Customer demand and expectations for retailers are increasing faster than in recent years. Therefore, you need to have a well-designed assortment plan, or a marketing planning strategy to give the best customer experience and achieve your marketing goals.
The versatile planning strategy sounds complicated and may be new to you, so we’re here to give you an insight into it. We will look at what assortment planning is, how it works, its benefits, and how you can improve on it.
What is an assortment, you may wonder before learning the meaning of the word? An assortment is a group of products that a business offers.
What is Assortment Planning?
Assortment Planning in Sales is the process of selecting products that the seller wants to sell at a particular time to maximize profits. In other words, it means that retailers decide which goods to buy and sell to their customers. It’s all about having the right goods in the right place at the right time.
Customer satisfaction depends largely on the types of products offered by retailers. Your customers may be disappointed if the products they want are gone or if the color of their choice is not available. As a result, they will go to a competitor’s shop.
It is important to know that installing all your products in your store is not possible because the cost of inventing will go up. Therefore, you should increase diversity and make marketing planning a priority to save costs and achieve profit growth.
Helps to Maximize Sales
When assortment planning strategies are used effectively, they can increase sales and help the seller grow the base of his customers. They are important because they determine the goods the customer is in contact with, which leads to a purchase decision.
The assortment can vary depending on the seasons – the ice cream shop can offer different summer flavors and different flavors during the rainy season. A good sales plan will help attract more buyers with different tastes to one store.
Similarly, in supermarkets, conventional goods, such as toothbrushes and toothpaste, are strategically integrated so that customers are persuaded to buy more than they intended. This caters to the public demand and increases sales.
Reducing out-of-stock problems
If any product is not available it will leave customers with dissatisfaction. Assortment Planning will help if a certain product is about to go out of stock. New, products can be added at the earliest before the existing batch of products finishes. If a new product is recently launched in the market. The demand for that product will increase. A retailer can stock up the new products for customers.
Attracting customers
During holidays, there is a huge demand for food products such as sweets. A retailer can put out offers on such products to attract customers. Increasing the choice available for customers will increase customer satisfaction with good feedback for retailers. For example, during Diwali Festival in India, a lot of offers are given out on gifts and sweets to attract customers.
Easy to Assist Customers
When the seller has the right assortment, he will be able to assist the customer in meeting his requirements. He will also help the customer but does not seek it beyond his store and thus give the customer the best experience. For example, a customer searching for shampoo can be assisted by taking the body products section.
Easy to plan retail budget
The retailer can store standard sizes, colors and, varieties of the most sought-after or widely used products with different sizes and variations, and colors on demand. You can avoid improper distribution of goods and discard unwanted inventory because everything is well organized. This weather can set a budget to buy stock and store it properly without over-budgeting and overcrowding.
Helps to avoid losses
With proper planning, a trader can avoid the stock process, causing financial losses to the trader. The business ability of a trader who is interested in a variety of trades and the best when the business potential is a rover will be a stock loss.
Keep your loyal customers
Instead of guessing, you do an experiment based on the performance of previous sales for each store and build a plan accordingly. This way, your loyal customers will get what they want in your store because they are more likely to buy the same items last year and think you are giving them away this year.
Control inventory spending
When your marketing strategy is done carefully, you will have an accurate estimate of the required assortment. Retailers will therefore spend a fortune on the program and will not overspend. As a result, we will reduce unnecessary installation costs and spending. This will ensure that the losses are in control.
Stand out from the competition
Having a good separation plan allows you to know which products are the hottest and put them on your shelves. If you can be quick to bring the latest trends, you can beat your rivals and improve the traffic.
Have a full understanding of your target customers
It’s important to understand what makes your customers spend money and why your customers choose to visit your store. Imagine you own a restaurant; you will incorporate a wide product range with low depth instead of the surrounding path because your targeted customers may want to find a variety of products.
Work in reverse sales
Short-term transactions are a way to put related assets together to increase sales. Once you have decided to sell sandals in a particular store, you may want to consider displaying sunglasses next to them. Customers are more likely to buy sunglasses when they are close to each other because these two items are exactly what your customers need during the summer.
Identify market styles using different platforms
We’ve been talking a lot about seeing styles in this article, but how can you do that? In addition to using tools like Google Analytics and Google ads, you can simply read blog posts, trend reports, Google styles, etc. You can also find the most popular items in each product category on major eCommerce platforms, such as Amazon, Shopify, eBay, and so on.
Assortment Planning plays a very important role in satisfying customer demand and making important business decisions. It helps to understand consumer expectations and to make sure you are doing the right thing. A variety of planning is done in supermarkets and businesses. I hope that this cover-up gives you more ideas about store planning. Offering too much variety in a product line can be frustrating for customers because it makes it harder to make a decision. Therefore, doing proper market research is important.
Algoscale leverages advanced tools to have an understanding of the current retail market trend and assisted our client to catch the attention of customers where their competitors lagged behind. All these reports generated are integrated with a separate customized web dashboard with the help of Business Intelligence (BI) tools.
Our goal at Algoscale is to transform data into insightful knowledge, and knowledge into quantifiable profits for our clients. Data, in our belief, is the key to any enterprise’s success.
