9 Planogramming Benefits and Opportunities to Increase Sales

Planogramming is considered successful when the use of planograms leads to an improvement in the store's financial performance or the entire chain store. This is easy to follow when analyzing the effectiveness of the executed planograms.

If you are planning to open a store or to update the placement of goods on the trading floor, planogramming will help. This process includes creating a product layout on a planogram, sending planograms for in-store execution, and monitoring and analyzing planograms.

Planogram (POG, plan-o-gram) - a visualization that shows the placement of goods in commercial equipment or merchandising fixtures in the store. Visual merchandising used in retail chains increases product attractiveness to customers.

Planograms and store layouts are the best way to get an idea of ​​how to place items in a store and make predictions about future sales. Retailers use planograms to structure all they need to work with the assortment of chain stores. Merchandisers use planograms to plan the placement of each product in detail. When knowing the placement of the goods, a retailer can analyze the effectiveness of the layout, prices, sales rates, and many other indicators.

The planogram helps to control inventory and to identify groups of basic and complementary products for future cross-merchandising.

With planograms, retailers can track marketing campaigns. Therefore, they are actively used by marketers in order to place successfully new products on the store shelf.

Top Advantages of Using Planograms  

1. Reducing the out-of-stock. The use of a planogram allows you to prevent the absence of any product in the warehouse. Programs for creating and managing planograms allow you to track out-of-stock indicators. You can use the PlanoHero automation service that generates out-of-stock analytical reports. The system automatically warns about goods that are not in stock. Accordingly, to avoid the situation of running out of products and lost sales, managers can order a new set of products just in time. Therefore, the store will always have items in stock, and available for customers. Thus, the income and loyalty of repeat customers will increase.

2. Planogramming allows you to control the balance between the available goods in the store and the current demand for certain categories of goods. With information about the items that are in stock and on shelves in the store, retailers can control the cost of purchasing goods.

3. Space optimization. The store space is limited. Therefore, the main task of the merchandiser is to find ways to place a huge number of products in the store's limited area. Planograms will help. The merchandiser will have the ability to experiment and adjust the layout when necessary and to see the full picture of the product placement.

When creating store plans and planograms, it is considered how efficient store space is. How is it optimized? How are the goods, displays, signs, and lighting placed in-store?

The efficient use of floor space according to the planogram increases the return on investment. Planograms help make sure there is room for each product on the shelf. As well as structure processes, establish interaction with customers, and control inventory.

4. Focus on buyers. How convenient is it for customers to move around on the trading floor? Can he quickly find what he is looking for? What are the buyer's journeys and behavior in the store?

When you know what and how the customer buys, you can determine how to sell goods. Thus, the use of planograms helps to place goods on the shelves, focusing on the behavior, needs, demand, and characteristics of repeat and potential customers. And as a result, you get big sales.

5. Effective marketing drives sales. The use of planograms by the marketing department helps plan and effectively place products on the right shelves, track sales and analyze marketing campaigns. Working with planograms, marketers can influence the assortment and adjust the availability of goods. Planograms are also used to integrate new products into the current layout to optimize sales among similar products.

6. Reducing inventory costs. In-store shelf space optimization with planograms is based on sales volume, margins, package sizes, and delivery frequency. With these metrics in mind, retailers can prevent lost sales due to errors or late stock replenishment. When shelves are optimized for inventory, each restocking can be immediately placed on the shelves.

7. Analytics. You can't improve what you don't measure. It's about collecting and analyzing store data. If store data is unstructured or missing, the retailer will not be able to improve business processes and increase profits.

Modern planogramming automation platforms such as PlanoHero allow collecting, managing data analytics, evaluation, and forecasting of future sales. So, for example, when you've learned what kind of product and for what reason got large sales, you can use this information in the future, as well as apply this knowledge in other stores of the chain.

8. Planning and strategic vision. Planogramming helps retailers to plan processes in the chain store. After all, planograms allow you to understand which products are in demand, which zones of the trading floor are the most visited, as well as where problems arise, and which processes need to be improved. A customized planogramming process helps to plan sales and determine the opportunities and strategy for the development of the entire chain store.

9. Planogram scaling. With planogramming automation, retail processes become simpler, easier, and faster. Building and sending planograms to chain stores, planogram execution control, and analytics are configured and can be applied in a few clicks to all stores at once. Processes that used to take a lot of time are now being automated using planogramming services. This allows you to get results in seconds, changing retail and increasing revenues.

Automated planogramming delivers accurate and efficient results by adapting any layout to the needs of individual stores.

The integration of planogramming automation in retail saves precious time, effort, and resources. By optimizing the planogramming process, a retailer, especially of large chains, can set up any parameters and apply these settings en masse up to hundreds and thousands of planograms. Therefore, this is not only a saving time and resources but a tangible cost saving that allows you to redirect time and effort to more important tasks.