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Big retailers such as Nordstrom, Victoria’s Secret and Lowe’s are increasingly bringing physical manifestations of social media into their stores to excite mobile-savvy shoppers and drive sales.
With more shoppers using their phones in-store, often to connect with social media, and throughout the path-to-purchase, it makes sense for retailers to carry over the interest in social media to their window displays and other store marketing efforts. The strategy is an example of the blurring of the lines between marketing, content and advertising as omnichannel marketing matures....
Back in the early 2000s, I was the editor of Progressive Grocer magazine, which did a “Super 50” list of top supermarket chains by revenue. In the first few versions of the list, however, the true top dog was missing. Walmart had been building supercenters and Neighborhood Market grocery stores at an aggressive pace, but it didn't report its transactional data to IRI.
We finally worked with several data companies and did square footage analyses to come up with a number to attach to Walmart's grocery sales and confer top honors upon it.
It was a relief to us on the editorial staff, because everyone knew Walmart ruled the roost. It appeared there was nothing Sam Walton's troops could not conquer. Then came digital....
The consumer is changing. Evolving. And it’s largely thanks to social media.The proliferation of social media has made it easier than ever before for consumers to reach out to brands, to research their purchases and to shop from anywhere in the world.
Here are four new social consumer behaviors that your brand should be paying attention to: - They are mobile
- The social shopper can shop from her living room, the subway or while at work. She can tweet recommendations in transit, and read reviews in bed. She can engage with brands anywhere at any time.
- Social consumers now spend more time accessing digital media through a mobile device than on a desktop...
There’s a tsunami of change coming toward the retail business environment and interaction with the customer that may turn today’s approaches and strategies in completely new directions, impacting everything from store design to communication with consumers.
It’s termed “living services,” and according to a new Accenture report it will let retailers deploy less intrusive customer experiences while boosting customer engagement and fostering stronger and faster sales.
The report provides information on how some brands are already putting ‘living services’ to work within the retail spectrum. One is example cited is how fashion retailer Nordstrom is determining store merchandising now on a weekly basis through tracking and gauging consumer product interest using the social network tool Pinterest.
“Living services will allow retailers to move away from the industry’s standard scenario of bombarding shoppers with offers on arrival at a location. By working with Pinterest Nordstrom is also providing staff with an iPad app to make it easy to show customers trending products and merchandise live,” stated the report.
The technology enabling “living services” is now mature enough for brands to create and deliver them at scale, the report said....
In today's Retail Wrap Up we cover a vast array of stories; from the weird and whacky (did you say, smart jeans) to Instagram's life changing update. No spoilers here, we wouldn't want to ruin the surprise.
Women may always be a mystery to men, but that need not be the case for retailers. Here is a closer look at how female consumers are navigating the retail sector right now that can help you land more sales with women shoppers.
Who, what, when, where, why and how? These are the questions that every researcher seeks to answer. If your business needs to find success in its efforts at marketing to women, these are questions that can help provide insights about female consumers that you can use to shape your marketing strategies. Here are some research findings about women shoppers that made our list of things you should know....
Webloyalty research into online consumers has revealed that UK retailers could be missing out on as much as £66m in additional revenue through failing to personalise the experience they offer online shoppers. Over half of UK consumers said that they would make more of an effort to use a retailer if it offered a good personalised experience.
The top fifty retailers in the UK have an average turnover of £3.2bn*. For an average-sized retailer generating a turnover of £850m (such as Wickes or Mothercare), this could deliver a 7.8% uplift in sales**.
In monetary terms, this translates to an annual uplift of £66 million, not only stimulating online consumers to spend, but also helping to improve loyalty. For larger companies, this number would naturally increase even further....
Despite a myriad of research studies pointing to the importance of personalization, the majority (74%) of online retailers still promote irrelevant items to shoppers via email, according to OrderDynamics c research. Some retailers (33%) don’t even sufficiently follow up with consumers after they sign up for the brand mailing list.
The report, titled: Customer Relationships: The Dating Game, compares retailing to dating, in that businesses have to convince consumers to “go out” with them to start and continue a business relationship. The study specifically measures the effectiveness of a “first date,” or purchase, as well as the long-term relationships that can lead to additional purchases and increased order values. Opinion Matters conducted the study on behalf of OrderDynamics by surveying more than 60 retailers and 2,000 consumers....
Fill your shopping cart, and have your goods delivered to your doorstep. This is the ecommerce experience that Amazon and friends taught us to love, as marketers and customers alike.
