Imagine you are taking a stroll through the Broadway and one of the showrooms catches your attention. You can’t resist your urge to walk in and check out. You enter the showroom and the items are arranged in such a manner that you end up buying on the spot.  Have you heard people saying it's so easy to shop from a store and they keep going back to the same store?
 Yes, all these comforts, feel and urge are generated by the power of various merchandising techniques. 
In this highly competitive and rapidly changing retail landscape, planning and implementing the right merchandising techniques for your business decides the sales graph of your business. 

Plan your Merchandising with Planograms

Planograms are the most effective tools to help you optimize your merchandising strategies.  It is the logical organization of products taking advantage of customer behavior and psychology.
A few years ago, a popular store in the UK realized that a higher percentage of their customers who are buying diapers were men. After detailed research, it was revealed that husbands had the responsibility of replenishing the diapers while wives are busy taking care of babies at home. 
When the store management became aware of this customer behavior, they tried displaying beer and snacks alongside diapers and immediately observed an increase in sales. 
Planograms and Merchandising are 2 halves of a whole. As product placement being the epicenter of merchandising, planograms help to strategize your shelf space and product displays taking advantage of color coordination, eye scanning pattern, brand blocking, cross-merchandising, product grouping, category, manufacturer and more.  
Well-planned planograms can not only help you to boost your sales but also reduce the supply chain costs, store-level costs and minimize space wastage. Apart from planning out attractive displays, Planograms also generate various analysis reports to study the customer behavior pattern from time to time.

Here are few Merchandising techniques you can plan with Planograms:

Visual Merchandising

Visual merchandising is the art of displaying products in a way that is visually compelling and improving customer experience with an intent to increase sales. 
Several kinds of researches have shown that most of the shoppers take their decisions while they are inside the store. Once you have attracted customers to your store, eye-catching and functional product displays and store layouts are designed to entice shoppers to make purchases. 

A classic example of visual merchandising is taking advantage of the eye-scanning pattern. The products placed at eye -level sell better whereas bottom shelves can be used for kids’ centric products which are at their eye-level. 

Cross-merchandising

Cross-merchandising is another powerful strategy to drive sales by strategically arranging complementary products together. Besides boosting sales, cross-merchandising also improves customer experience and convenience and saves a lot of time for shoppers.

Few classic examples of cross-merchandising are: 

• Batteries are displayed together with electronic appliances
• Loaves of bread are displayed near different kinds of butter and cheese
• Ice- creams and ice-cream scoops
• Beers kept alongside salty snacks, chips or peanuts

Cross- merchandising when done right is a powerful strategy to drive sales and customer loyalty. It entices customers for impulse buys and adds positivity to customer experience
Use Nexgen POG for optimizing your cross-merchandising strategies and boost your sales. 

Color blocking

Color blocking is another important strategy to drive sales. It is the use of colors to display the products in a visually appealing manner. It is usually done in a vertical block known as color ribboning.
Color blocking can be done either in-store or in the window display to attract more customers to the store. If you have to really optimize the color blocking strategy, you need to know your customers as colors have power on human emotions.

Horizontal and Vertical Merchandising

Vertical merchandising is a method of arranging products in a vertical display. Vertical displays allow customers to stay in one position and view the products from top to bottom.
Horizontal merchandising is horizontally arranging products taking advantage of the human eye scanning pattern from left to right.

Plan Your Sales Using Nexgen POG

Planogramming traditionally was considered to be a labor intensive process. But today there are easy to use online tools like Nexgen POG.

Nexgen POG is cloud based planogram software that can be accessed from anywhere by logging in using your username and password. You don’t require any complicated installation process and other associated setup/configuration complications.

Apart from planning out attractive displays, Nexgen POG also generate various analysis and reports like sales reports, space reports and capacity analysis report. The sales report can give you insights into the days of supply and space to sales ratio. Space and capacity reports can give you insights into shelf space and shelf share. The capacity report can give you the total capacity of shelves and sections including available volume and used volume of each product. 

Be it pharmaceutical industry, cosmetics, retail and beverages, Planogram can help you strategize your shelf planning in any industry. 
Start optimizing your sales patterns using Nexgen POG.  

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Check out how does brand-blocking improve retail merchandising