The sporting goods retail landscape is constantly evolving due to new technologies and ever-changing consumer habits and preferences. The success of your store will depend entirely on how satisfied your customers are and how much they are willing to spend on your products. Today’s customers prioritize buying local, loyalty, personalization, free shipping, and delivery.

By applying consumer psychology to your sales strategies, you can design more effective marketing campaigns and increase both sales and customer satisfaction.

Here are 10 ways to attract new retail customers and sell more sports equipment and sports-related services.

1. Focus on The Customer

The first rule of retail is to focus on the customer. You can have the best merchandise on the market, but if it’s not the merchandise the customer is looking for, it won’t matter. Golfers are not looking for baseball gloves. So, the first key to being a winning retailer is to understand your customer. If your specialty is a particular sport, know what merchandise will appeal to players, coaches, fans, and enthusiasts of that sport. If your sports store sells merchandise for all sports, understand the seasons, so you have a product that is in season. It’s all about your customer.

2. Size and Trend Analysis

Sporting goods is one of those specialty retail areas where trends can define the sales graph. You see this in sports equipment, sports apparel such as shoes and jerseys, and other sports-related merchandise. Understanding current market trends is a sure way to sell more products. You’ll keep the right items in stock and avoid products that won’t sell. You need a way to manage your products and the sizes you carry. Make sure you have a size chart that your customers can use as a guide to finding the right shoe size.

3. Manage Seasonal Inventories Efficiently

Sports is an intrinsically seasonal business. Knowing when to start ordering and stocking your shelves with seasonal sporting goods is key to managing your seasonal merchandise more effectively. Not only do you need to know when to order, but you need to know how much to order to get you through the next sales cycle.

Inventory tracking and monitoring are very important for sporting goods stores. Order enough to get through the inventory cycle, enable automatic replenishment, and allocate the right quantity of each product to each store in your chain. Serializing your products can help you do this more efficiently. This is how you keep your products moving and profit from your inventory.

4. Use Your Foot Space Efficiently

Store layout, merchandising displays, and the amount of product you can put on the shelf all depend on the size and shape of your selling space. If you set up your store properly, you will be able to stock the right products in the right quantity. To do this, you need to use the floor space you have to the fullest.

You need to keep your visuals up to date to drive traffic and sales. This means regularly updating your visual displays to keep up with the latest trends and seasons

5. Manage Repairs

Every athlete knows that once you’ve broken in your favorite gear, you don’t want to let it go until it has outworn its time. That’s why sporting goods retailers can earn extra revenue by repairing equipment or offering over-the-counter repairs to their customers. You’re more likely to sell more new merchandise if you entice your customer to come to you with a repair order.

If your retail store repairs sports equipment, you need a solution that can help you manage the process seamlessly.

6. Provide Effective Sales Training

Train employees to recommend products, encourage customers to spend more, and accept offers. It’s a good idea to hire employees who have experience in the sporting goods industry or who are passionate and knowledgeable about sporting goods products. You need a team of employees who not only communicate with customers or clients but also know how to build rapport and develop different relationships with each customer. Ideally, all of your salespeople can hold their own on the sales floor, especially when it comes to cross-selling and up-selling products and services.

Your sales manager will need to be knowledgeable about the world of sports or be a sports enthusiast to ensure they can help customers with questions and provide the right quality of service. Train employees to create a buying experience where the consumer engages and quickly turns into a buyer, not a browser. Equip your sales team with communication skills, industry and product knowledge, and the ability to become a concierge for that consumer. Maybe your teams are good at closing sales, but equipping them with mobile point-of-sale (POS) apps could boost them even more.

7. Provide a Seamless Omnichannel Experience

Omnichannel retailing is an integrated approach to retail across all channels that aims to provide consistent, seamless, and personalized experiences resulting in secure and frictionless payments. The combination of physical stores and e-commerce with social media is very powerful. Mobile commerce allows consumers to explore and find products they don’t typically look for in a physical store, to begin with.

To survive, sports retailers must integrate online and offline strategies to provide a seamless experience for their customers.

8. Offer a Loyalty Program

Another tip for increasing your retail sales is to increase customer retention by creating a loyalty program. Focus on repeat customers and keep them coming back. Ask your loyal customers once a year to complete a satisfaction survey that will help you identify areas for improvement, then put an action plan in place to attack those areas and make adjustments as needed.

Loyal customers will be less difficult to convince to spend more than new customers. Leverage this buying engine by rewarding your existing customers, enticing new customers to return with the promise of rewards, and using the marketing tools of your loyalty program. The goal of a loyalty program is to get customers to reengage with your brand and become repeat buyers, usually with discounts or other special perks. You can use the loyalty program to gain insights into customer behaviors and use this data to optimize and personalize communications, products, and offers.

9. Maximize Promotions and Seasonal Offers

Special offers can be very effective in attracting customers or increasing cart size. To achieve greater profitability, discount items that are often sold next to high-profit products or place low-cost add-ons near your checkout. This can encourage last-minute impulse purchases. One way to improve sales at a sports store is to offer a special deal that customers can’t get at your online store or elsewhere.

You can offer a limited one-day offer, a free item with a minimum purchase, buy now pay later (BNPL) services, curbside-pickup services, Click-and-collect, a percentage off, a giveaway, or a buy-one-get-one-free offer. Offering these services will help drive in-store traffic and sales. It’s proven to get people through your door and increase in-store sales.

10. Automate Your Merchandise

Retail automation provides sporting goods brands with better data, increased efficiency, and overall cost reduction. It reduces workload and error-prone manual tasks, allowing staff to focus on important business decisions.

Automating your online and offline merchandising allows you to be more productive and save time. It helps sporting goods retailers stay organized and streamline workflows to focus on delivering a better customer experience.

ChainDrive Equips You to Win

Sporting goods retailing needs software that can efficiently manage every retail operation. ChainDrive is an intuitive integrated retail management solution that can be customized to meet the specific needs of individual retailers. For those selling sporting goods, ChainDrive Sporting Goods POS software provides the powerful equipment needed to beat the competition:

• Intelligent size and trend analysis incorporate user-defined fields for unique product attributes.
• Seasonal product management to keep you ahead of demand.
• Serialization to simplify team orders.
• Repair management to keep your retail operations running smoothly.
• Inventory management provides real-time status on all your channels.
• Advanced pre-pack and mismatch management to address footwear challenges.
• Professional support is available 24/7/365.

ChainDrive integrated retail management software meets the needs of today’s omnichannel retailers. The Sporting Goods software component is designed with feedback from retailers who have requested features that address their business pain points. In addition, you can request custom components to ensure that your management software is perfectly suited to your business.

Running a sporting goods store is not a stressful business; just make sure you follow the steps outlined to take advantage of this opportunity and make a profit! Ready to implement these tips in your sporting goods store? You need a unified commerce platform that can keep up. Contact us for a free demo to see if ChainDrive is the right system for you.