According to recent research and developments, new kid on the block “click and collect” apparently scores far higher in customer satisfaction and sales. And is exactly what it sounds like. Customers can click on their computer or smartphone to make a purchase and are then welcome to pick up their goods in person. Too simple to work?
“The importance of click and collect should not be underestimated. It has become firmly established, with expenditure set to grow 82% from 2014 to 2019 to £6.5bn, with clothing and footwear making up over half of all sales. “...
A recent survey by consulting firm Accenture found 63 percent of consumers plan to use a laptop or home computer to make purchases or research items this holiday season, up 16 percentage points from last year.
The smartphone, in particular, is gaining ground. As of August, 174 million people in the U.S. owned one — 72 percent of the mobile market, according to Reston, Va., digital tracking firm comScore. Branding Brand’s research found that mobile devices generated more than half of online retail visits that month, up from 4 percent in 2010.
The digital world generates data even better than sales, so there’s plenty of information on how Americans are using their tech tools.
Accenture’s survey found 24 percent of consumers plan to use a smartphone while shopping, up from 18 percent last year. Almost half of those surveyed are already using or at least would be willing to try services like ApplePay and PayPal that let them use their mobile phone to pay at checkout....
It's important for retailers to know who their potential customers are online in order to market to them effectively.In the first quarter of 2014, 198 million U.S. consumers bought something online, according to comScore's quarterly State Of Retail report. That translates to 78% of the U.S. population age 15 and above.
But who are these shoppers driving the trend of buying online and on mobile devices?
In a new report, BI Intelligence breaks down the demographics of U.S. online and mobile shoppers by gender, age, income, and education, and takes a look at what they're shopping for, and how their behaviors differ...
If there is one thing that is true when it comes to finding cool products for men, it's that unless you are an extremely decisive person, sometimes these unique style and tech products are hard to find.
With this in mind, we decided to highlight the most essential websites to follow for insights on cool products and gear. These are websites that we check almost everyday and we wanted to share them with you as well. We didn't rank them in any order. We recommend bookmarking all of them and make sure to follow them on social media....
A blog about ecommerce marketing, running an online business and updates to Shopify's ecommerce community. Small and boutique retailers have their work cut out for them when it comes to staying in business. There's a lot they need to know, and a lot that they need to take action on. Whether it's the latest trends in omni-channel retail, engaging their most loyal customers over social media, or understanding the way technology and mobile are revolutionizing how they accept payments.
Which is why I've taken the liberty of assembling the top 25 blogs that every small retailer needs to read and subscribe to if they want to stay ahead of the curve and thrive when it comes to selling in person...
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Beacons have been heralded as the future of retail, with 85% of retailers expected to use the technology by 2016. But getting a successful proximity-marketing program off the ground involves more than just setting out a few digital devices.
A bad user experience or a lack of infrastructure can derail even the most ambitious beacon program, which is why executives from some of the industry’s top firms are now focusing so heavily on client education. By offering guidance during the setup process, technology providers are hoping to help retailers overcome common challenges and launch more successful beacon programs.
Here are the top six most common reasons why beacon programs fail, as seen through the eyes of experts working in the industry....
Via Douglas G Hall
The report, Navigating the New Digital Divide which studied close to 2,000 urban Indian shoppers, said the conversion rate of shoppers who use a digital touch-point is 40% higher than the non-digitally influenced shoppers.
Besides more than a third of digitally influenced shoppers would prefer the flexibility of buy-online-pickup-in-store, the report said.
However, Rohit Bhatiani, director at Deloitte added, “Today, 90% of the retailers do not have a mobile app or mobile-friendly websites and hence these retailers are not even considered by consumers for pre-buying research. Retailers need to create a strong meaningful digital presence to attract customer attention.”...
How much is your customer worth?
One approach would be to re-focus acquisition strategy based on the Customer Lifetime Value or CLV. According to the 2015 RJ Metrics Benchmark report, a new e-commerce customer is worth, on average, $154 in their first year. This number varies by type of retail. For instance, the categories of housewares, food and drugs tend to be above this average.
What is more interesting is that only 32 percent of these new customers are likely to make a second purchase in their first year. The report also reveals that the top 1 percent of customers are worth 18 times more than the average customer, which equals about $2,772.
Armed with this information, an e-tailer can easily calculate ROI on programs targeting new customers vs. programs targeting your biggest fans—the top 5 percent....
Smartphones and the emergence of the Internet of Things is giving the consumer new power to demand the products that they want for the best possible price. One increasing trend is in-store real-time price comparison: 40% of consumers surveyed by GFK double check offers using their mobile phone.
