Same-store sales are looking a little flat and you need to find ways to deliver better results. There are only three ways you can drive sales in your stores: 1) encourage more prospects to visit your store; 2) increase your average ticket and 3) increase your conversion rate — that is, sell to more of the prospects already visiting your stores.

 

To a great extent, retail sales have been a two-trick pony: drive more prospect traffic and increase average ticket. Driving more prospects into your stores usually requires an advertising or promotional investment of some kind, and increasing average ticket, well let's just say that most retailers have been and continue to focus on this one — but what about conversion rate? Driving conversion rate is the third trick every retailer needs to learn.

 

Here are five ways you can improve conversion rates in your stores.

 

1) Understand why people don't buy: There are reasons why people visit your store and don't buy and you need to understand it. Every store manager should spend some time observing visitors in his/her store. Watch customers as they move through your store, and it won't take long for you to identify some actions you can take to turn more visitors into buyers.

 

2) Align your staff to traffic not transactions: Staff scheduling is tricky at the best of times, but aligning your staff resources to when prospects are in your store will help you maximize your chances of converting more of them into buyers. Pay particular attention to lunch time, when store traffic can be way up, but staff lunch breaks can seriously drag down conversion rates. Associates need to eat, but customers need to be served. Matching staff schedules to traffic volume and timing in your store will help improve your chances of converting more.

 

3) Look for conversion leaks and plug the holes: Traffic volume and conversion rates tend to be inversely related. That is, when traffic is high, conversion tends to go down or sag. When traffic levels are low, conversion rates tend to go up. It's not hard to understand why this happens. When the store is busy, till lines are longer and it's harder to get help from an associate. The opposite is true when the store isn't as busy. So, if you want to improve conversion rates, look at the traffic and conversion patterns in your store by day of week and by hour to look for when conversion rates are sagging — these sags represent the times when sales are being lost.

 

4) Set conversion targets by store: Having goals and targets are important if you want to improve results. If you don't have a conversion target for your store, you need to set one. It's important to remember that every store is unique and conversion targets should be set uniquely by store. One store might be doing well with a 15% conversion rate while another may be underperforming even though it has a 30% conversion rate. The trick is to move your own conversion rate up relative to your store's performance.

5) Make conversion a team sport: A good way to help improve conversion is to ensure all your staff understands what conversion is and that each of them helps influence it. Ask your staff about why they think people don't buy and what the store can do to improve conversion rate. Discuss targets, get them to buy-in and share results. Get them excited about moving the conversion needle and you will significantly improve your chances of actually doing it.

 

If you don't track traffic or measure conversion rate in all your stores today, simply put, you are missing out on an entirely new way to drive sales. You can't improve conversion if you don't measure it. The retailers who are focused on driving conversion rate have a significant advantage over those who do not.