Go with the flow

In the third of a series of features for Garden Centre Retail, our Director Paul Pleydell looks at customer flow - the principles and techniques to maximise product exposure and increase sales performance and average customer spend.

I am a great believer in selling more products to your existing customers. Let's assume that your marketing has worked well and lots of customers have arrived at your garden centre. The challenge is to make sure that every customer, who walks through your front door, leaves with a full basket (or better still, a full trolley).

The products we sell in the garden centre are the most important thing. They create the turnover, which in turn pays the bills and the wages, and hopefully leaves something left over for the owner or shareholders.

Garden centre products broadly fall into two main groups, 'impulse' and 'demand'. Impulse products are the ones that customers have no intention of buying when they arrive at your garden centre but buy because they have some special appeal. This could be a rose just breaking into flower, a beautiful vase or a really squidgy slice of lemon meringue pie. Demand products are the opposite and are products that customers have decided to buy before they arrive at the garden centre. These are often functional or solve a problem, for example weedkiller, tree stakes or a bog standard border fork.

Looking around today's garden centre there are a huge number of products that can be classed as 'impulse'. This means that the customer has arrived without knowing that these lovely products even exist. It is therefore vital that they get to see them otherwise they will never get sold.

A lot of time is spent at trade shows, meeting suppliers and choosing products to sell in our garden centres, there are teams dedicated to this purpose and then more time spent on pricing and displaying these products. But I would question the value of this huge investment in selecting products, particularly 'impulse' products, if your customers don't get to see them.

In my world, customer flow is king. This is why good store design centres around good customer flow.

So what is good customer flow? In simple terms it is the retailer taking control of how a customer moves around their shop. This allows the retailer to control which products are placed along this route to maximise sales.

It is not about forcing customers to only walk a certain way. It is about encouraging them to walk a certain way.

The front door to the garden centre is the start and the tills are the finish line. There should be a main route around the retail area that leads through all of the main departments and past any secondary departments. The department that customers enter first should set out your stall and make it clear what your business is all about. The main aisle should be a minimum of 1.5m wide and more usually 1.8-2.0m wide, particularly in larger centres. Secondary paths should be a minimum of 1.0m and ideally around 1.2m wide. The main aisles can be clearly highlighted with contrasting flooring, subtly defined by the position of shop fittings or marked by overhead signage.

Customers will follow the 'path of least resistance', which is likely to be the main aisle, but this needs to have soft changes in direction and clear views ahead, if it is to work effectively. The use of colourful and well lit focal points and stunning displays will help to coax customers into harder to reach areas of the centre. Good customer flow should also provide different shopping routes around the shop, the canopy and the full retail area (including the outdoor sales areas).

Once the main route is defined then product promotions can be well positioned along this to maximise sales. These can help to tell a story about the business or push promotions and value driven offers.

A well-defined route gives customer confidence in where they are being led, allowing them to focus on shopping.
If possible the main flow should follow a broad circuit around the retail areas. A central path is not ideal as it gives a choice of left or right, so whichever choice is made, the other half of the shop can be missed. It is worth noting that most supermarkets have the entrance in one corner.

Garden centres sell a diverse range of products and good customer flow needs to recognise this. Customers need to walk quite close to books, say 1-2m to see these clearly and make an impulse purchase whereas a set of garden furniture can be admired from 10 -15m away.

It is not enough to just herd customers around the main aisle, shopfittings and displays need to be angled to allow customers to flow into each department and browse, again clear views and great displays can help draw customers deep into your retail areas.

Improving the flow around your centre can be easy and a very cost effective way of increasing turnover. We have seen 10-15% increases in Average Transaction Value as a result of making simple changes to customer flow for some of our clients.

A good point to start is to see how well you are currently retailing to the customers who visit your centre. This can be done by looking at your average transaction value through your main tills. Whilst there is some regional and local variation I would generalise by saying that below £15 is weaker, £15 - £20 average and above £20 is good.

If your figures are good maybe you just need more customers through your front door but if they are weaker then customer flow should be high on your list of things to tackle to improve your business and it can make a big difference.

You have worked hard to get your customers so make sure they see everything you have on offer.