Retail is an essential sector in every economy and central to this industry is the ‘store’ which is now facing substitution challenge with the growth of online retail. The brick and mortar store owners are finding it hard to acquire and retain new customers. As the tech savvy generation changes the rules of commerce, the players in the retail sector are strongly focusing on technological innovation because it has been established that the ones who get more creative with their solutions are the ones who will drive customer spending.
There are barriers to innovation in the retail sector but we don’t want ‘lack of awareness’ to be one of them. Here are the top 5 trends in the retail industry that can help every retailer drive visibility and generate customer loyalty.
1. Mobile Inventory Management
Maintaining adequate stock control is a key part of every retail store and things get complicated when a business has a fleet of stores. While businesses may have an inventory management process in place, it is largely unsuccessful in reducing lead times. In a rapidly changing environment, where even staying afloat becomes a challenge, the mere fact that a process exists is not good enough. What will matter is the efficiencies that process creates.
Why maintain a bulky log book and have half of your smartest staff locate an item on the list when you can embrace the idea of an inventory management mobile app? It will accurately track your inventory and you can significantly reduce the risk of buying the wrong item. Besides being able to restock quickly, you can also drastically reduce costs by maintaining optimal amount of inventory and discovering any theft in stock. With a mobile app that integrates the sales and supply channel, you stand a chance to improve productivity and enhance your customer experience.
H&M, the world’s second-largest clothing retailer had a turnover of 14.6 billion Euros in 2013. A huge part of their success has been due to its adoption of efficient and integrated systems for retail inventory management.
2. Point of Sale (POS) Mobility
Life is too short to be standing in queues. The crowded check out lines become a deterrent for any retail shopper. The ordeal gets magnified on weekends. Even though you may have a traditional Windows based POS system, it is obsolete considering it is not helpful anymore; it isn’t addressing the pain points of today’s customers.
Today’s POS system should allow you to be more flexible and mobile. Unlike your legacy systems, the new mobile based POS do not stop working when hit with a virus. A cost-efficient and a time saving POS can be your very own unique selling proposition. Why irk your already busy customer by having him wait in long queues when you can have your sales staff take credit card payments from anywhere on the floor? You don’t even need to delay the customer to collect his receipt – it can be sent to his smartphone directly. By introducing that kind of efficiency and speed, you will be able to stop your customers from abandoning the shopping cart at your store and shopping at your rival’s.
3. Location Based Services Through WiFi and Beacons
What leads to a higher and a deeper level of engagement with your customers? A personal connection – which is more or less missing in today’s brick and mortar stores. That’s why these stores feel more threatened by the growing e-commerce and m-commerce which is able to hook the shopper better by making personal and relevant recommendations. It is not feasible for a retailer to employ more staff just so that they can personally attend to every visitor. What’s your option then?
Proximity marketing is the groundbreaking technology that is redefining the in-store experience of customers. By deploying beacons or using your existing WiFi network, you can send targeted promotional messages or hyperlocal content to your customer’s mobile phone directly. For example – you can send across the map of your entire store and help your customer to navigate effortlessly. As your customer walks down different aisles in the store, you can send relevant deals and offers pertaining to a particular aisle. The granular in-store analytics provided by this technology can help you drastically improve your level of service. You can meaningfully engage with every visitor who possesses a smartphone and set a new benchmark in customer satisfaction.
Macy’s and Walmart have been early adopters of proximity targeting. Data from a recent Swirl survey shows that North American shoppers are engaging with and acting on location based campaigns in stores. 60 percent of shoppers open and engage with such content, and 30 percent of shoppers redeem beacon and wifi-triggered offers at the point of purchase.
4. Customer Loyalty Apps
Discounts and reward programmes are quickly becoming the mainstay of retail marketing. There is no one that dislikes earning rewards or saving money. When the world is going cashless, it is not a sign of innovation to have your customers clutter their wallets with loyalty cards of different retail outlets. It would be an unpleasant shopping experience for a visitor who has to forego his loyalty points if he forgets to carry his loyalty card. How do you then build your service offering around loyalty without a loyalty card?
The answer once again lies in your smartphone. Building loyalty apps for your store is a simple way to have your customers track and redeem their loyalty points through their smartphones. It is being seen that more and more retailers are adopting mobile loyalty programs. Apps like ‘Collect’ are a proving to be the rage among interested and savvy shoppers.
Target’s Cartwheel app helps shoppers “save on the things they already buy,” with a reported $65+ million in global savings by users.
5. Omnichannel Experience
It has become a standard practice for shoppers to research thoroughly about a product online before they make the actual purchase. Customers are accustomed to the beautiful and tailored shopping experiences on the web or on their mobile phones and they expect the in-store experience of a store to be no different. This just goes on to show that consistency is important in building the value of your brand.
With an influx of different devices in the market, the customer has the option to use more than one touch point to access a product or a service. This option is increasingly becoming the norm as retailers establish multiple selling channels. Kiosks, online retail, call centers are some of the new store formats that are on the rise. To stay competitive in a marketplace teeming with competition, retailers must be able to provide an omnichannel experience to its customers. A seamless shopping experience is the order of the day, irrespective of the channel – in store, online, smartphone or a catalog.
Home Depot recently invested $300 million to upgrade its “omni-channel” strategy, betting that customers would be willing to buy products from mobile devices and kiosks, given the right experience.
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