Up to a matter of months ago, the sole aim of a retailer’s mobile strategy was to drive traffic to their website. Now look where we are – real, live, mCommerce – with brands taking full advantage of the commercial opportunities that data analytics and mobile apps can offer.
Things like personalised in-store offers (based on a customer’s mobile profile and delivered, personally, at the transaction stage), branded wallets (that allow customers to manage their store accounts and check loyalty points), plus a-hundred-and-one other data-driven, in-store, mobile, and social innovations.
Which is all fine and dandy but, back here on earth, the customer still has to deal with endless in-store checkout queues (73% of shoppers abandon in-store purchases if they have to wait more than five minutes to pay1).
So let’s hope that soon, given our current track record of retail innovation, high-value customers will be jumping queues and paying for items on the fly via their mobile devices – with or without the help of an i-enabled assistant – while still browsing the store. Then, all paid-up, they’ll be able to follow their purchases online (and in real time), from pick to final delivery.
Less B2B or B2C. More A2P (app-to-person).
64% of people have used their mobile device to research products while shopping in a bricks-and-mortar store2
Of course, the trick is to get customers to download the store app in the first place because if you can, browsers are more likely to buy from you. They’re less likely to shop on price, too.
One of the less obvious benefits is that downloaders give you their email addresses, willingly. And on the back of that trusting digital relationship, subsequent emailing can achieve 50-80% open rates (compared to spam’s single figures). As companies collect more and more information from mobile devices, data sets grow (location, products bought or browsed, demographics, checkout history, even the weather during a sales push, and so on) and buyer personas get more accurate.
However, while market insight, trend spotting, and innovation are increasing the chance of retail success/survival, the new opportunities created are changing the nature of commercial competition.
On Black Friday, UK shoppers alone spent £800 million online 3
The Black Friday gold rush encouraged manufacturers and distributors to sell direct to consumers by hosting sale days on their own websites. Which meant competing against the very stores they supply products to. So, what can retailers (who sell other company’s products) do but differentiate themselves, and build trust ahead of the sale to avoid competing solely on price?
Recently, service has been their differentiator – home delivery, personal shoppers, in-store hosts, and fast-buy technology such as in-store navigation, click & collect, and digital shopping lists linked to the store planogram, etc.
But this could be just the beginning. Don’t be surprised if bricks-and-mortar stores morph into dedicated showrooms, ditching their prime-point-of-sale heritage altogether, with retailers creating inclusive, peripheral informational and social content (e.g. how products are used, or why they’re interesting to engage with), rather than barking sales messages at prospects. Playing publisher in fact. And the great thing is, it will all be driving data that mCommerce retailers can capitalise on.
To add further fuel to the fire (or should I say, data to the deluge), by 2018, there will be 8.2 billion handheld (or personal) mobile-ready devices, and 2 billion machine-to-machine connections (e.g. GPS in cars, asset-tracking systems, medical applications, etc)4.
Not surprisingly then, the biggest challenge for multi- and omni-channel retailing will be managing this torrent of raw data to achieve data integration, plus helicopter and granular views of the digital marketing ecosystem. Which, in addition to the tactical and strategic benefits, will allow retailers to be sure that products offered are in stock, priced as advertised, and so on.
It’s an omni-channel race for survival. And, all things being equal, whoever attracts the most new customers and increases the purchase frequency or average spend, ought to win out.
However, until retailers address fundamental problems like in-store checkout queues, their innovative mobile strategies will keep writing cheques their data management capabilities can’t cash.
1explore.ee.co.uk March 2014; 2Walker Sands, 2014 Future of Retail Study; 3The 2015 eCommerce Trend Report – TFM&A Insights; 4Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2013–2018
This post first appeared on Forbes TeradataVoice on 17/04/2015.
The post Data-Driven Retailers Are Working Up A Real ‘App’etite For Mobile appeared first on International Blog.
