Despite the upsurge in e-commerce sites and online stores, there are still several shoppers who prefer to shop at a physical store. Some business owners and marketers even suggest that a physical store is crucial for an online store to thrive.

With that said, we discussed why it is still important to have a physical store today as well as listed a few tips on how you can attract more paying customers to your physical store.

Importance of Physical Stores

A study focused on China suggests that physical or offline stores remain valuable in the digital age. Regardless of the general belief that people nowadays prefer to shop online, a physical store still has an important role to play.

The researchers suggest that customers’ exposure to the products in a physical store can trigger online purchases in the future. Other than that, they also find that physical stores greatly complement any brand’s online channel.

If you look at some of the e-commerce sites today, almost all thriving brands have a physical store as well; so it is no longer surprising why business owners still invest and market their offline stores. Even though over half of their marketing budget often goes to online campaigns, they still allot a sizable budget to their physical store marketing campaign.

Developing Your Marketing Campaign

Bearing in mind that physical stores often complement online stores, you need to develop a campaign for your physical store that would work well with your digital marketing campaign.

This simply means that every marketing campaign you develop for your physical store should be translatable, visible, or have an impact on your digital marketing campaign. This way, even online customers or shoppers would be interested to visit your physical store.

Remember that attracting potential customers to your physical store does not necessarily mean acquiring new customers. Sometimes, you can simply work with the leads that you have and encourage them to buy from your physical store.

It is also one of the easiest and most convenient things you can do. Given that you have already implemented a digital campaign before, you can just work with the leads that you acquire before and simply turn them into buying customers.

Make Your Store Pop

One of the surefire ways to increase foot traffic in your store is to add a few gimmicks and make your exterior a head-turner.

Many brands do gimmicks like they hire brand ambassadors and have them dress up in a costume while demonstrating their products, while others simply make their store pretty and enticing.

The latter is the most popular option that marketers often resolve to, especially if their store location is in a crowded area or the area gets a lot of foot traffic. If you have a pretty store or an interesting storefront, then passersby would be curious about your store and what you are offering. This alone can attract more potential customers to visit your store.

Even more so, people who are not aware of your brand would be introduced to your products and you can now gain more potential leads as well.

Give Incentives

Incentives are a great way to show how much you value your customer’s visit to your store. By simply giving incentives to those who drop by, you can encourage more customers to buy from your actual store.

However, keep in mind that incentives should not burn a hole in your pocket and it does not always have to be a regular thing.

Examples of incentives are vouchers, freebies, trial periods, discounts, and many more. As we said, vouchers and discounts do not have to be that expensive. Also, you are not required to have these incentives every day or every week.

Giving away too much can make you lose money before you even earn them. That said, the most effective way to give incentive is to do it in moderation. Giving away more than 80% of discount every week might increase your store’s foot traffic but it might hurt your income too. So it is best to do it in moderation and make sure that every incentive you give away would be offset. These offsets can be in the form of income, exposure, referral, leads, and so on.

Conclusion

At the end of the day and despite the technological progress that we have been through, customers still need to interact with your products and get to know your brand in person. They cannot just rely on e-commerce sites and online marketplace.

That said, it is up to you to come up with different gimmicks and tactics to encourage them to visit and buy from your physical store.

And, remember, whichever in-store marketing campaign you manage to come up with, should complement and work alongside your digital marketing campaign in order to keep up with the times.