Well-designed visual merchandising displays can help you sell more products, while poorly designed product displays may cause customers to leave your store without making a purchase.
Merchandising displays fall into three main categories.
- Store shelving displays
- Point of purchase (POP) displays
- Furniture and clothing displays
Each category contains many different types of displays, each with its own set of important features. How can you utilize visual merchandising displays to help sell more products? Here are our favorite tips for creating stunning displays that grab your customers’ attention.
Tips for Visual Merchandising Displays
If you own or manage any type of retail store, you need to understand the power of visual merchandising. Excellent store displays can help enhance the customer experience, make a positive first impression, and increase sales. Here are some tips for effective visual merchandising.
Use a Uniform Color Palette
Sticking with three or four colors (and various shades of each of those colors) helps create a cohesive, harmonious visual experience for your customers. The colors you choose should match your retail brand. For example, bright colors are energetic and ideal for kid-friendly spaces, while earth tones are more calming and better for a spa.
Use Focal Points to Guide Customers
Whether it’s a table display, a piece of wall art, or a group of mannequins, focal points grab your customers’ attention and lead them to things you want them to see. Make sure the focal point fits into your brand, improves the shopping experience, and doesn’t create a traffic jam in your store.
Avoid Empty Space
Not only is empty space a lost opportunity to showcase your inventory, but avoiding too much empty space also helps keep your customers visually interested in your store. When they’re more engaged with your store and interacting with your products, they’ll be more likely to make purchases.
Be Deliberate With Lighting Choices
There are four primary types of lighting: ambient, accent, task, and decorative. Wisely use all four types of lighting to set the mood in your store, make a statement, and attract attention to specific items you want your customers to see. Soft lights make for better ambient lighting since they’re easier on your customers’ eyes, while bright lights help highlight specific products.
Consider How Your Layout Directs Customer Traffic
Your shop floor layout impacts customer movement, traffic flow, and the overall shopping experience. There are five main types of store layouts, each with its own merchandising opportunities, benefits, and disadvantages: grid, loop, angular, forced-path, and diagonal.
Utilize Signage Effectively
Signage influences how your customers understand your products, shares information with shoppers, guides customers to specific items, highlights features or products, and much more. Figure out the goal of all your signage and make sure it matches your overall brand. Excellent signage also contains a call to action, is concise and informative, and creates visual intrigue, among other things.
Tell a Story
Your business’s story is how you want customers to describe your store to their friends and family. Visual merchandising should leave your customers with a clear vision of your brand and the story you are telling. The story should match your products and your customers – if those things are mismatched, you may attract the wrong types of customers.
Drive Sales With Product Placement
Do you know why bread, milk, and produce are typically as far apart as possible? Product placement. By keeping the most essential items on opposite sides of the store, supermarkets force you to walk the whole length of the building and hope you will encounter something you decide to buy that wasn’t on your list.
You can likely find a way to do the same with product placement at your own store.
Bundle Related Products
While it pays to keep some products far apart from each other, it also pays to bundle related products together. For example, a display with chocolate bars, graham crackers, and big marshmallows entices customers to buy all three items and make S’Mores, which they would be less likely to do if they needed to visit three separate aisles for the ingredients.
Organize Your Space
Make sure your space is organized so customers can easily find everything they need. This will help contribute to a positive shopping experience and keep customers coming back since they know they don’t need to waste time searching for their important items.
Common Types of Retail Displays
There are numerous ways to display products beyond simply putting them on shelves. Here are some of the most common types of retail displays that draw attention and boost sales.
Entryway Displays
Make your store as inviting as possible from the moment customers first step through the door. Entryway displays may feature products that inspire impulse buying, fragrant flowers, or display items that give a sense of what your store sells.
Dump Bins
Typically made of cardboard, dump bins are customizable and easy to interact with from every angle. Typically filled with small individually packaged products, dump bins can attract a lot of attention, especially when placed in the middle of a highly trafficked aisle.
Window Displays
Invite customers in off the street with stunning window displays. Get creative with your window displays: change them up each season, showcase your best merchandise, or make your store look homey with a beautiful flower arrangement that complements your products.
Display Tables
While you could simply put a single product on a display table, consider creating a story. Fresh flowers could help you tell a story that helps sell the products you choose to display there.
POP Displays
Commonly found near the point of sale area or in other highly trafficked parts of the store, point of purchase (POP) displays stand apart from the “regular” shelving and play a big role in a brand’s visual merchandising strategy. “Grab and Go” displays are a popular form of POP display. Some companies, like Ulta and Sephora, have beautiful displays with mini product sizes while you wait in line.
Display Cases
Enclosed on all sides by clear plastic or glass, display cases often need to be unlocked by a store associate, making them ideal for high-end products that need a layer of security to keep them safe from sneaky hands. Since customers can see your product from multiple angles in a display case, you can get creative about how your products are displayed.
Freestanding Displays
More organized than dump bins, freestanding displays are an excellent way to display somewhat larger products and can be interacted with from 360 degrees. Commonly made of cardboard, freestanding displays can be made in eye-catching shapes, colors, or designs.
End Caps
Don’t let space at the end of your aisles go to waste – end caps are prime locations to attract attention without your customers needing to go down an aisle. You can feature either a single product or related products on end caps.
Other Types of Visual Displays for Businesses
Visual displays and plants for the workplace are great for other businesses besides just retail stores. Nearly any business can benefit from displays, especially those featuring farm-fresh flowers from The Bouqs Co.
Hotels
What makes your hotel stand out amongst the competition? Having floral arrangements throughout the lobby – or even in the rooms – can make your hotel more memorable and bring customers back time and again.
Restaurants
Customers in your restaurant should have something to look at besides each other. Fabulous flower arrangements are not just a feast for the eyes, but they can also act as conversation starters for diners who may not know each other well (we’ve all had that awkward first date at a restaurant, right?).
Salons
What could enhance the experience of going to a salon more than the visual and fragrant appeal of a bright bouquet? Make your salon appear friendlier and softer with flowers thoughtfully placed in the waiting area.
Healthcare Settings
People are often stressed or scared when they visit the dentist, doctor, therapist, or other healthcare professional. Fantastic floral displays are an excellent way to add a soothing aura to the waiting room – and they require somewhat less maintenance than a fish tank.
Offices
Did you know having plants in your office can increase workplace productivity? That’s right, studies have shown that plants improve workplace satisfaction, concentration, and productivity. Even if you don’t have any customers on-site to appreciate visual displays, your employees will benefit from having the green signs of life around the office.
Real Estate Agents That Stage Houses
If you’re a real estate agent who regularly stages homes before selling them, our flower subscriptions can help ensure you always have fresh floral arrangements on hand to help liven up any space. Schedule deliveries as frequently as every week or as infrequently as every other month and get discounts on additional Bouqs you order between your regularly scheduled deliveries.
Make Displays Pop With Flowers from The Bouqs Co.
You already rely on The Bouqs Co. for personal arrangements, but did you know we also offer flowers for businesses? If you want to regularly incorporate fresh flowers into your merchandise displays, let us help you. Our Bouqs are also perfect for gifting to customers or employees.
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