What’s more, an additional one billion consumers across the world are expected to begin using smartphones in the next five years. For retailers, knowing the market and understanding how consumers want to shop is more important than ever.
Dive Brief: Retailers don’t have a good handle on the effectiveness of their digital strategies because they’re looking at “channel-specific sales” rather than gauging how digital connections are also influencing in-store sales, according to a new report from Deloitte Digital.
In 2014 for example, in-store sales driven in part by mobile and web were $1.7 trillion, five times that of web sales, according to the report, “Navigating the New Digital Divide.”Deloitte says its research indicates that digital-influenced sales — sales in which consumers have used a device to shop at some point in the process — will account for well more than half (64 cents) of each dollar spent, a total of $2.2 trillion by the end of 2015....
In India, e-commerce has seen tremendous growth in recent years. Here are eight major things we learnt about online selling in 2014.…
The next two years will bring about new behavioural realities of device connected retail environments. What sort of shopper habits will develop as new retail technologies become widespread and expected by the consumer? And most importantly, what can retailers actually do about it?
Yes, current retail environments (both on and offline) are data-rich and increasingly personalised. But culture hasn’t caught up yet. In the past, technological advances in retail have been defined by the friction they introduced to the shopping process, rather than convenience. Think of the current state of self-checkouts; theoretically timesaving, but in practice just an often-broken inconvenience. It hardly feels like progress.
But not for long. Retailers are growing savvy and sophisticated in their use of new technologies to improve customer experience (and their bottom line). As these realities take hold and culture adapts around new technological promise, entirely new consumer patterns and expectations will emerge....
Many local retailers think that the rise of digital has lead to a downturn in business, suggesting that they can’t compete with the online shopping experience.
But according to a recent study commissioned by Google, digital can in fact enhance your business, if used properly.In ‘The 3 New Realities of Local Retail’ Google outlines three key findings:- Digital drives in-store traffic- Smartphones are in-store shopping assistants- Omnichannel shopping deserves omnichannel measurement....
Before deciding to read this topic, ask yourself first – What are the things you wished was there in your last visit to a shopping site?
Should there have been more scope for interaction? Should there have been a price comparison facility? Did the web design communicate what it promised to sell? Would you purchase more if they offer seasonal discounts / free delivery next time?
Being 'user friendly', is the focal point of all e commerce sites. A design that is user focused, generates more conversions. So, if you were given the opportunity to make some improvements to the last visited shopping website, what would you have added or changed?
This post will bring to you a set of five best shopping site names, which try to maintain the key marketing principles, together with a beautiful web design....
How do we get more people into our stores? It’s an age-old question for B2C companies who have brick-and-mortar presences. How do you get people from thinking about your product to coming in your store and buying it?
The good news is, social media is here to help — and not just with bringing in the crowds. Social media allows you to have a deeper and more multi-faceted relationship with your customers than ever before. Don’t miss out on that opportunity.
I’m going to use Seattle ice cream purveyor Molly Moon as my model in much of this post. There’s always a line at Molly Moon’s, especially in the summer but even on rainy Seattle days. That’s not because they’re slow scoopers – it’s because their ice cream is that good and, dare I say, because they use Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to their best advantage....
It has to woo overlooked small retailers in the same way a disruptive technology needs to cater to developers.
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has gotten lots of attention thanks to its pending multi-billion-dollar U.S. IPO. It seems to have no immediate plans to expand in the U.S.—but that's likely just a matter of time. And when it does, Amazon had better watch out, because Alibaba has a host of ready allies: the legions of mom-and-pop retailers that Amazon has left stranded in its wake.
Let's start with some background from Alibaba's perspective. The company controls 80% of the Chinese e-commerce market, which means it needs new markets in order to grow. Its current model—acting as an e-commerce middleman that connects buyers and sellers—might translate well to some big emerging markets, but Alibaba will need to take a more subtle approach in America for three reasons...
Mobile, social, and the cacophony of modern interruption marketing has transformed the retail path to purchase, and forced retail marketers to focus on building lasting relationships that benefit customers.
...“Now, because of smartphones and tablets, marketers need to fundamentally rethink things. Shopping is becoming an iterative rather than a serial process. Consumers no longer go shopping, they always are shopping.”
Among the less frequently discussed casualties of modern marketing is the path to purchase.The path to purchase is not a sidewalk leading from the shopper’s front door to a store; it is a cycle repeated over and over, and it requires marketers to take a different tack....
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Mobile instore moves build sales.