By Kathy Beck, Senior Director of Product Marketing, Revionics
The world is changing fast, and with the advent of social and mobile the retail shopper is more demanding than ever. In an omnichannel world, shopping and shoppers create a new level of complexity due to increasing numbers of competitors to be tracked, hyper-competitive pricing and promotions, the variable path to purchase due to channel and touch point proliferation, pricing and assortment transparency, and the shoppers’ need for immediate gratification.
Winning retailers have recognized a key part of the new shopper dynamic is to communicate effectively, and with relevant content and offers, in order to earn loyalty and drive shoppers to the point of purchase. A key to earning loyalty is to engage and motivate shoppers at their preferred touch points and channels to create real intimacy thru personalized interactions. Engaging the instrumented shopper through digital channels is essential to developing a relationship that goes beyond a mere transaction. Understanding their product, touch point and channel preferences empowers retailers to engage wherever and whenever the shopper wants and provides them with relevant, targeted offers.
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For example, a leading privately held supermarket chain is revolutionizing grocery loyalty by utilizing social and mobile as never before in this very traditional channel to power an effective and measurable social media rewards program. They are providing customers with compelling, time sensitive, and limited quantity offers through social media channels, such as Facebook, to fuel social advocacy and amplification, strengthen shopper engagement, drive in-store traffic and recruit new loyal shoppers to their shopper loyalty program.
In addition, manufacturers are participating in the program by funding exciting, targeted offers that drive shopper excitement with highly relevant, branded incentives they can share with their social graph. This program also provides the retailer access to powerful analytics enabling them to continually improve offers and engagement in order to better connect with their consumers and understand the influence that their shoppers have on their peers.
The retail industry’s latest social commerce solutions are capable of creating and extending relationships by providing relevant offers that resonate with loyal shoppers and their social graph due to a deep understanding of past purchase behavior and social interaction. Digital coupons and offers that are optimized across online, mobile, and in-store channels can be used to drive traffic either online or in-store and can be tracked along the entire path to purchase to measure current, and improve future, program effectiveness.
Recent studies have shown that although many shoppers state that price is the most important component of their purchase decision process, shopper actions do not support those statements. Shopper loyalty is driven by delivering the shopping experience that most satisfies shopper needs — including not only the right product, price, promotion and place but extending the experience to include the right service levels, atmosphere, shopping assistance, etc. The ability to drive shoppers to the register through the timely delivery of targeted pricing and promotional offers that resonate is a far better way to drive loyalty than to engage in the downward spiral of price and promotion competition that may drive a single transaction but leaves no lasting impression.
Shopper engagement that flies under the radar of internet price crawlers and competitor sweeps provides a means of stealth combat and a strategic competitive advantage. Waiting on the sidelines for competitors to create their own loyal base is a dangerous and potentially lethal way to play a zero sum game. Retailers must embrace and engage the growing population of connected shoppers by utilizing all available data points to profitably drive loyalty and register rings.
Kathy Beck is the Senior Director of Product Marketing for Revionics. She has more than 25 years of experience in the retail industry working in planning, pricing, promotion and consulting. For the past eight years, Beck has been involved in the development and implementation of lifecycle pricing and assortment and space optimization strategies and tactics. Previously, Kathy was responsible for merchandise planning at several specialty retail chains.
