During inflation, the prices of consumer goods tend to rise significantly and can affect sales. Every business requires to meet their sales target even in that season. They desire to have their shoppers streaming in as normal.
But price hikes, especially after the pandemic, affect how buyers buy, and every business that wants to remain in the market must find a way to upsell or encourage its shoppers to make unplanned purchases. Here are six strategies to encourage impulse purchases during inflation.
1. Communicate urgency using the right language
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Once you create a sense of urgency in their minds, shoppers are bound to make impulse purchases. The ideal items to create urgency may be stapled items or shoppers’ wants. Displaying items that your customers desire, especially near the checkout, spurs them to purchase now.
On the other hand, when you display staple items near the checkout line, you must effectively communicate that sense of “Need to have it now.” You can use phrases like “Buy before they are gone” or “Buy now.” These phrases enable you to create a greater desire for the staple items in your eCommerce store. If you have an app for your store, finding your promotional items becomes easy and quick for your customers.
2. Forecast your customers’ needs
Every savvy business needs to know how to forecast sales in different seasons. This allows them to observe trends to anticipate the needs of their customers at any time of the year. Having such information handy helps you predict the items your customers will be looking for in the season when inflation strikes.
Once you understand what products will sell the most, you can create appropriate displays to ensure they are easily noticeable. For instance, a home decor shopper may be interested in buying scented candles to achieve a specific feeling in their space during winter.
So, if the winter season brings about a rise in scented candles purchases, displaying them in areas of high visibility encourages your shoppers to buy even during inflation.
3. Draw attention to specific consumer items
A business has a great window of opportunity to get their shoppers’ attention while they are waiting in line to check out. You can use point-of-sale(pos) displays or other ways to position those items in strategic areas within your mortar store to draw attention to them.
Digital signage comes in handy as it allows you to have multiple displays of one or more products. It works perfectly when you communicate a sense of urgency through your display. Also, try using lighting that distinguishes the display from other products, e.g., colored lighting, and use bold and bright colors to draw your customers’ attention to the display.
4. Create a unique path for your customers to follow
Encouraging purchases during inflation calls for the perfect mix of product placement and product selection. Once you identify the path that shoppers follow within your store, product placement becomes a breeze.
Additionally, you can harness your retail store layout and interior design themes and layouts to lead your customers to your high-demand items and plan for the expected foot traffic. Designing your customers’ path within the store allows you to predict areas where they are likely to linger, need a visual break, and the types of product displays they’ll pass as they shop, making it easy to find the best placement for your displays.
5. Place lower-priced items near the checkout
Your shoppers will not spend huge amounts of money on your expensive displays near the checkout counter. As a result, pricing is a vital factor when choosing items to display near the checkout line as impulse buys.
Ideally, displays of $20 or less as impulse products are great for point-of-purchase sales and checkout. Such low-priced items boost purchases with items that loyal customers or new customers readily buy without a lot of consideration.
You can also display discounted items near the cash register. Using a sense of urgency of a limited-time promotion and sale prices is a great formula for encouraging shoppers to do impulse shopping.
6. Display promotional items around popular products
Your checkout counter should not be the only high-impact area to capitalize on to sell promotional items. Try placing those products as add-ons near the high-demand items using a different display to provide impulse shoppers with a visual break or include them on your store’s power wall. This method is also ideal when introducing a new product.
Choose low-priced items that match the high-demand products. For instance, place waffles in front of your ice cream freezer. This way, you benefit from the foot traffic and attention drawn by high-demand items that lead to impulse buying.
Conclusion
Highly-priced items on your displays may cause impulse buyers to hesitate to make purchasing decisions and are not great for encouraging purchases. The best display should limit anything that calls the customer to choose one option over another, e.g., size or color.
Try these ideas to encourage impulse buying and take notice of those that change your store by improving sales and creating exciting customer experiences.
