Increase Your Retail Store Hours
Surefire Way to Boost Your Retail Store's Sales
Searching for a way to boost your retail sales and profits and develop deeper customer loyalty? It’s simple:
Increase your retail store hours.
10:00 in the morning until 5:30 in the evening, shortened Saturday hours and closed on Sundays might have been just fine in the 1930’s - or even 1970’s - but it’s a whole new world out there. These kinds of hours just don’t cut it anymore.
Your customers can shop 24 hours a day, 7 days a week at the local superstore, on the internet, and with catalog merchants. Yet quite often they have to work very hard to shop with the independent merchants and other small businesses in their own neighborhoods.
One of the most important things you can do to boost retail store sales is to make it as easy as humanly possible for your customers to shop with you. And you cannot sell through a closed door!
Your hours should be tailored to the schedule of your customers, not to your schedule. This means staying open all day on Saturday, staying open late on some weekdays, and opening on Sundays.
Quite often this means hiring and training new people. Many storeowners are hesitant to take on the extra cost and responsibilities of increasing retail store hours. Although change is never easy, in this case it pays.
Seimens Research did a survey and found that on Saturday between noon and 2:00 p.m. 11% of Americans were shopping. From 2:00 to 4:00 on Saturday was the next busiest 2 hour segment, followed by noon to 2:00 on Sunday, then 2:00 to 4:00 on Sunday.
In an informal, entirely unscientific survey of over 50 retail storeowners who stay open on Sunday, every single one of them said their sales more than justified staying open. Most responded that Sunday was usually as big as most weekdays, yet they typically kept shorter hours.
Remember, 67% of customers stop shopping with a business because of perceived indifference. If your customer comes to your door and you aren’t open they will think it’s because you don’t care about their business. They won’t tell you about it, they’ll just go away.
If you want to boost your retail store sales in today’s incredibly competitive retail environment you must put the needs, wants and desires of your customers first. This means increasing retail store hours; hours that fit the schedules of today’s super busy consumer.
Love your customer… the money will follow.
Want more great Information on how to love your customers so the money will follow? Check out our Marketing Kit in the Retail Mastery System. It’s packed with tons of practical, to-the-point retail marketing techniques that will help you get the most from every customer!
