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As a retailer, you have one goal – to boost your profits. That includes improving your sales, increasing the average purchase value, keeping your products moving, and making your customers happy. All of these can be achieved through suggestive selling, but only when it’s done right.

Suggestive selling essentially involves pushing a sale and getting a customer to buy more products and spend more money in-store. But it needs to be done delicately to prevent overwhelming the customer and making them feel dissatisfied. So, let’s take a look at a few suggestive selling tips that will turn you and your sales team into pros and help you improve the customer experience while boosting your sales.

What Suggestive Selling Is and What It’s Not

Before we dive into specific techniques, we must go over what suggestive selling – or add-on selling and upselling – entails. Most retailers see it as nagging a customer until they accept all the offers or leave the store. And in most cases, this aggressive approach results in a customer leaving.

To perform suggestive selling right, you need to be gentle and focus primarily on the customer experience. That means not spraying your new fragrance directly into their face as soon as they enter your store.

Suggestive selling is a psychological game. You need to start a conversation with your customers, understand why they’ve visited your store, and only then offer them products that make sense for them. So, let’s see how you can do that.

Train Your Sales Associates

Upselling and add-on selling will become much easier when your salespeople are intimately familiar with the available products in-store. The better they know the products and their features, the better arguments they’ll be able to make when attempting to promote them to the customers.

Customers won’t be convinced to buy a product if all a salesperson says is, “this fragrance is very popular; you should get it.” Why is the fragrance popular? Which ingredients are in it? What are the best fragrance combinations, and why?

Providing relevant information to the customer will increase their engagement and improve their satisfaction. They’ll be more likely to listen to your salesperson’s recommendation if it seems like they’re an expert on the subject.

Present Special Offers

If a customer is under the impression that it’s more important for you to close a sale and get as much money from their purchase as possible, they’ll be less likely to buy anything from you. They want to do business with retailers that put customers first and focus on providing them with the best experience. After all, the main reason why customers switch brands is that they feel unappreciated.

The best way to show your appreciation is by showing concern for their purchasing budget. So, instead of immediately bombarding a customer with the most expensive products and services, offer them your current special deals.

If they came to your store with a $200 budget in mind for a new kitchen appliance, don’t offer the most expensive appliances first. Show concern for their budget by focusing on the best deals you have. If you tell them that a $500 appliance is now on special sale for $350, they’ll be more likely to take you up on the offer that if you just start showing appliances with an original price tag of $350.

Focus on Complementary Products

If you want to perform suggestive selling successfully, you need to keep your offers relevant. A person buying a new set of jeans is likely not interested in getting a new laptop at the same time. However, they might be interested in getting a suitable belt or a matching jacket.

When you’re attempting suggestive selling, focus on complementary products that make sense for your customer. Otherwise, it will seem like the sale is your number one priority, and not the customer.

Keep Your Product Offers Light

Overwhelming a customer with dozens of offers is the fastest way to lose their business. When they have too many options to choose from, they’re less likely to decide on any of them. If they do decide to take you up on one of the many offers you presented them with, then they’re more likely to regret their decision later – leading to lower customer satisfaction. The phenomenon is known as choice overload.

Your best option for suggestive selling is simply presenting a few select offers that make the most sense for the individual customer. Personalized suggestions will yield the best results and boost customer satisfaction levels.

Develop a Loyalty Program

Loyalty programs are beneficial for both retailers and their customers. You’ll enjoy better customer retention rates, and your customers will get to increase their savings or enjoy special rewards.

When they know that they’ll be collecting points for rewards or getting their favorite items at a discount, your customers will be more open to the idea of upselling and add-on selling. They’ll stay with your business longer, and they’ll be more likely to share positive experiences with others.

So, develop a good loyalty program that’s beneficial to you and your customers, and enjoy the benefits of it.

The Bottom Line

Suggestive selling is a powerful method for boosting your profits and increasing customer satisfaction. As long as it’s done right, you and your customers stand to gain from it. So, give it a try, and see what a difference it can make to your bottom line.

All those albums and shoeboxes scattered all around the house treasure some of the most valuable memories you shared with your dear ones. Over time it can become hard to find the photos you want to take a look at. It’s entirely understandable that you want to scan them and keep them in one place well-organized.

The question is, how do you do it in the most effective way? First, you’ll need to get a hold of a scanner. You can find a variety of photo scanners here. However, getting a scanner is only the beginning of it. Here are the best ways to scan your old photos.

Plan Your Scans In Advance

You don’t want to scan your old photos as they come. If you do it, you will end up with a chunk of digital photos. You’ll risk this big chunk of digital material discourage you from organizing it. That’s why you should organize your photos and plan your scans in advance.

A simple methodology will do the trick. Decide how you want to group the photos. You can then go through all the photos and organize them by the criteria you want, such as dates, events, family & friends, trips, etc. If you have too many old photos, you should also make a scanning schedule so that you know what to scan first and have a timeline to stick to.

Finally, you don’t want all your photos to end up in “Scanner” or “My Pictures” directories. Make a new directory on your drive or cloud-storage and decide how you want to name directories. Make sure to move your scanned photos to designated directories as soon as you scan them.

Make Sure Your Scanner is Ready

The photo scanner is a piece of equipment vital for the success of your project. You need to tend to it with care and attention. First, make sure that it’s properly connected to the power source and your computer. Then, you have to ensure that you have the latest drivers and proprietary software used to run it.

Once you have taken care of the technical part of the care, you need to make sure that your scanner is clean. Any dust, stains, or fingertips on the scanner bed will potentially ruin your scans. Never use tissues or paper towels to clean the scanner bed. These leave debris that can affect the scans too. Instead, opt for a dry handkerchief, or even better, a dry microfiber cloth.

Since the scanner bed can get dirty when you place and remove photos, you should also wipe it clean every now and then.

Clean Your Photos Before Scanning Them

Stains and debris on your scanner bed can ruin your scans as the stains and dust on photos. That’s why you should dust off your pictures before putting them into the scanner. If you’ve kept your photos in a shoebox, they probably have some dust on them.

Use a can with compressed air and a dry microfiber cloth to dust em off. Just make sure to store the compressed air can properly so you don’t get liquid on your photos. There’s no need to get all your photos cleaned. Clear them in batches according to your scanning schedule. Otherwise, they might get dusty again, especially if you have a couple of thousands to scan.

Scan Multiple Photos at Once

If your scanner bed can fit several photos at once, why not scan multiple photos in one go? It will save you time. Make some space around every image when you put them on the scanner bed. However, you will need to crop those photos later and save them as individual files. If you don’t know how to do it – you should stick to the good old “one by one” routine.

Make sure to hit the “Preview” button before each scan. It will help you assess whether you placed the photos correctly and save you time down the line having to rotate images.

When it comes to choosing the best resolution for the images, the rule of thumb is to stick to 600 DPI. It’s more than enough to get sharp scans without the photos eating up too much of the storage space.

Finally, avoid using the default file names the software offers. Name every scanned image accordingly. Use dates, locations, or people names to name the files and save them in an appropriate folder, as we’ve previously discussed.

Follow these steps every time you want to scan your old photos, and you will be able to do it like a professional. As you can see, planning is vital for this delicate project. You will also need to make sure your scanner and photos are clean at all times to get good scans.