Visual merchandising for your retail business

You should monitor the effectiveness of your visual merchandising to make sure you're getting value from the time and effort you're spending on it. This will also help you to improve future techniques.

Measuring the success of your visual marketing methods will allow you to:

• decide whether to continue or change what you're doing - eg if something is difficult to sell, try moving the product or same display to another location before completely giving up on it
• improve your decision-making on which techniques to apply and when - eg if you have sold all of your inventory and you have no back stock, change your visual merchandising plan to something you have plenty of

How to measure the impact of your visual merchandising techniques?

Here are some ways to help you measure the success of your visual merchandising practices. You can evaluate:

• Return on investment - if you have made significant changes to your retail space, it is to important measure sales performance against previous weeks, months or seasons for comparative analysis and future planning purposes.
• Customer visits - capture figures on the number of people that come into your store and those that walk by your shop. This will help you to evaluate the opportunities and options to attract those who are less inclined to enter.
• Customer spend - evaluate a customer's average spending in one visit - is this more or less money than before you applied your visual marketing changes?
• Browsing time - consider how long customers spend in your store - is this a space where you are making a connection with customers and creating a welcoming experience.
• Returning customers - look at whether customers are coming back to your store and how often they return within a specific timeframe. This may also influence how you choose to target customers who visit less often.

Alongside evaluating customer spending and interaction in response to your visual merchandising techniques - consider the following to help drive ongoing improvement:

• Using retail analytics tools: There are resources that you can use to gain detailed data and insight into in-store customer journeys and track how they affect sales.
• Benchmarking your business: Setting benchmarks will allow you to compare your business with others. You can identify areas for improvement or adapt specific best practices to increase your own performance. See measure performance and set targets.
• Entering awards: Seek recognition for visual merchandising best practice. This will help raise the profile of your business in addition to increasing your exposure to what other businesses are doing well. See how to enter and win business awards.

It's worth remembering that measurements will probably only show the immediate impact of your visual merchandising activity. The biggest benefit can be the long-term improvement in your sales and return customers.