The Art Of Selling Product With A Glass Door Merchandiser

By Randy Skyba, VP of Sales and Marketing for Minus Forty

With micro markets being declared essential services during the current COVID-19 pandemic, you may very well be in for some increased traffic in the next few months. When it comes to your glass door fridges in particular, besides ensuring that you are stringent about sanitation and food safety, it’s also a good time to look at maximizing their selling potential.

Make sure your glass door refrigerators and freezers are well-maintained

Now more than ever, proper cleaning and food safety practices should be top of mind. You should be wiping down your refrigerator and freezer units’ door handles and glass doors with a non-abrasive disinfecting solution several times daily. A clean merchandiser not only makes the product inside look more appealing, you’ll also be helping to prevent the virus spread. Having hand sanitizer or disinfecting wipes (with at least 70% alcohol content) available for customers right next to the unit is also a nice touch (literally), as this can make customers feel safer and, as a result, more likely to buy.

Customers may not outright notice if your refrigeration unit is functioning correctly, but they certainly will notice if it isn’t. For example, broken doors that fail to close (sliders are notorious for this), burned-out lightbulbs or dated (and often noisy) equipment are like “bad PR” for the products inside. Proper maintenance is crucial for both aesthetics and food safety. A good way to remember regular maintenance tasks is with the acronym “ACT:” since optimal Air Flow, regular Cleaning and Temperature monitoring are key to protecting the product and the people.

Brighten your sales with LED lighting

Your products are the star, so it’s important to give them a bright, well-lit “stage” to showcase their appeal. High-efficiency LED lighting improves color and contrast, helps to grab customers’ attention, saves energy and lasts up to 4-5 times longer than traditional incandescent lighting. And better lighting literally pays off: studies have proven that installing better lighting improves sales by 35% and conversion rates (number of customers who made a purchase after viewing the display) by 100%.

Sell smarter with signage

If you’re not already, take advantage of the “blank canvas” your refrigerated and freezer merchandisers provide. Colorful door stickers, banners, decals, and bright, high visibility backlit signage are all effective ways to better feature your product offering. Your signage should provide quick information, using simple, straightforward and “easy-to-understand” language. To promote interest and keep customers engaged, you should also plan to change up your stickers, banners, and decals as often as possible.

Is investing in signage worth it? You bet. According to a research study by Brigham Young University, displays with signs outperformed displays without signs by a whopping 20%. Another surprising finding was that when regular priced items had signs and the sale items didn’t, regular priced merchandise outperformed sale merchandise by 18%! Bottom line: signs draw attention to items, and the cost doesn’t seem to matter. And when the customers take notice, they tend to buy.

Choose your colors carefully

Believe it or not, color can influence consumer choices. They’re considered a key component of visual marketing and certain colors carry strong connections to specific ideas and evoke different feelings in people. Bright colors like orange, yellow and red radiate energy and are known to stimulate appetite, which is why restaurant and fast-food logos tend to use orange, yellow and red a lot. Cooler greens and blues tend to be associated with relaxing and slowing down the pace. Colors you might want to use sparingly in your glass door fridge displays are black, brown, grey and pink, as these colors have been shown to decrease appetite.

There’s such a thing as perfect product position, too

You may have heard of the expression “eye level is buy level” – and it’s actually true. Positioning your best-selling products at eye level – which is at or around the 60” mark– makes it easy for shoppers to find the products they buy most often. You can capitalize on this by placing new products close to these best sellers, to increase the likelihood of them being seen. This is also an excellent opportunity to tie in a graphic highlighting the new product in the well-trafficked glass door refrigerator merchandiser. You should also make sure that shelves are fully stocked, because orderly, stocked shelves have a direct impact on product sales as well, conveying freshness and attention to best before dates.

When youuse the best practices described above, they add up to a better experience for your customers, and that all adds up to better sales. Additionally, all of us at Minus Forty would like to say “thank you” for keeping our essential services going during the pandemic period.

Randy Skyba is the Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Minus Forty Technologies. He helps retailers merchandise their frozen and refrigerated products.

Sources: https://medium.com/@onlystaples/colors-that-affect-your-appetite-cfdb8fecbd72