How to Successfully Open a Pop-Up Store
When it comes to retail, you can’t just separate online or offline. Today, more and more retailers are merging these two strategies. If you have an ecommerce business, opening a pop-up store can help you provide a different shopping experience to your customers and boost awareness of your brand. If you are planning to open a pop-up store, you should learn some techniques that can help you make it a big success.
Come Up With an Interesting Concept
Before setting up a budget and look for the right space, you should have come up with a great concept. Ask yourself questions like; what can I do to attract visitors? What kind of snacks do my customers like? What can I do to make people want to spend more in my store?
An interesting and creative concept can certainly help you bring in more visitors. However, you need to be careful when choosing a concept. Don’t just choose a unique concept without adjusting it to your brand. You should use a theme that reflects your brand so that visitors can easily remember it.
Choose the Right Location
After you find the right theme for your pop-up store, the next thing to do is to choose the right location. The venue has to be strategic and well known. Make sure that it draws visitors who fit your target market. Find out where the brands that are similar to yours used to open their pop-up stores.
Find a Partner to Collaborate
Collaborating with other parties such as event organizers or other relevant brands will help you attract more visitors and get more publicity. Big events such as music festivals or bazaars usually bring in media for coverage, so it’s likely for your brand to gain more exposure.
Plan Your Online Promotions
Even though a pop-up store is supposed to be temporary, you should take advantage of the momentum to increase brand awareness. Therefore, online promotions should be done well in advance.
Use the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) marketing strategy in your campaigns. Create a teaser on your social media to stimulate curiosity among your followers. Send your customers promotional emails announcing the special deals they can get if they come to your pop-up store.
If it is fine with you to spend more money, then consider working with an influencer. With a large number of followers on Instagram or YouTube, not only can they help bring in many visitors to your pop-up store, but also get your brand under the spotlight.
Implement a Cloud POS System
Mostly, people choose to come to pop-up stores because they hope that transactions can be done faster than at the mall. That means, you need to provide a system that can speed up and simplify the checkout process for customers.
A cloud-based POS system can help your staff find products faster, track stock availability, and record important customer details such as credit card information. The system allows your staff to manage payments with smartphones or tablets. When the internet connection is lost, the transaction can still be processed and all the data will be updated once the system is connected again to the internet.
Run a Social Media Contest
Creating a contest on social media can be an effective method to create buzz for your brand. You can offer attractive prizes to customers who post their photos taken in your pop-up store on Instagram using unique hashtags that you have created.
Leverage Live Streaming
You may have already promoted your pop-up store months before it opens. However, how do you maintain the buzz you garnered while running your pop-up store?
One of the simplest and most effective ways to keep it fresh is utilizing live streaming on social media such as Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. You can interview daily visitors or ask customers to give their testimonials. Keep your followers updated on what’s happening in your pop-up store.
Keep Promoting After the Event
Even when your pop-up event has ended, you should wrap it up in a good way to make it memorable for your visitors and customers. You can share the moments that you have captured on social media to remind the public of how fun the pop-up event was.
Send thank you messages to customers who came to your pop-up store. This will make them feel special and encouraged to come back to your future events. Take advantage of all the visitor data you gathered for newsletter, campaign, and promotional purposes.