How Jewelry Retailers Can Increase Store Walk-Ins

Auckland, New Zealand--Walk-ins are essential for your brick-and-mortar jewelry retail shop. Having more visitors walking into your store leads to increased purchases and potential for conducting business in the future.

A blog post from retail support company VEND written by the company’s Retail Expert Francesca Nicasio talks about ten ideas to drive walk-ins to retail stores. Here’s the list and some of Nicasio’s advice:

Keep up with seasons and pop culture

Nothing keeps people away more than a stale and outdated store, so if you’re looking to increase footfall, one of the first things you should do is freshen up your windows and in-store displays.

Give people new and relevant reasons to check out your store. You can do that by incorporating trendy and seasonal elements into your displays.

If people are gearing up for the back to school season, make sure your store visuals reflect that. Or, if a particular season is in full swing, come up with relevant themes to use in your displays.

Take Pink Pointes Dancewear, a UK-based dance shop. A while back, Laura Watkins, the owner of the store, decided to use autumn as inspiration for her store’s display.

“When I first took over running our shop the new Bloch Militare boot has just come out. It’s a split sole dance shoe but looks like a boot,” she recalled.

“It happened to be September and the leaves were beginning to change so I made a display with hundreds of leaves in beautiful autumnal colors and this pair of boots on top as they looked like Dr. Matens and great for stomping in piles of leaves.”

Depending on your products and customers, you could even incorporate pop culture into your displays.

The jewelry retailer Alex and Ani did this really well when the famous HBO series Game of Thrones was still on the air. During the final season, Alex and Ani launched a Game of Thrones jewelry line, and heavily promoted it in-store.

In addition to having a prominent in-store display, Alex and Ani dedicated its entire window to the Game of Thrones theme and even set up special signage to draw people in.

Use eye-grabbing signs

If your shop is in a busy location filled with distracted shoppers or if people aren’t stopping to look at your windows, try adding additional elements to grab their attention.

Our suggestion? Use signage. It’s simple, affordable, and effective. The key is to choose signs that pop. To do that, you need to go beyond just sticking a “SALE” poster on your door or window.

Like Alex and Ani, you could set up a sign right outside your door to advertise your latest products. Another option is to use signs to spotlight any promotions or offers that you’re running.

Invite influencers or experts to your store Driving foot traffic isn’t easy and sometimes you need to bring in outside reinforcements to draw in the crowds.

One way to do this is to invite influencers or experts to your store. Many independent bookstores have used this strategy to tremendous success. Take Vroman’s, Southern California’s oldest independent bookstore.

Vroman’s regularly hosts book signings and events featuring different authors, and these efforts attract more visitors to its location.

Vroman’s even found a clever way to drive book sales during these functions. While the author events are free, guests are required to purchase the author’s book from Vroman’s if they want a signed copy. And here are some additional suggestions from VEND’s Nicasio:

• Market the store to existing customers

• Re-engage shoppers with messages

• Look beyond selling products

• Make social interactions

• Encourage location tagging and social sharing

• Keep an eye on the online traffic

• Showcase store inventory

• Learn from metrics and improve https://www.vendhq.com/blog/ increase-walkins-retail-store/

Read more on these points in the entire blog post.