Best Practices for Mobile Retail Strategy

Efforts should address each stage of the purchase funnel

Mobile devices accompany consumers everywhere throughout a busy day. Through mobile initiatives, retailers have unique opportunities to engage with consumers as they move through each purchase phase—whether they’re in a store, in transit, at work or at home.

Data from InsightExpress showed that during the holiday 2010 season, smartphone owners used their devices at different stages of the purchase funnel: to receive sale alerts (awareness), look for better prices and product reviews (consideration) and redeem coupons (conversion). This gives retailers many opportunities to connect with consumers and encourage purchase and loyalty.

Forward-thinking retailers are devising mobile strategies to address each stage in the consumer purchase funnel—awareness, engagement, consideration, conversion and loyalty. For example, retailers are use mobile to aid in the awareness stage, enabling consumers to research and learn about products via SMS and mobile websites. They can facilitate engagement via the mobile channel through targeted coupons and special offers as well as invitations to opt in to sweepstakes and contests. And retailers drive consideration via mobile by offering complete access to product ratings and reviews, promoting free trials or samples and links to social media feeds so that consumers can see what friends have to say about potential purchases.

For many retailers, mobile remains a work in progress. Among US retailers polled in the fall of 2010, 60.7% reported planning to beef up their existing mobile web presence or SMS campaigns. Nearly 40% of those polled planned to launch more SMS campaigns or test various mobile initiatives. “It’s clear that retailers need to do more than dip a toe in the mobile waters.” said Tobi Elkin, eMarketer writer/analyst and author of the new report “Mobile Web: Best Practices for Retailers.”

Also read our blog on topics like:

1. How are businesses using text message marketing to boost sales?
   

2. Five Social Media Projections for 2011

3. Untapped Potential for Mobile Loyalty Programs

For more information and help on starting your own mobile strategy, please contact us or visit our website.

Source: eMarketer

Implementing the latest marketing initiatives

Shopper marketing has traditionally been about developing a marketing relationship with consumers in the store. It involves the strategy and tactics that are employed within the framework of a retail environment in order to attain a specific business objective, not the least of which is driving top-line revenue for brands.

Shopper marketing is now evolving at a very quick pace and is becoming much more involved in what is called "the digitally fueled path to purchase".

Brand marketers and retail clients should view the digital path to purchase as a three-step process:

1. understanding the brand, its positioning, target and overarching essence.
2. create an engagement strategy.
   
3. activate across relevant touch points.
   

Understand the brand positioning, then dive into shopper segmentation to derive shopper insights. Those shopper insights are increasingly being driven by digital inputs.

In deriving shopper insights, develop an engagement strategy that is contextually relevant to the actual shopper. It’s not just purely about putting a product on the shelf and offering a coupon or some form of a discount anymore. Shopper marketing is much more about the process of connecting with shoppers when, where and how they would like to engage. Most often, it’s through a digitally oriented methodology.

There are some standard elements in the shopping experience—pre-shopping, while shopping and post-shopping. Those factors focus on the “when” and the “where” aspects but the “how” is becoming increasingly more important. It’s being driven more by individual product categories. For example, how shoppers engage with a commodity like paper towels is significantly different than how they would engage with a durable good or entertainment-based item. The path to purchase varies across categories.

The next generation of shopper marketing is no longer defined by traditional brick-and-mortar stores or ecommerce for that matter. Consumers don’t really have to search for information in the pre-shopping phase. They can have it delivered to them wherever they are and on their own terms based on their predisposition toward different types of communication and technology.

Moving forward, we should see more two-way dialogues taking place between brands and shoppers. We see more preferential treatment for brand loyalists, influencers and those who are actively engaged with brands. Brands will reward loyalty in a more impactful way as it relates to digitally fueled shopper marketing.

Physical retail stores are still important but more and more, we see that how retailers and brands interact with someone digitally, on their terms and through the device by which they want to interact, is becoming much more important. We’re becoming more channel-agnostic and contextually relevant.

Marketers need to understand shopper segmentation based upon purchasing behavior, while also focusing on consumers’ digital lives. They must create digital shopper segmentation models in order to arrive at contextually relevant and holistic shopper marketing opportunities.

Marketers should evaluate the strategic needs of the brand, particularly at the pre-shopping phase. We see that shopping is taking place constantly. The lines are blurring between the pre-, in-store and post-shopping phases. It all counts as shopping, even as you’re consuming and using a product. These lines are blurring, particularly as the path to purchase is more digitally influenced. We should try to understand how a shopper behaves along the entire continuum.

There’s an insight-driven digital component for almost all engagement marketing programs that includes metrics and measurement from an ROI perspective. It’s really important to understand not only the future needs for the brand’s growth, but also the needs of the shopper segments as they evolve and change over time. For example, conduct a research into understanding younger consumers, diverse ethnicities and baby boomers in order to better understand their digital lives.

For more information on how to digitally fuel your business, please contact MODI$club.

Gaining Consumer Trust Online and Offline

Marketers must leverage trust, not just popularity

Trust and credibility are the gold standards by which relationships are measured. This is true of personal relationships as well as connections between people and brands.

The rise of social media has reinforced the importance of trust. Successful and enduring social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn are built on a foundation of trust and transparency. But social media has also distorted the notion of trust and put an emphasis on the size of a person’s network and connections.

“Marketers seeking to maximize their reach should focus on the quality of social network connections rather than their sheer size.” said Paul Verna, eMarketer senior analyst.

According to Invoke Solutions, quantitative measures such as the volume of content and participation, the length of time people have been fans or followers, or the raw number of followers or fans mattered far less in inspiring trust than the openness of the dialogue, the quality of the comments, and the responsiveness of the sponsor or author.

And Vision Critical found that among US consumers overall as well as daily social network users, friends and family were trusted for product recommendations far more than brand-originated content or people consumers did not know.

And marketers around the world agree that popularity does not equal influence on social media sites.

“The level of influence over one’s friends, followers or fans is the real key, and influence does not necessarily correlate to the size of the network,” said Verna.

In addition, there is a feedback loop between online and offline word-of-mouth, and marketers must understand the connections and differences between the channels.

For more information on how to build trustworthy connections with your audiences, visit our SMS portal or contact us.

Source: eMarketer