Colours have an impact on people. Most of the meaning we give to colour is due to culture and experience.
For instance, most people learn from a young age that traffic lights have two important colours: red for stop and green for go.
Fire is red which can explain why the colours is often perceived a meaning danger or urgency.
Water and sky are blue, which may create a sense of calm.
Here is a chart created by Entrepreneur.com
Where do you fit on the colour chart? Does it reflect your brand?
Your shop window is the first thing customers see when they walk past your shop.
The window is there to entice customers to come in by giving them a sample of what you have to offer.
You need to change it as often as you expect regular customers to visit you.This is not an issue with people who do not know about you but you need to make the effort for your usual customers.
For instance, if your regular customers come to you once a month, you need to refresh the display in the window once every three to four weeks.
If they visit you once a week, make sure the window is updated twice weekly.
This ensures customers always see something new and different when they visit you.
Retail is constantly evolving and you should be tweaking and improving your shop floor and your website all the time.
However that does not mean you need to makes changes without thinking.
Before any change, you need to ask yourself:
Change for the sake of change is not clever business.
For the past few months, a supermarket has been sending me offers of loyalty points if I spend a certain amount in store within a few days.
However, the offer only works if I activate it first by clicking on a link in an email.
Why? This is cumbersome and not really practical. On top of this, what benefit do I get from it? None, as I am already aware of the offer.
What benefit do they get out of it? None, as I am already in their database and enrolled in the loyalty scheme.
If you make offers to your customers make sure they are simple and straightforward. No point in requesting additional steps if they do not bring any benefit to anyone.
More than half of the Internet traffic to websites now comes from mobile devices (phones and tablets).
More and more people rely on their mobile phone to quickly check availability or prices.
You need to make sure your website can be used on these devices.
Please note people tend to browse for information however most purchases still happen from a desktop or laptop computer.
Be careful where you choose to advertise. Publishers (online or not) will always boast about how many readers they have. However, they may not translate into sales for you.
The obvious reason may be a lack of targeting: if you sell toys, a magazine about gardening is not going to produce results regardless of the size of their readership.
Another reason is what people are doing at the time of seeing your ad. For instance online forums are usually well attended and highly focused, however when people are involved in a discussion they are unlikely to react to your ads.