Editor's Note: 50 Best Retail Tips of 2019 to Drive Business Gains in the New Year
Total Retail is excited to present to you its 50 Best Retail Tips of 2019! For this annual report, the Total Retail editorial team spent time in last year's fourth quarter poring over each piece of content we created in 2019 to identify the 50 very best tips of the year. We reviewed the content published in our e-newsletter (Total Retail Report) and on our website, identifying the 50 tips that we believe will help our audience (i.e., retail executives) lead more successful businesses. These tips cover virtually every facet of running a successful retail business, from customer experience to e-commerce to marketing to mobile to technology, and much more.
To give you just a little flavor of what you can expect in the full report, here are three of my favorite tips featured:
- You can rectify almost any negative review simply by responding. No, not a refund. Nope, no gift card necessary. The bar has been set very low, and that’s great news for retailers. More than 48 percent of reviewers don’t even expect a company to respond to their review (though they’d like it if they got one). And almost nobody said they expected a freebie in response to their review. — Zach Pardes, Trustpilot, “Bad Reviews: You Get Them, But Do You GET Them?” Total Retail Report , April 3
- Pay attention to the price of the upsell. It’s important to make sure the item you’re trying to upsell is no more than 25 percent higher than the original product. If someone is planning to purchase a pair of jeans for $80, they might be willing to spend $100 for a higher-quality item, but it’s unlikely they would go higher than that on the spot. — Ro Bhatia, LimeLight, “The Upsell and Cross-Sell Bible for Subscription Retailers,” Total Retail Report, Aug. 2
- Some retailers make the mistake of removing their holiday pages from their site at the end of every shopping season. This is a mistake. They immediately lose all the momentum, links and authority they’ve built up with Google. To win in holiday search, ensure that your search engine optimization and content teams consistently maintain a section of your site dedicated to the holidays, keeping it relevant and useful. — Jordan Koen, Searchmetrics, “4 Ways to Improve Google Search Performance This Holiday Shopping Season,” Total Retail Report , Oct. 31
Use these tips to spring your business into action. The chosen tips are meant to drive top- and bottom-line gains for your organization, and are prescriptive in nature. While not all 50 may be applicable to your business — at least not yet — there’s enough here for everyone to get started. Make it your New Year’s resolution to begin incorporating these tips into your 2020 business processes.
Furthermore, these tips are meant to be shared with your colleagues and peers within the retail industry. These action items likely extend beyond your slice of the business, and touch many parts of your organization. Educate not only yourself, but those around you as well. Total Retail’s mission is to be the retail executive’s source for content and community. It’s through annual features such as our 50 best tips of the year that we hope to fulfill that mission.
Download our 50 Best Retail Tips of 2019 report today, and prepare for a more prosperous 2020.
