If you are an owner of a recently established retail business, online or physical, then congratulations are in order, because you have successfully completed the hard part of running a retail business.
Unfortunately, now the harder part begins. Growing your retail business.
Setting up a retail business is already a daunting task because there is so much to plan, track, and manage. Firstly, you need to make sure you have everything you need to start a retail business, such as:
Secondly, you will need to make arrangements and plans for other elements of running a retail business, such as :
Once you are done with setting up a retail business, you will need to run your retail business as smoothly as possible. Furthermore, in an ideal situation, you should be able to grow your retail business over time.
Let’s take a few minutes to discuss why you might want to consider growing your retail business.
Some retail business owners might see the idea of growing a business as very unappealing due to all the challenges involved. Therefore, in this section, we will highlight some of the benefits you can get by growing your retail business, which might even convince static business owners to rethink their strategy for future growth.
The first and most obvious benefit you get for growing your retail business is long-term prosperity. This means that by growing your retail business, you are placing yourself in a position to be in business for a long time, maybe even after you leave the business for future generations.
Here’s the reality: many retail businesses end up closing after a few decades, years, months, or even days after they start. Furthermore, according to Investopedia, 20% of new businesses fail after the first couple of years of opening. Therefore, if you are serious about the longevity of your retail business, then you will seriously need to consider investing in the growth of your retail business. This is because continuously improving and growing your retail business prevents your business from becoming obsolete. As a result, your retail business will continue to flourish, and more importantly, your retail business will be able to keep up with the changing times.
Therefore, if you would like to keep your business running for many decades to come, you should always strive to improve your retail business through continuous growth. It does not even need to be superfast growth, a slow and steady growth will also do the job of keeping your business relevant.
The second reason why you might want to consider growing your retail business is so that you can gain the upper hand over your competitors.
Today’s world is highly competitive, and there will definitely be other retail businesses that provide whatever you are providing. Furthermore, people will always consider both you and your competitors before buying something.
Therefore, you will need to do something that will make people’s choices swing toward your retail business and not your competitors. Moreover, you will need all the help you can get to attract these people and turn them into regular customers. This includes growing your business to better compete with others.
Lastly, by growing your business, you stand a much better chance of attracting new customers and retaining old customers by providing your customers with better facilities, options, and offers that match your competitors or even exceed them. Furthermore, you can compete with your competitors by implementing the following growth elements:
By investing in growing your business, you are taking the first step to build a successful brand that will become a household name for many consumers.
Brands have a significant edge in the market because these are businesses that have proven to be reliable, trustworthy, and consistent. Furthermore, branded retail businesses are more successful than independent businesses for the following reasons:
Therefore, if you have dreams of creating a successful brand that will be used by many consumers, then you will need to have a significant growth strategy in place to help you achieve brand status.
Now that you are aware of the benefits you can get from growing a retail business, let’s now look at what you need to grow your retail business.
Growing a retail business has no fixed, one-size-fits-all method. Rather, growing a retail business can be done in multiple ways from getting a bigger location to installing a new printer. Furthermore, each and every small improvement that contributes to the effectiveness and efficiency of your retail business can be seen as a growth factor. However, there are certain factors, or keys, that are a basic requirement to start growing a business.
Therefore, in this section, we will be looking at some “keys” that will be needed to grow your retail business.
The first and most obvious thing you will need to grow your business is money. After all, making improvements that grow your retail business, no matter how small, won’t be free of cost!
There is a simple process you can follow to make money for growing your retail business, and it is fairly simple to understand, but a bit challenging to implement. This process works somewhat like this:
As you can see, you will need money to make any significant improvements that will contribute to the growth of your retail business. Furthermore, you will need to increase your sales to get the funds necessary for growing your retail business. Most of these funds can come from your net profit, which can be invested back into your retail business to grow it.
If you are just starting your business, then you will need start-up funds. Here are some ways through which you can raise start-up funds for your business.
To increase your sales, the first thing you will need to do is attract more customers to your retail business (traffic), whether it’s an online store or a physical store.
