Best Practices

Every day, your customers make hundreds of decisions before they ever walk through your front door. By the time they arrive at your store, their brains have already been working overtime. Instead of giving shoppers decision fatigue, this article offers some tips on how to make decisions easier for your customers.

For online retailers, the package that lands on a customer’s doorstep may be the only representation of the store they encounter. This article offers some tips for elevating your brand's packaging.

Every marketing campaign, promotion, slogan, event and social media strategy has a shelf life. Some last for years, while others become stale in weeks. This article offers some tips on how retailers can refresh their marketing.

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.