Last updated on August 13th, 2024 at 01:01 pm
Want to increase your retail sales in 2026?
Here are ten tips that can help you do that…
- #1. Clearly Define Your Target Audience
- #2. Take Time to Understand Your Dream Customers
- #3. Develop a Brand Strategy
- #4. Provide Sales Training to Your Store Staff
- #5. Figure Out what Your Perennial Sellers are
- #6. Have Upsells and Cross Sells
- #7. Experiment with Offering Services
- #8. Build Your Email List with a Free Offer Then Use Email Marketing to Sell Your Products
- #9. Set Up a Loyalty Program
#1. Clearly Define Your Target Audience
If you want to increase your sales, you need to get clear on who exactly you are trying to sell to.
In fact, if you are currently selling to several distinct customer segments, you might want to consider niching down to the most profitable one. Why?
Because if you zero in on your most lucrative customer segment, it will be much easier for you to come up with offers, marketing campaigns, and sales messaging that resonate with that demographic.
Moreover, it’s probably safe to say that the more generic your store is, the more difficult it will be for you to compete with massive corporations such as Amazon and Walmart.
However, if you focus on catering to a specific, narrowly defined demographic instead, it will be much easier to build a brand and establish a loyal customer base because you won’t be in direct competition with these giants.
Of course, it’s not possible to niche down to your most profitable customer segment overnight, but you can begin gradually shifting your offers, marketing campaigns, and sales messaging in that direction. See if focusing more on that particular customer segment leads to an increase in sales.
#2. Take Time to Understand Your Dream Customers
Selling is persuasion applied in the business context.
And you can’t be persuasive if you don’t understand the person that you are trying to persuade.
Here’s some real talk: the chances are that you probably don’t understand your dream customers as well as you think you do, especially if you don’t belong to that demographic yourself.
That’s why we recommend investing in customer research such as:
- One-on-one interviews
- Focus groups
- Online surveys
Also, consider doing some informal customer research by casually chatting with people in your social network that belong to your target demographic.
You may be surprised how much you can learn simply by talking to your family and friends, asking them questions and listening to what they have to say!
#3. Develop a Brand Strategy
You need to develop a brand strategy that will resonate with your target audience.
JC Penney’s rebranding debacle can provide some food for thought here. When Ron Johnson assumed leadership of the company as its CEO, he decided to make a switch from coupon sales to everyday low prices. This was presumably an attempt to move away from thriftiness, give JC Penney a makeover, and turn it into a hip and stylish brand.
That decision proved to be disastrous, alienated the company’s customer base, and damaged the brand so much that it arguably never fully recovered.
The problem was that Ron Johnson, who was previously a senior vice president of retail operations at Apple, tried to implement a brand strategy similar to that of Apple without understanding JCPenney’s target audience.
The lesson here is that you can’t just blindly copy what successful brands are doing and hope that it will work. You need to develop a brand strategy that appeals to your dream customers!
#4. Provide Sales Training to Your Store Staff
If you want your store staff to take a proactive role in selling your products instead of just working the cash register or aimlessly walking around the store, you need to include sales training in your onboarding process for new employees.
You want to introduce them to your inventory, explain what items go well with your perennial sellers, and give them cross sell and upsell scripts.
Besides that initial sales training, you also want to provide additional sales training when you make changes to your inventory (e.g. when you switch from the winter collection to a spring collection).
Remember that if your store employees don’t know what’s going on, they won’t be able to answer customer questions, which will make them and by extension your store look bad!
#5. Figure Out what Your Perennial Sellers are
Every retail store has best-selling products that continue to sell well year after year.
Look at your sales data and figure out what your perennial sellers are. They should be your core, centerpiece offers that you create upsells and cross sells for.
Also, consider investing in improving the quality of your perennial sellers and taking them to the next level.
Once your customers discover that your core products are much better than similar products that your competitors offer, they will start recommending them to their families and friends.
That can help you get extra sales through word-of-mouth!
#6. Have Upsells and Cross Sells
So what are upsells and cross sells?
Upsells
An upsell is an offer that is an upgrade on the initial offer that the potential customer has already accepted.
McDonald’s infamous “Would you like to supersize that?” is a classic upsell example.
Here are three common approaches to upselling:
- Offer them more of that same product but for a better price (e.g. they want to buy 500g of vitamin C powder but you upsell them 1kg of the same powder at a better price per kilogram).
- Offer them a subscription for that same product but for a better price (e.g. they want to buy a bottle of supplements that should last them three months but you upsell them a quarterly supplement subscription at a better price per bottle).
