Ubiquitous smartphone adoption is completely changing how people shop and interact with brands. With smartphones surpassing more than 125 million U.S. consumers (comScore Mobile in Focus Report), mobile marketing strategies should be top-of-mind for retailers of any kind. While some brands, such as McDonald’s, Starbucks and Amazon, are initiating effective mobile experiences to grow their businesses, others are getting left behind. In order to stay relevant in today’s mobile world, here are a few tips that can be adapted for any retailer:
Find And Nurture Your Niche:
The niches for mobile engagement are dependent on how consumers use brands to complement their own consumer journey. Each segment of retail has different constraints, and each brand’s mobile strategy should focus on the opportunity to use mobile to help overcome those customer journey pain points.
For example, fast-food industry players are leveraging mobile engagement to improve the traffic flow issues the industry has been trying to tackle for ages. Both the McDonald’s and KFC mobile wallet apps allow customers to order and pay on their smartphone and skip the line in-store. This makes the customer journey much quicker, while providing the customer service that in-store staff may not be capable of managing.
Be Willing To Adapt:
When customers can get something online for cheaper, and in only a few clicks, it is imperative that retailers focus on creating a reason for them to continue shopping in-store. In a few unfortunate examples, such as Borders bookstore, brands are failing to realize that digital is here to stay and differentiate their in-store shopping experience to make it worthwhile for customers. To compete with online e-commerce giants such as Amazon, who are using mobile engagement to provide more authentic customer service traditionally given by friendly sales staff; retailers should start thinking about adding more value to the physical retail store.
They can do this through value-added features such as loyalty rewards savings that are exclusively in-store, geo-located incentives that inspire customer walk ins, mobile-to-store ordering and free delivery options.
Be Where Your Customers Are All Of The Time:
With mobile connectivity, there is no longer a pattern to how consumers shop. A shopping trip may start by reading a review on a blog, browsing on a tablet, receiving a mobile coupon, or purchasing in-store. These fragmented customer journeys explain why retailers need to be present on every channel to deliver a relevant and user-friendly experience. McDonald’s, KFC and Amazon all make their mobile ordering and payment service accessible online by tablet, and by mobile phone. No matter what device consumers are on, they have access to the same high level service.
Create Incentive:
You will have to give your customers a reason to incorporate mobile into their shopping experience. One retailer doing that very well is Starbucks. Starbucks, for example, has a great program for incentivizing customers. They offer relevant rewards that customers want to use, and enable customers to pay faster with the in-store mobile payment feature.
Additionally, the retailers that can add the most value to the customer journey will be the ones that win in driving consumer adoption. Loyalty programs traditionally reward customers for making purchases in-store. With the increase in customers choosing to browse now and buy later, retailers should consider more unique approaches like Mobile-to-Store Rewarding, implementing loyalty points for browsing that can be applied towards future purchases.
Play Favorites:
The mobile customer is your preferred customer because the information collected with each transaction is the real mobile shopping gold mine. To get more from your customers shopping on mobile, create a reason for them to try your new service through exclusive benefits such as mobile-only couponing, complimentary products for downloading the app, and the option to skip the line.
Conclusion
73% of retailers have or are currently developing a mobile strategy (Main Street Analyst), shifting the mobile debate from developing a mobile presence, to developing a thoughtful, successful strategy that really engages their customers.
On the contrary, mobile engagement goes far beyond marketing techniques and is more reliant on scalability and technological capacity, which often times can be incredibly complicated for retailers to implement.
We believe the real key to effective mobile marketing is to leverage platform based solutions that incorporate POS middleware and real-time synch of product availability, back office interfaces that enable retailers to pilot their own campaigns and advanced reporting to understand consumer purchasing behavior, demographics and interests.
Only then will retailers be able to create stronger relationships with their customers, and the more likely it is that stores will be able to survive in this increasingly mobile world.
Jérémie Leroyer is the CEO of AIRTAG, the mobile shopping ecosystems startup. AIRTAG’s sweet spot is end-to-end Mobile Shopping Solutions including in-store devices and secure mobile wallets that deliver an interactive and engaging user experience.
Source: http://goo.gl/hR9yOw
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