How I Increased in-store conversions with simple experimentation

Back when I used to work in a supermarket I noticed a few things about how tiny environmental triggers can have a huge impact on buying behaviour.

This a 3-minute article about how small actions can rise above the noise and make a difference in sales.

One of those usual low-selling Sundays I had to take care of the oven fresh breads – the baguettes etc. I placed the oven-warm bread in the display stand as usual. However, this time I noticed that the display sign on top of the shelf saying “Fresh bread baked here today”could not be seen behind the baguettes. I took the sign off and placed it in the middle of the shelf, between the two baskets of bread. Now it stood out clearly.

How about the business impact?

That day I had to make three extra batches instead of the usual one batch. One small change, three times the average sales. My hypothesis is that this tiny improvement in the placement of the sign made all the difference in the sales that day.

Can you guess what happened on the following Monday? A co-worker came and put the sign back to the place where it originally was – into a place where it did not draw any extra attention.

Back to selling just one batch on a Sunday

This happened because the sign was not in the position that is defined in the store concept.The company “policy” advised managers to give the market minus points if the sign was mispositioned.

In-store advertisement and the conversion rate optimisation in web shops are essentially about the same thing: making the value proposition clear and relevant enough to capture our short attention spans and familiarity-filtering perceptions.

We should not forget that our customers’ expectations are ever increasing. The customer does not care if your in-store advertisements are limited by the company policies. The customer does not care if you do not have the capability to experiment in eCommerce. Sales numbers react – but do you? The question is, are you empowered to…

Make educated hypotheses and test them with experiments.

In complex environments, the only way to learn is to first actively probe and experiment. Read more about the Disciple of Business Experiments at HBR. I am always happy to read stories about purposeful and accidental experiments.

Originally published in my LinkedIn