Christmas and New Year’s are the biggest holidays of the year, with many people stepping out for shopping and last-minute gifts. In 2024, the total valuation of the estimated sales in the UK during the festive season is predicted to be around £96 billion.
This means that the festive season is a great time for retailers to maximise their revenue as their stores witness a visible increase in retail foot traffic. The success of a business and how well they can monetise during the festive season will depend on their foot traffic management. There is no better sight to a businessperson or shopkeeper than to see their store bustling with people.
However, to make the most of this seasonal in-store traffic, you must be able to showcase your products properly, answer questions of your customers, and expedite the checkout process.
Proper management of customers will ensure the queue keeps moving and you can make the most of the festive business.
However, based on how well they manage their traffic, their sales can be directly impacted.
With massive promotions and discounts during the holiday season, it’s a given that there’ll be tons of crowds in every retail store. This makes having good crowd management strategies in place essential for increasing revenue.
If you’re looking for tips to effectively manage the crowd during this holiday season, we’ve got you covered.
In this blog, the experts at Doorway Services have put together a few crowd management strategies that can help retailers during the festive season.
Let’s take a look!
1. Take Safety Precautions Beforehand
With so many events and discounts during the festive season, most retail stores will attract a larger crowd than usual. With the many people in your store, along with the possibility of overcrowding, taking safety precautions beforehand is an effective way to keep your customers safe.
This means that from door repair and maintenance, and aisle organisation to checking shelves and additional staff, there’s a lot you need to do. Since your automatic doors will see an increase in the influx of customers, getting them checked beforehand by experts should be a priority.
If your doors need repair or maintenance work, get in touch with Doorway Services right away!
2. Proper Queue Management
With eager customers rushing around looking to make quick purchases and take advantage of discounts, disorganisation in your store is a given if you don’t have proper crowd management strategies in place.
In such cases, proper queue management can prove beneficial to manage an increase in in-store traffic.
Whether it is utilising additional staff, making arrangements for queues to move at a steady pace or using dividers to manage the flow of the crowd, there are many methods and techniques you can use. You could also consider implementing self-service tools and digital queue systems to improve the processes.
With a less hectic atmosphere and quicker checkout process, waiting times are reduced to a minimum, making your store more efficient and organised.
3. Make The Most Of The Space
The best way to manage festive season traffic is to make the most of your store floor area. This can include removing any display that takes up a lot of space or placing items of the same kind in one area.
Safety and queue management is possible only when your store is not cramped, with enough space to facilitate the flow of traffic. With a lack of open spaces to move around, your customers will have difficulty reaching the places they wish to.
Since holiday sales account for a considerable amount of your annual revenue, doing all you can to ensure your customers have a safe and pleasant experience will work in your favour.
Additionally, by making enough space to let your customers move around and look for all they need, there’s a chance that they’ll end up purchasing more.
4. Keep Your Staff Prepared
The festive season is a hectic time for shopping that requires all your staff to be alert to avoid any risks or issues. Having enough staff on hand can help you properly manage the store and take care of all the customers.
Consider hiring temporary staff for the festive season to leverage the days fully if need be. However, you’ll need to brief your team on what to expect and what they need to do if any problems arise.
Moreover, you’ll also need to keep them up to date with safety measures so that they’re prepared for all situations. From teaching your employees how to handle peak hours to effectively managing stressful situations, training your staff can ensure that your store runs smoothly with everyone performing their best.
5. Make Data-backed Decisions
The best way to make the most of the holiday sales is to plan ahead of time. You can use the data from previous years to make an assessment of the retail foot traffic that you can expect this time around. It can also help you plan for the inventory that you need to stock up on (you don’t want to refuse customers because stocks are over).
Many stores hire extra staff to manage festive season traffic, but instead of assuming this, you can instead refer to your previous year’s data and make an informed decision.
You can monitor the data either manually by calculating the number of people entering your store or by using APIs integrated into your point-of-sales system, which can automatically monitor the amount of sales generated. This can help you predict the expected sales.
6. Make the Most of Quiet Days
Officially, the festive season in the UK starts in early December, though some stores start their sales and promotions towards the end of November. It is generally seen that weekends and holidays often see the largest in-store traffic. Even the days leading up to Christmas see the largest footfall in stores, making it a high-pressure time for stores.
Foot traffic management strategies include preparing for the high traffic days on quieter days. For example, the maximum number of people are likely to be during the weekends, while Mondays and Tuesdays generally have a smaller number of people. You can use this time to restock shelves, change the window display, process the returns, ship off any items that you might have sold through online channels, and catch up on bookkeeping tasks.
Staying updated on these tasks will help you better manage festive season traffic.
Contact Doorway Services For Door Installation And Repairs
These crowd management strategies, when effectively implemented, can be beneficial for almost any retail store during the holiday season.
That said, if you’re on the lookout for commercial door installation or repair and maintenance work, our team at Doorway Services can help you with that!
We provide automatic and manual doors for every type of premise and maintenance services to keep them in shape.
To find out more about our services, get in touch with us right away!
Recent Comments