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Understand the shopper's journey to personalize the buying experience
"I know that half of the money I spend on advertising is wasteful, but I do not know which half it is." Marketing professionals can relay to this quote from John Wanamaker, American pioneer of advertising: by spending money, it may (eventually) pay off. An anachronistic quote that summarizes the way some brands still analyze the customer journey in 2018, almost a century after the disappearance of Wanamaker: blindly, or almost.
Today, customers are mobile and easily switch channels. They start a search on a computer, check more information on their phone, then go to the store before ordering online ... and eventually return in store the product they purchased.
The stakes are important for retailers facing these new challenges: how to follow the consumer journey from online to offline? How to know if an advertisement on Facebook or YouTube has an impact on sales? How to measure the impact of a street marketing campaign on the evolution of online and in-store sales? The answer is easier than we think.
Multitouch attribution: Follow the customer journey
While omnichannel is with no doubt the key to success for retailers, it is not yet an ubiquitous strategy. Many retailers are still organized in silos: The online on one hand (merchant website,social networks and mobile Apps) and the offline on the other hand (instore sales and traditional advertising). And in-between them, a huge grey area, wasting retailers and customers’ time and money. Indeed, each channel has its own indicators that do not interact between themselves and can even compete if there is a Web promotion that in-store salespersons are not aware of for example.
On the contrary, web marketing KPI are used only to measure the online customer journey,
with no way to know if it impacts sales in store. This model based on the “last click” leads
managers to take bad decisions.
To offset this, we should follow the customer journey through all points of contact. It is called the “Multitouch attribution”: a way of knowing what marketing levers the customer has been exposed to, and what led him to continue (or not) the shopping journey. The impact in store is measured by in-store analytics tools that add an unprecedented layer of information. The Smart Box aggregates the right indicators in order to know, among other
things, the number of visitors entering the store, what they do, what they buy, and which levers triggered the purchase (loyalty, website or social media contact, click on an Ad, open an email, etc.).
Customize the customer experience to optimize your omnichannel strategy
The consolidation of online and offline data allows you to go beyond simple dashboards. It is valuable information for managers in store since it directly impacts the customer relationship with a consumer centric approach. With this consumer knowledge, their purchasing history, their online behavior and preferences, sales associates can offer
tailored products and services in an omnichannel purchasing journey. They know who they are addressing and can personalize the shopping experience according to the behavior of their customers (in a hurry, responsive, needing reassurance, loyal, etc.) and their purchasing habits (average purchase, online/offline orders history, product return, etc.).
Many people have predicted the near death of physical retail facing online sales. But not only is the retail store not dead, but it has reinvented itself! A “phygitalization” leading to innovations that shake the existing practices, where information and data management is more than ever key in the commercial battle.
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