Between countless unpredictable variables, constant changes in shopping trends, and ongoing crisis management, creating seamless retail experiences for customers isn’t easy. 

Luckily, there are a few foolproof ways to improve retail sales performance. Here are few strategies to set your brand up for success.

Increase Retail Business Execution

In order to create the perfect shopping environment to drive retail sales, your retail organization needs operations, productivity, and engagement to be on the right track. Every single level of your company’s org chart needs to be completely aligned — from executives at HQ all the way to the part-time student who is stocking your store shelves.

Your teams at headquarters are spending valuable time, money, and effort into developing initiatives that will drive sales. From merchandising to marketing, 

To make the magic happen (and to increase sales), your store execution problem needs to be solved. And what you actually have isn’t an execution problem… It’s a communication problem.

Today, retailers rely upon cumbersome, slow, and inefficient systems. The good news is that Zipline is on a mission to change that with a cutting-edge retail operations platform.

Increase Retail Store Communications

Research has shown us that only 29% of direction sent to retail stores by headquarters is actually correctly executed by store teams. The link between your ideas (and the thousands of hours that your teams are spending on them) and in-store execution is store communication. 

The most agile, aligned, successful (and profitable) retail teams empower their store teams with effective internal communication that is well-organized, prioritized, and actionable.  From moving inventory to promotional displays,  

The first step to effective communication is to provide your store associates with context that helps them to understand why their tasks are essential. Good retail communications helps store associates to see how their day-to-day responsibilities are one vital step for a larger vision or mission.

Providing context does more than promote employee buy-in. Context also helps your retail workers to prioritize. Successful retailers enable their store teams to become stewards of the brand. Today’s managers are operating multimillion-dollar operations, and they’re making day-to-day decisions that impact your in-store sales. The key is good store communications. 

Increase Employee Engagement

 By engaging your employees, you can create excellent customer shopping experiences (therefore driving retail sales!). It’s well-understood that engaged employees deliver superb service to customers, and happy customers spend more money and continue to shop at your stores!

Empowering your employees is a sure-fire way to drive sales. Equipping your store associates with product knowledge can help make the difference between making or losing a sale (or even creating a returning customer). 

Fill your employees in on campaigns and promotions, and utilize surveys or quizzes to keep a pulse on how much they’ve absolved about rollout information. We recommend sharing information in a  weekly digest to inform the store team of what’s going on that week. If employees are allowed to bring their own devices, or use company-issued devices on the sales floor, give them access to an app where they can pull up additional information about products. 

By empowering your employees, you can create a connected store experience, one that fosters customer loyalty, creating seamless shopping experiences that promote retail sales.

Increase Your Store Teams’ Capabilities

To set your retail business up for success (and to increase sales), you need effective store execution…. And that’s where the Zipline steps in. 

We get retail. At Zipline, we understand what it takes to run a complex retail company, because we’ve done it.  That’s why we created the leading communication and execution platform for retailers who believe in the power of the store experience.

We believe that the future of retail lies in its people. That’s why we built a straightforward solution to solve a complex problem. By giving your stores clarity, giving your upper field visibility, and giving your comms team agility, you can empower the individuals who make up your organization to do what they each do best, carrying out your brand’s values to make a difference, helping to move the needle and improving the bottom line. 

Zipline’s communications and task management solutions are the perfect way to help retailers coordinate promotional efforts with their brick-and-mortar stores. If you’re interested in increasing execution, driving sales, and fostering easy communication between leaders and operators, request a demo today.