https://www.bin-store.com/blog

Have you been experimenting with different retail display ideas on your sales floor? Setting up creative and effective displays is quite a challenge on its own, but another difficulty lies in determining out how to measure success. You cannot simply go with your gut to figure out whether your retail displays and fixtures are converting. So how do you know if your retail display design ideas are really working? Here are a few ideas to help you out.

• Set profits targets for each of your retail display cases and racks. That way you can measure how close you are to meeting the mark at the end of each week or month.

• Try “split-testing” your displays. Split-testing is a term we usually use when it comes to advertising, but you can use the same idea to identify display ideas that work. Try one setup for a few weeks, record the results, and then try another setup. You may need to do this several times to start getting a clear idea of what is going on. Some displays may work better of the long term than others. Some may be better for specific seasons, and so on. You can use those profit targets to help you figure out which displays are best for meeting your sales goals.

• Make ongoing observations. Ask your sales agents to keep an eye on your displays and note how different setups influence foot traffic, interest, and sales. These qualitative observations may be harder to make sense of than your quantitative reports based on sales figures, but they can still be incredibly valuable.

• Take pictures of your shop displays over time and date them. Why? Because by the time you have clocked all this observation time and tested a variety of display ideas, you may forget exactly what display ideas you have tried! If you don’t take pictures, how can you possibly know what retail displays you had up four months ago, or six, or twelve? If all your notes say is, “2015 Christmas display performed much better than 2014 Christmas display,” you are not necessarily going to remember what you did last year versus this year. But if you have photos of last year’s Christmas display and this year’s, you will have some guidance when it comes to putting up your 2016 display.

• Survey customers. Consider polling subscribers to your email newsletter or even just handing out short surveys at the door with paid postage. Ask buyers what kinds of displays they like and which displays have been their favorites.

Tracking the performance of your retail displays is a challenge, and it will never be an exact science. But it pays off to try and take an approach which is as precise as possible. Gather solid, quantitative sales data as well as subjective, qualitative reports. Keep photographs and careful notes, and you will gradually be able to figure out what works and what doesn’t. From there, you can develop a real edge. Your future displays will draw more foot traffic and generate more sales!