Here is where marketing strategies come into play. If you want more traffic to your store or website, you will need to market your business and products. By marketing your business and products, you will make more people aware of your retail business, which can lead to increased traffic.
Once you have a steady flow of traffic to your retail business, you will have more chances of making successful sales. In addition, there are multiple other strategies you can use to increase traffic for your retail business, just go with one that works best for you.
Once you start generating enough traffic to your retail business, you will need to make sure that your customers actually buy something from you and not go home empty-handed.
It is a wasted opportunity if a customer visits your online or physical store and does not do anything that can potentially lead to a sale. To make your customers buy something from your retail business, you need to increase your conversion rate.
One way to increase your conversion rate is by installing a store/product locator, such as WP Maps, on your website. A store/product locator provides you with two benefits:
A store/product locator is a very useful tool for physical store owners who also have a website. This is because a store/product locator, such as WP Maps, accurately guides your people from your website to your physical store to make a purchase. Moreover, the people who set out to your physical store after browsing your website are most likely in a buying mood. Therefore, every effort should be taken to ensure that these people reach your physical store easily to complete a purchase.
As your conversion rate increases your sales will automatically increase, and if you are profitable, you can use the profit to grow your business by doing things such as:
To be able to significantly grow your business, you will need to manage two elements crucial to growing a business.
Firstly, to be able to grow your retail business, you must make sure that the products you are selling are in some sort of significant demand. After all, no one wants to buy things they don’t need. For example, if you live in a country where it rarely rains, then things like umbrellas will not really sell a lot. Therefore, it is very important that you sell products that are in demand, the higher the demand the better.
Secondly, you need to be able to supply the products in demand to your customers. This is done by ensuring you have the right amount of resources to manufacture or procure high-demand products. In addition, you will also need to have enough space to store these products, such as a warehouse or a large stockroom. Lastly, one of the worst things a retail business owner can experience is not having enough products to sell to ready-to-buy customers, as this leads to the immediate loss of a sale.
By effectively managing the supply and demand of your products, you will be able to grow your business more easily,
The last entry on the things you will need to grow your business is time.
Yes, you read that right! To grow your retail business, you will need to take some (or a lot) of time out of your schedule and use it to plan to grow your retail business. Because growing a business does not happen overnight, sometimes it can take days or months of planning just to implement even the simplest growth strategies.
Furthermore, in rare cases, you may also need to make some sacrifices to find the time to plan the growth of your retail business, this can include working overtime or canceling your vacation plans.
Once you have plenty of time on your hands, you will find that growing your business will become much more manageable. In addition, with enough time, you can afford to carefully consider and plan every step of your retail business growth.
Let’s now get into the real meat and bones of this article: how exactly do you grow your retail business?
There are many growth strategies you can use to grow your business, some work better than others and some are easier or more difficult than others. Furthermore, your growth strategy choice should depend on your final objective. Do you want an easy strategy that gives small amounts of growth? Or do you prefer a difficult-to-implement strategy that gives you huge amounts of growth?
Well in this list we have outlined some growth strategies that are sure to give your retail business the boost it needs.
One of the best growth strategies you can use to grow your business is taking the time to carefully plan your growth. That’s right! If you want to grow your business you will need to sit down, grab a paper and pen, and make a growth plan which can include things like:
Planning the growth of your retail business is a sure way to get on the right track to growing your business. Furthermore, planning can also help you avoid any unforeseen circumstances that might occur.
While planning growth strategies for your retail business, it will be very beneficial to consult other people about your growth plans. For example, the people you can consult could be accountants, business attorneys, marketing specialists, etc.
Once your growth plan is set, you can go about carrying out this plan. Furthermore, it is better to divide this plan into many stages so that you keep track of your progress, and can make any changes if necessary along the way,
One strategy you can use to grow your business is to implement a sales funnel.
