If you’re the proprietor of a shop, whether it’s a very small one or a larger one, you’ll want to take advantage of a few sophisticated (and not-so-sophisticated) marketing techniques that’ll help you to not only attract new customers, but maintain the existing ones, too.Let’s run through some of the techniques on offer.

Product Sampling

So-called ‘experiential’ marketing offers would-be customers a chance to experience the product for themselves.What better way could there be to convince them of what it would be like to own the product in question?

Product sampling campaigns, naturally, involve giving something away for free – and thus many firms, particularly those with limited cash reserves, are wary of it.But product sampling campaigns, when they’re done properly, can yield significant results even if the product being sampled isn’t perfectly suited to the practice.For best results, you’ll want to be as targeted as possible – haphazardly sending out samples at random is clearly not going to get the best results.Where possible, ask would-be customers if they’d like a sample, and encourage them to give your feedback once they’ve used it.You’ll be able to then use this feedback to make improvements to future iterations of the product.

Mystery shopper

If you’re running a small (or even a large) shop, then customer service will be all-important.It’s by this measure that most customers will decide whether to return to your shop.This is so whether the shop is online, or existing in the real world.It’s far easier to keep an existing customer than it is to gain a new one, and so focusing your efforts on providing the best customer experience every time is perfectly sensible.

Of course, if you don’t know exactly where your customer shopping experience is falling down, you’ll hardly be able to pick it up again.That’s where a mystery shopper comes in.This anonymous person will enter your store and collect feedback on your behalf.This feedback can be precisely tailored to suit the things you’d like to know about your business.So, if you think that the shelves in your store aren’t being kept clean, you might ask specific questions about the dust levels.The more targeted the questions, the more likely you’ll be to gather useful information.

Questionnaires

Another means of gathering information about your customer experience is through questionnaires.Present these to your customers on their way out of the store, but don’t be pushy about it.These are a relatively cheap way of collecting a lot of information – even if you decide to incentivise them a little bit by offering a cash payment.It’s worth taking the findings of your questionnaire with a pinch of salt, however; remember that only a specific sort of person takes the time to fill these things out, and that sort of person might not be representative of your customer base as a whole.

Retail Audit

If you’re to ensure that your shop is doing its job properly, you’ll want to bring in outside expertise to comb through every part of it.This task is called a ‘retail audit’.Just as its cousin, the financial audit, will run through every part of a business’s incomings and outgoings and make suggestions for improvements, a retail audit will evaluate the shop itself and establish just what’s going wrong and how the situation might be improved.

Ideally, you’ll want the people carrying out the retail audit to be as impartial as possible.This means bringing in outside expertise to help.There exist specialist companies like Tactical Solutions who’ll offer exactly this service.Suffice to say, having an outside agency perform the audit will make it far more persuasive when you’re dealing with potential buyers and other outside parties.

Product Recall

A recall is something that few business operators relish, as it’s something that means, by definition, that something has gone badly wrong.However, like many disasters, it’s inevitable that one might occur at some point or other – and thus taking precautions to ensure that it’s going to be taken care of swiftly and soundly is wise.A product recall specialist like Tactical Solutions will be able to provide exactly the required service.Any delay or mismanagement when recalling a product can be extremely costly to your firm’s reputation – compounding any existing damage it might have suffered.In order to avoid this eventuality, working with an organisation with the expertise and technology necessary to do the job well is vital.