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her inform The law of attraction Drive customer conversion rates in your stores SAME-STORE SALES ARE looking a little flat and you need to find ways to deliver better results. There's still a scent of the financial melt-down lingering, but you've survived that crisis and it's time to start getting the sales needle to move in a positive direction. There are only three ways you can drive sales in your stores: 1. Encourage more prospects to visit your store; 2. Increase your average ticket; 3. Increase your conversion rate – that is, sell to more of the prospects already visiting your stores. These are the folks who visit your store, but don't buy. To a great extent retail sales has been a two-trick pony: drive more prospect traffic and increase the average ticket. Driving more prospects into your stores usually requires an advertising or promotional investment of some kind, and increasing the average ticket, well let's just say that most retailers have been, and continue to focus on this one, but what about conversion rates? Driving conversion rates is the third trick every retailer needs to learn – it's another source of sales opportunity that most retailers today completely overlook. Before I get into the ways you can drive conversion, I need to confirm that you actually track traffic and calculate conversion rates in your stores. First, you need to actually track prospect traffic. This is not the same as transaction counts. Lots of retailers are confused about this. Transaction counts represent the number of people who made a purchase; traffic counts represent the total number of people who came to the store including buyers and non-buyers. Conversion rate is simply calculated by dividing sales transactions by gross traffic counts. For example, if you logged 500 traffic counts in your store and there were 200 sales transactions for the day, your conversion rate would be 40% (i.e. 200/500). As you can see, without traffic counts you can't actually calculate conversion rates. The fact is, if you don't track traffic in your stores, you can't calculate conversion rates. If you can't calculate conversion rates, well, you can't improve it. So for the roughly 35% of retailers who actually track traffic and conversion rates, here are five ways you can improve conversion rates in your stores: The fact is, if you don't track traffic in your stores, you can't calculate conversion rates. If you can't calculate conversion rates, well, you can't improve it. 46 | December/January 2012 | HER MAGAZINE