A sales funnel is kind of like a flow chart you use to streamline your marketing and sales processes. Think of it as a diagram of a funnel that helps you visualize how you will do the following steps:
A sales funnel works the same way as a real funnel. In a real funnel, a substance is poured at the top of the funnel, and as the substance moves down it collects in a small, focused area. Likewise, the substance “poured” on top of the sales funnel are potential customers who are aware of your retail business. However, in a sales funnel, not every bit of the substance (potential customers) will reach the end and earn you a sale. In addition, in a sales funnel, there is a filter at the end of the funnel that needs to be crossed for customers to make a buying decision. Moreover, it’s your job to ensure that potential customers cross this filter and become full-fledged customers.
Once you have potential customers inside your sales funnel, you have to try to convince them to move further down the funnel by increasing their interest in your products. This is done by:
Once your potential customers gain enough interest in your products, they will eventually make the decision to perform a useful task, usually a purchase.
By analyzing the sales funnel from top to bottom, you can figure out how much it costs to convert a certain amount of potential customers into paying customers. Moreover, using this data, you can scale your retail business for even more conversion.
For example, let’s say it costs you $200 to get 100 people in your sales funnel, out of which only 5 make a purchase of $100. Therefore, you gain a total of (5*100) $500 in sales. As you can see, you spent $200 and got a sale of $500, which gives you a net profit of $300. Moreover, you can use this data to plan for future expansions, and as a result, grow your business.
Falling under the category of marketing strategies for growing your retail business is advertising.
Advertising is one of the oldest forms of marketing and is one of the best ways to raise awareness for your retail business. By advertising your business or products, more people will become aware of your retail business. In addition, if people are convinced that your product is able to solve their problems, then they might decide to do business with you. This is the end goal of advertising that you should go for.
Advertising can be done in both online and offline methods.
Firstly, in the case of offline advertising, a retail business can advertise by:
Secondly, online advertising can include promoting your retail business using:
For more information about promoting your retail business online, please see the following article: Which Apps Should You Use to Promote Your Local Businesses?
According to broadbandsearch, the number of people who use the internet is 63.2%, which accounts for a huge percentage of overall traffic. Therefore, as a retail business owner, it will immensely help your business grow if you can utilize this heavy traffic that is on the internet daily. Moreover, you can utilize the heavy traffic on the internet by increasing your online presence so that you are more noticeable to lots of people.
Increasing your online presence is a sure way to grow your retail business because an online presence can raise awareness for your business for thousands of people all at once.
Raising an online presence can be done in many ways.
Firstly, the most common and easiest way to raise your online presence is by having a website. A website can have all the information of your business such as products, services, contact information, prices, origin story, etc. all in one place on the internet. In addition, a website can give online visitors a good summary of you and your business that can eventually lead visitors to a purchasing decision.
Secondly, instead of a website, you can start an online store for your business to raise your online presence. An online store will provide an additional source of income for you from buyers who prefer shopping on the internet. There are many platforms you can use to easily create an online store such as Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, etc. See this guide if you are looking to create the best Shopify online store for your business.
If you are a physical store owner with a website, one thing you can do to increase conversion and boost sales is to install a store/product locator, such as WP Maps, on your website. A store/product locator is a tool that is used to accurately guide online customers to your store by providing them with:
Once people get interested in your products by browsing your website, some might want to come to your physical store and make the purchase in person. Therefore, in this scenario, it is very important that customers, who are planning to come to your store, get accurate information so that they can reach your store easily and quickly. Moreover, the last thing you want is for interested customers to get lost while trying to reach your store, as this can lead to the loss of a sale.
If you are already using a store locator application like SOCi on your website, then you may want to consider this SOCi alternative store locator for your website for a much better experience.
Overall, there are several ways to increase your online presence, and doing so will certainly help you grow your retail business.
The most logical way to grow a business (that should be obvious to everyone) is to reinvest the profits you make back into your retail business.
Once you become profitable, it will be a good idea to allocate some percentage of this profit back into your retail business to make your retail business grow. Furthermore, this profit can be put to good use by putting it back into your business so that you make even more profit, and as a result, your retail business will grow even further. This growth strategy is one of the most natural ways to grow a thriving retail business.
