impulse marketing reprints

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https://hardwareretailing.com/sell-impulse-items/

 by Renee Changnon  June 29, 2015 

 Whether it’s the pharmacy or the office supply store down the road,  retailers use strategic merchandising when stocking their shelves to  encourage impulse purchases—and it’s working!

Even consumers who carefully budget or try to adhere to a list often  add extra items to their shopping carts after browsing the store.  According to a study by the Integer Group, one of the world’s largest  promotional, retail and shopper marketing agencies, nine out of 10  shoppers still buy items not on their lists.

So what makes a consumer decide to pick up a pack of gum or a tube of lip balm?

It seems as though people don’t know what they want until they see  it, according to an article by Specialty Retail. The article quotes Paco  Underhill, author of the book “Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping,”  who says, “Two-thirds of the entire economy is impulse buying.”

The single-line checkout queue, dollar sections near the front of the  store, clip strips and theme-driven endcaps are all examples of  merchandising tactics that encourage customers to add to their baskets,  and retailers like you are using these techniques to find success in  impulse every day.

To get a better understanding of how independent home improvement  retailers are adding to their operations’ bottom lines through impulse  sales, Hardware Retailing spoke with five retailers who have made  impulse items a part of the shopping experience in their stores.

These retailers share the impulse items their customers can’t resist  and the strategic merchandising techniques that add to the items’  allure, which you can see through the photographs in the article.

 Thinking seasonally is another way to increase impulse traffic and boost  sales. Arrange rakes and bags for leaves in the fall; shovels, salt and  winter-proofing products for the colder months and even holiday-themed  purchases throughout the year.

To complement the grilling selection at Alspaugh’s Ace Hardware,  flavored wood chips are a popular impulse item customers can add on to  lighter purchases.

For Matthew Henery, owner of Henery Do it Best Hardware in Port  Townsend, Washington, and three other locations in the state, some of  his most popular impulse items fall into the seasonal category, with  bird food, garden tools and other seasonal items luring customers to  purchase based on their current needs. And with Christmas decorations in  the winter, small housewares items like candles for Mother’s Day and  patriotic items for Memorial Day and Independence Day, you can get  customers excited for each holiday, enticing them to add products to  their shopping carts.

 Some of the most popular impulse sellers right now at Oakley Farm and  Home Center in Oakley, Kansas, are toys and products for kids, says  assistant manager Jennifer Crotts. Toys are popular impulse items  customers—or their children—add to their purchases. With small, low-cost  items like dolls, miniature cars, bouncy balls and more, these items  keep the shopping experience pleasant for the whole family and add to  impulse sales.

In  the fall, the store sold wooden school buses for kids with the local  school name printed on it. Displaying the chairs near the register  intrigued customers and led them to purchase the chairs because of the  local theme, Crotts says.

“One of our most popular items right now are these light-up bouncy  balls,” she says. “Toys are always popular, because parents and  grandparents might decide to get something for a child as a reward for  good behavior.”

 When you browse retail locations outside the home improvement industry,  you can easily see how these retailers are taking the category to the  next level. From long and winding checkout aisles lined with products at  stores like Michaels, Home Goods and Best Buy to the dollar section at  Target, consumers have more opportunities to shop impulsively than ever  before.

So  how can you take the examples you see in other stores and add them to  your operation? Each of the retailers we spoke with found ways to make  merchandising for impulse products creative and engaging for their  consumers. They have found success by placing a heavy emphasis on the  checkout area, creating unique endcaps, utilizing signage and displaying  clip strips in departments throughout the store.

 After attending a distributor market, DeRoest got the idea to create a  single-line queue as away to boost add-on sales at checkout. After  remodeling about a year and a half ago, he and his staff have found what  does and doesn’t work with this popular merchandising tactic.

“Last year, we watched the average ticket go up by more than $1,” DeRoest says. “With over 800 customers a day, that adds up.”

For retailers considering a single-line queue, DeRoest says it’s  important to keep it basic and be prepared to change things for the  customer.

“Keep it simple as far as the traffic flow,” DeRoest says. “We had  fun with it, but there was definitely a learning curve. It’s more  important to make the line shoppable so customers have space to browse.  If the line is too narrow, it doesn’t work.”

Longmont Ace Hardware rebranded and reopened in 2012 and followed the  direction of retailers outside the industry like Best Buy and office  supply retailers by deciding a single-line queue was the best way to  organize the checkout area.

