Best Practices

Although restaurants and retail stores sell very different things, they share the same mission: creating loyal customers who choose to return again and again. This article offers seven lessons retailers can borrow from great restaurants to strengthen customer relationships and drive long-term success.

When was the last time you evaluated your website? Think of your website as an employee, and then evaluate it to those same standards. This article offers six helpful tips for evaluating your website to make sure everything is running efficiently.

The first 30 seconds are crucial for making a sale. In those first moment, customers start making judgements about whether your business feels relevant, trustworthy, clear, helpful and worth any more of their time.

Even though returns can be annoying, they're a source of information, and often a very useful one. If you study them carefully, returns can tell you a great deal about your products, your customers, your staff, your merchandising and your marketing.

Most retailers spend considerable time focusing on merchandise, pricing, advertising and staffing. Yet, many overlook one of the biggest threats to sales growth: customer friction. This article offers some key tips for retailers on how to reduce customer friction and create seamless shopping experiences.

To track business performance, retailers should keep track of a handful of key measurements that provide an ongoing pulse of the business, identify trends and take corrective action before small issues become major problems.

While marketing tools like social media, email campaigns, digital advertising, search engine optimization and online reviews certainly have value, many retailers are overlooking one of the most powerful marketing assets they already own: their storefront. This article offers some tips on how to make your window displays inviting for customers.

Retailers spend enormous amounts of time, energy and money trying to attract new customers. However, many retailers overlook one of the most valuable assets already sitting inside their business: their existing customers. The quiet power of repeat customers is often underestimated, yet they can become the foundation upon which long-term retail success is built.

In today’s retail environment, it has become remarkably easy to confuse marketing activity with marketing success. Social media engagement can certainly play a role in visibility and brand awareness, but retailers must be careful not to mistake digital applause for actual profitability. In this article, Alan Miklofsky shares how retailers can turn marketing dollars into sales instead of just social media praise.

In today’s social media-driven business environment, many independent retailers have become fascinated with the idea of “going viral.” For most independent retailers, the obsession with viral marketing often distracts from what truly builds sustainable retail success: consistent visibility, ongoing customer engagement and long-term community trust.