However, making a profit is easier said than done. Some businesses take years before becoming profitable. Therefore, this growth strategy is only truly effective if you have a healthy profit margin. So the first step in implementing this growth strategy is to focus on becoming profitable first, only then will you be able to take the next step.
After you have become profitable, you can re-invest in your business by:
If you own a retail business, chances are that there are other businesses that do and provide exactly what you do and provide. These businesses are your primary competitors. Furthermore, to stay one step ahead of them you will need to find out what they are doing and do those things better than them.
The first step will be to identify who your competitors are with a quick search online. Once you have identified your competitors, examine their business models, determine their selling strategies, and try to match or exceed their selling strategies. For example, if your competitors hold a promotional event every month or promote their products on a certain website, then do the same thing for your retail business.
Once you have gathered enough intel on your competitors, the next part will be fairly simple. All you have to do is try to match your competitors in some if not all, elements of their retail business. Here are a few examples of how you can do better than your customer:
When you decide to match your competitor’s selling strategies, make sure that your financial budget allows you to do so. Furthermore, If matching your competitors leads you to a financial loss, then it’s better to postpone competing with your competitors. At least until you are able to go toe-to-toe with them.
Streamlining your everyday tasks is one way to make your retail business operate more efficiently and avoid wasting resources such as time and energy.
Running a retail business often involves many day-to-day tasks in areas such as:
There are also subparts to each of these tasks. Moreover, if you assign one person to handle more than one area of these tasks, then for sure this person is going to get overwhelmed and not perform at his/her peak. Therefore, to make sure your retail is running like a well-oiled machine, you will need to make sure that all of your day-to-day tasks are distributed strategically amongst your employees.
Rather than piling multiple roles on a single person (or yourself), it is better to have one person handle one or two specific tasks. Moreover, this makes it much easier to get things done more efficiently. For example, your retail business will perform much better if you have one person who handles only the accounting-related tasks, rather than having one person handling accounting, sales, and customer service.
To streamline your everyday tasks, you may need to either hire more staff or eliminate wasteful activities.
Firstly, hiring professionals suited for a certain task is one way to quickly streamline your task because these people will know how to complete their tasks in the best way possible. For example, to handle sales, you might want to hire a person who has experience in sales.
Secondly, eliminating wasteful activities is another great way to streamline your tasks by making the most use of the resources you have available. By eliminating wasteful or redundant tasks, you and your employees will get things done more quickly. For example, if you are having daily meetings where little to no progress is being made, then it is better to cut the meetings down to once per week. Furthermore, by doing this, the time that would have been spent on meetings can be used for something more productive.
These are just some of the ways to streamline your day-to-day tasks, and by using at least one of these methods you will, no doubt, begin to see significant growth in your retail business.
While attracting new customers may be the logical way to grow a retail business, what’s more important, in our opinion, is to retain your current customers.
Retaining customers simply means getting your current and former customers to keep coming back to make purchases from your retail business. To do this, you will need to provide excellent service, quality products, or other incentives that will draw customers back to your store. Moreover, some of the ways to retain customers include:
By retaining your former customers, you ensure that your customer base remains at a healthy level, which will, in turn, increase your chances of making sales and growing your retail business.
Growing your retail business can be one of the most challenging things to do for your business. However, there are great rewards and benefits to be gained from taking the time to grow your business, such as prosperity, a feeling of accomplishment, and much more.
By using one or more of the growth strategies outlined in this article, you will be taking the first step in your long, yet exciting, journey to grow your business into a force to be reckoned with.
If you would like to explore more diverse topics related to e-commerce, please see our blog page.
Waleed Daad Khan is a results-driven Marketing Consultant with a passion for Businesses. He holds certifications From Wharton, McKinsey, Hubspot and SEMrush, and has helped businesses of all sizes improve their online visibility and reach. With 4 years of experience in the field, Waleed stays up-to-date on the latest digital marketing trends to deliver cutting-edge strategies.
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