer: Serena Dorf is a social media-savvy Los Angeles-based content writer. She is passionate about writing, personal development, marketing, and productivity. In her free time, she is reading classic American literature and learning Swedish. Feel free to connect with her onTwitter.

Join the #retail, #inspiringretail and #SmartStore conversations on Twitter @RetailNext, as well as at www.facebook.com/retailnext.

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