“Impulse means there’s a lot more to shop,” Pellicer says. “We have 32 feet to display impulse items in our checkout line.”

 An eye-catching endcap featuring product videos or items necessary to complete a project increases impulse purchasing.

Take Oakley Farm and Home Center for example. Thanks to Crotts’ time  spent browsing Pinterest, she started to generate ideas for how to make  endcaps more exciting and promote impulse buys.

“I’ve  done a couple of different endcaps based on ideas I got from Pinterest,  and it’s gone pretty well,” Crotts says. “Another project I promoted  was Easter grass. I had extra herb containers that weren’t moving, so I  decided to sell the project, adding potting soil and grass seed  available in bulk and container bags. It was something fun for kids to  do.”

Crotts has done a few other creative endcaps with ideas she found on  Pinterest. She says she gathers all the items for the project she wants  to sell and includes a finished example to draw customers in. With the  Easter grass endcap, she says parents and grandparents were drawn to  pick up the items, even thought they weren’t on their original shopping  lists.

Finding fun ideas and making signage to accompany them has been a  great way to boost these endcap projects and increase impulse sales,  Crott says.

Signage near products is another tactic to use when merchandising for  impulse, and interactive signage is even better. Longmont Ace Hardware  has several POP TVs throughout the store, and these are another way to  draw attention to impulse items, Pellicer says.

“We have video endcaps in the store, and some perform better than  others,” she says. “It all depends on the content you have available for  them.”

In addition to the POP TVs, Pellicer says it’s important to consider  all forms of signage and price markers to grab customers’ attention.

“Even small changes like a sign on an item or a color-coded display  instantly draws attention, and you can do it in any area of the store,”  she says.

For more insight on how your impulse sales can increase, analyze the  sales of each endcap to measure their success. At Henery Do it Best  Hardware, Henery has created a system that helps him change and improve  impulse on a monthly basis.

“I have created what I call my endcap map, which I draw out monthly,”  Henery says. “This helps me to see how the endcaps have done. I analyze  how well an endcap has performed, looking at how many dollars per  square were made and ultimately determining if we want to continue to do  a specific endcap in the future.”

Through his endcap mapping, Henery says he has found what items do well on specific endcaps throughout the store.

“Our best endcaps are typically the ones a customer will see when  they first walk through the store and when they walk out of the store,”  Henery says.

 Longmont Ace Hardware has expanded its impulse merchandising to many  areas throughout the store by analyzing customer foot traffic.

“We started experimenting with other places people stand in the  store, like at our service desk,” Pellicer says. “We also have a post  office in the store and have taken impulse items there as well as the  power aisle, which has a lot of traffic.”

While  Oakley Farm and Home Center utilizes endcaps to sell impulse projects  in correlating areas, they also have other locations in the store that  serve as impulse hubs.

“We have a big black rack located at the front of the store,” Crotts  says. “We like to switch it out seasonally, as customers will pass it  walking in or walking to the register.”

At Alspaugh Ace, merchandising means trying to create an opportunity  for customers to spend that extra dollar, no matter where they are in  the store.

“Impulse items in our store are located at the registers and  throughout the store via clip strips, like candy in the plumbing and  electrical departments for those customers in the middle of their work  day,” Blackmon says. “The more points of contact the impulse items have  with the customer, the greater the turns will be in the impulse  category.”

While Henery Do it Best Hardware has created an emphasis on analyzing  endcap success, Henery says other merchandising strategies are helpful  throughout his stores.

“We cross-merchandise with clip strips all over the store,” Henery  says. “A few examples right now are electric cords in the electric power  tools or garden tools aisles or caulk from the paint department on clip  strips near the sinks.”

His store also uses dump bins to draw customers’ attention to items they may need, like wasp and hornet sprays or batteries.

Henery says merchandising items with endcaps and clip strips is a great way to add on sales.

“I like to think we’re able to sell air by using clip  strips and endcaps in our store,” Henery says. “You’re adding items  without adding floor space, gaining sales you wouldn’t have otherwise.”

In addition to the single-queue checkout, staff at Joe’s Hardware merchandises impulse items in the store’s power aisle.

“Through the center of the store, we have dump bin displays, and we  have endcaps with some clip strips,” DeRoest says. “I think the  impulsive item, in my mind, is an add-on item that you wouldn’t have  sold otherwise. As a business owner, you have to look at ways to sell  that extra item. If you can get one extra item in your customers’ hands,  that can be the difference between being in the red or the black.”