- Offer them a better version of that same product that includes additional features (e.g. they want to buy the cheapest laptop in the store but you upsell them one that’s more expensive and has more features).
See if you can come up with upsells for your core products.
Cross Sells
A cross sell is an offer that is complementary to the offer that the potential customer has already accepted.
McDonald’s famous “Would you like fries with that?” is a classic cross sell example.
Look at your inventory and see what items you can use as cross sells for your core products.
Say, if you sell travel equipment, including backpacks and packing cubes, when someone wants to buy the former, you can cross sell them the latter.
Consider keeping these cross sell items near the cash register so that your employees can pitch them to customers who are about to buy one of your core products.
You also want to design your product displays in a way that makes it easy for customers to grab some cross sell items together with your core products.
Say, if you run a clothing store and one of your winter centerpieces is a long winter coat, you can display accessories like gloves, scarves, and hats next to it.
You could even create an accessory bundle that includes all of these items in a color that goes well with that coat and then a use poster stands to draw attention to this cross sell offer!
#7. Experiment with Offering Services
When we think “retail”, we tend to think “products”.
But you can also create an additional stream of revenue by offering services.
You have probably seen makeup stores offering makeup services and clothing stores offering personal stylist services. Why not do something similar in your store?
Of course, if you decide to provide a service, you need to make sure that it’s good, which means that you will have to invest in either training your store employees or in hiring people who already have the required skills.
Note that you can use services to increase product sales. Some people have money to spend but feel overwhelmed when they go shopping. So why not help them choose the right products?
#8. Build Your Email List with a Free Offer Then Use Email Marketing to Sell Your Products
An email list is the most valuable digital asset that a retail business can have because it allows you to reach out to your customers directly without having to rely on various third parties such as social media platforms.
Imagine having a list of 10,000 subscribers that you can email when you want to launch a new product, announce a seasonal sale, or let people know about a limited-time discount for a particular item. Wouldn’t that be great?
So how can you build an email list of people who are interested in what you sell?
You can do that by offering your customers a freebie in exchange for their email addresses. That freebie is called a “lead magnet”.
Check out this video in which our friend Alex Hormozi, an entrepreneur and investor who reached a $100M net worth by his early 30s, shares his approach to lead magnets:
Ideally, your lead magnet should not only help you get email addresses but also set the stage for a sales pitch for one of your products.
Say, if you are selling makeup, you could give away a small eye shadow palette with just 3 colors and then pitch that customer a large palette with 12 colors via email.
Obviously, the math needs to work if you want to stay in the black, so pay attention to the relationship between your customer acquisition cost (CAC) and your customer lifetime value (CLV).
Also, keep in mind that your lead magnet doesn’t have to be a physical product, it can also be a digital product or a service. See which approach makes the most sense for your business!
#9. Set Up a Loyalty Program
Finally, you want to create a loyalty program where people can:
- Get membership cards
- Collect points or “store money” that they can then use towards future purchases
- Access exclusive deals that are only available to the loyalty program members
We also recommend setting up a system that allows you to automatically send personalized product recommendation emails based on that person’s purchase history.
Want to Learn How to Grow Your Online Store FAST?
We have all heard about the “retail apocalypse” that started in the 2010s and accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic.
There’s no denying that people increasingly prefer to shop online instead of going to brick-and-mortar retail stores.
And it’s probably safe to assume that this trend is going to continue in the foreseeable future.
So how can you make sure that your business doesn’t become one of the retail apocalypse casualties?
The answer is simple: you need to start investing in the e-commerce side of it.
That way, if a day comes when you need to shut down all your retail locations, you will have your online store to fall back on.
Our co-founder Russell Brunson is widely recognized as one of the top sales funnel experts in the world.
He can show you how to grow your online store fast with sales funnels. Want to learn from him?
The best place to start is his best-selling book “DotCom Secrets”.
In this book, Russell:
- Introduces the Value Ladder sales funnel that he used to grow his company from zero to $100M+ in annual revenue in less than a decade.
- Goes over the most popular Value Ladder sales funnel variations and their use cases (e.g. a cart funnel is great for growing online stores).
- Discusses the most important principles that you need to understand if you want to build sales funnels that convert.
“DotCom Secrets” is available on Amazon where it has over 2,400 customer reviews and a 4.7 star rating.
But you can also get it directly from us for free. All we ask is that you cover the shipping.
So what are you waiting for? 🧐