While some brick and mortar stores have been completely undone by the online shopping craze, many others have weathered the storm and are doing just as well, if not better than they did before. The main advantage that brick and mortar stores have over their online counterparts is that while those online can only offer a product, they can provide their customers with an experience.

By putting more emphasis on giving your customers an excellent experience when they come to shop at your store, you can easily compete favourably with online stores. Here is how:

1. Provide Speed and Convenience

One of the downsides of online shopping is having to wait a few days for your product to arrive. Brick and mortar stores can take advantage of this by looking for ways to provide services to their customers more rapidly. Since speed is one of the few things you have that your online competitors don’t, you must make the most of it if your entrepreneurial venture is to remain competitive. Being an entrepreneur takes a specific type of outlook to be successful, so be sure to focus on your drive to find a way to make your business as efficient as possible.

This may mean a redesign of your store so that customers can find what they are looking for easily, or it could just be a faster checkout process, ensuring that your customers don’t have to spend too much time in a queue.

2. Hire the Right People to Work With the Customers

If you own a store that sells women’s apparel,don’t just hire someone who will simply show customers where they can get the dress they are looking for. Rather, hire someone with an eye for fashion to make recommendations for your customers. This same idea can be extrapolated to any business. Rather than hiring people to point customers in the right direction, you could bring in people who could actually improve the customer’s experience. This is the kind of personalized experience online stores cannot compete with, hence positioning you at an advantage.

3. Utilize the Online Space to Know More About Your Customers

Owning a brick and mortar store doesn’t mean you can’t make use of the internet to improve how you do business. Online businesses have the advantage of being able to collect data on their customers. You can also give your store an online presence by starting an interactive social media page. You can use this to know more about your customers, and what they expect from your store. You can also use such a page to alert your customers when you have a sale or special offers.

It is indeed possible to transform your in-store customer presence, and strongly compete with online stores by using the three strategies discussed to give customers a memorable experience. If the customers remember your store, and the good experience that they had shopping there, then you can expect them to return to use your services again and again. From this point, you will then be likely experience the most persuasive form of marketing; word-of-mouth.

People highly value the opinions of people they know and trust, and if people are saying good things about your business, then the sky’s the limit!