With online shopping just a click away, customers who visit your jewelry store are choosing the in-store experience. This means that, if your jewelry store doesn’t make their trip worthwhile by giving them an exceptional experience, they probably won’t be back.
Providing a great retail experience means being a trusted advisor, matching shopper needs with your products, and overcoming any hesitation they may have about purchasing an item they fear won’t deliver.
In other words, you need to bulldoze the roadblocks that prevent customers from stepping up to your jewelry store’s checkout counter.
In this blog, we’ll teach you how to do it.
Here are five simple tactics you can use to overcome jewelry store customer hesitation and start making more sales.
Apple stores deliver exceptional customer experiences, but one particular detail of their customer service principles is worth taking a closer look at.
Specifically, they instruct employees to “listen for and resolve expressed and unexpressed needs.” The word “unexpressed” is arguably the most important: It reveals that Apple doesn’t only want its associates to pay attention to the needs that customers explicitly tell them about.
Instead, it wants them to use their observational skills and context clues to identify and address the needs that customers don’t tell them about, too.
In your jewelry store, that could look like:
The bottom line? Pay attention to what your customers tell you — the spoken and the unspoken.
Related Read: Creating a VIP Buying Experience for High-End Jewelry Shoppers
Unlike other product categories like food, clothes, and personal care items, jewelry is nonessential by definition. It’s decorative, but it doesn’t serve any necessary purpose.
So, for you, overcoming jewelry store customer hesitation through emotional connections isn’t simply a good idea — it’s nonnegotiable.
Fortunately, jewelry lends itself perfectly to these connections. For example, from the moment a customer walks into your store, you form an almost instant emotional connection with them by asking “Who are we shopping for today?”. Whatever the answer, it will remind them of the emotional reason that they’re there.
Similarly, you can help customers quickly connect with a piece they’re eyeing by simply encouraging them to try it on and giving them a sincere compliment about how it looks.
And for existing customers, you can send personalized marketing emails centered around upcoming special events, make recommendations based on their past purchases, and create handwritten thank-you notes for large or custom orders.
Related Read: Personalization in Retail: 8 Strategies for Jewelry Stores
Trust is important for retail shops of all kinds, but especially for jewelry stores. After all, your customers must trust you to sell authentic jewelry, repair treasured family heirlooms, create custom pieces, and provide honest advice — often in exchange for relatively large sums of money.
If you take a transparent approach and make sure your customers feel that you’re advising and guiding them rather than pressuring them to open their wallets, trust will form naturally. You can do so by:
When your customers start to exhibit signs of hesitation, you can break through with the “Feel, Felt, Found” method. This approach could look something like:
By using the “Feel, Felt, Found” method, you can empathize with customers and help them understand the value of the purchase they’re considering, even when they’re feeling more hesitant than ever.
It’s undeniably frustrating to take the time to educate and assist a customer only to be met with a response like “I don’t know, I’ll have to think about it.” And in an independent jewelry shop where trust and transparency are paramount, aggressively chasing the sale could very well cause more harm than good.
So, how can you overcome this particular flavor of jewelry store customer hesitation without scaring away clients? It all comes down to using real and reasonable constraints to your advantage.
For instance:
To be sure your employees can use these tactics in a natural and non-pushy way, try having them role-play potential scenarios at staff meetings.
Some customers have higher or lower budgets than others, and there’s no getting around that fact. But within each customer’s budget is plenty of wiggle room you can use to sell them on your jewelry’s value rather than its price.
For example, let’s say a customer comes in with a relatively low budget for an engagement ring. From there, you can explain that by opting for a low-cost but durable stone like moissanite or a lab-grown diamond and pairing it with a high-purity metal setting, they can still afford to buy a gorgeous ring that stands the test of time and holds up to everyday wear.
In a scenario like this, you can make a sale by homing in on the value of the ring (beauty, durability) rather than drawing the customer’s attention to its price.
Related Read: How To Handle Jewelry Price Objections: 12 Proven Strategies
As a jewelry store owner, you know better than anyone that jewelry store customer hesitation doesn’t exist simply because shoppers enjoy making you work for each sale. It exists because your customers are real people with real budgets and concerns.
But with the right tactics and training, you and your salespeople can successfully knock down the barriers that keep your customers from buying pieces they’ll treasure forever.
And when it comes time to evaluate which strategies work and which ones you need to tweak, don’t rely on employees’ anecdotes alone.
Instead, use a point of sale (POS) system like Jewel360 that features detailed analytics, built-in customer relationship management (CRM) software, sophisticated marketing tools, and much more, so you can see exactly how your efforts are paying off — all while turning first-time buyers into loyal customers.
See how Jewel360 can adapt to your unique jewelry store by building a custom POS and getting your free quote today.