The Storefront Business: 5 Crucial Elements of a Successful Grand Opening

Lizzie Weakley

November 22, 2017

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A grand opening is a chance to create brand awareness among your target clients. It is also a chance to increase the sales volumes by offering great deals to your prospects. However, for it to be successful, certain elements should be accomplished. Here are five of them.

Plan

A grand opening is more of a wedding party. The devil is in the details. Choose a strategic date, create a timeline for completion of specific timelines, establish a budget, and set goals for the grand opening among other tasks. You also have to plan details to plan your brands such as music décor, food and signage. Start planning early in advance to ensure that there is time to make adjustments and cater for the delay.

Promote Your Grand Opening Event

You do not expect the prospects to come to your grand opening if you do not create a buzz around the event. Your advertising strategy should be two-pronged; traditional and online. Create a fan page on your favorite social media page and connect with your fans. At the same time take advantage of brochures, posters, press release on mass media channels, postcards and word of mouth advertising among other tools.

A Trial Run

Enact your grand opening before the actual event. Go through all the main activities of the event to ensure that everything will run as planned. You can have friends and family to walk through as practice and rate the experience they get from the business. You can then make adjustments where there are gaps. The trial run should include the media teams who will be entertaining and recording the event.

Interact

On your D-day ensure you have enough workforce to handle the expected visitors as per the expected numbers. Ensure that your team is interacting with the customers and have enough information about your products. Offer tours, and exchange contacts. Professionals at companies like Garland’s, Inc. suggest that if you are dealing with heavy items such as furniture, buy quality carts and fit them with robust casters for carrying the purchased pieces to the parking lot or your delivery vehicle.

Feedback

At the end of the day, evaluate if you have met your goals. You can only determine this by collecting feedback from your employees and customers. Make it easy for both parties to give feedback. For clients, it could be an anonymous note at the entrance that is dipped in a closed box. You could also sit with your team and evaluate your success and near misses.

Use the grand event to tap into opportunities for more business and enhance product awareness. Get valuable feedback on your product offering too. Such comes handy in your future sales.