Retailers increasingly recognize that to stay competitive and provide a new, more personalized shopping experience for customers, they need technology.
Here is one possible scenario, featuring a consumer named Sue:
During the holiday season, Sue vowed to get everything on her shopping list purchased and wrapped early. To stay organized, she used her favorite retailer’s smartphone app to create a detailed shopping list. Sweater for Jane; scarf for mom; boots for Danny. The list grew longer each day. Sue headed to the store determined to make a dent in her list.
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Once she pulled into the parking lot, Sue’s smartphone recognized the store Wi-Fi and prompted her to connect, giving her access to wayfinding and offers. The retailer greeted her via her smartphone: “Welcome back, Sue! We have special pricing on several items on your shopping list.” Sue’s customer loyalty soared. At her first opportunity, she shared her love for this personalized shopping experience on all her social media accounts.
Making Personal Customer Engagement A Reality
Locationing platforms are the new shiny carrots that enable retailers to capture more insight into shopping behaviors. But more than that, they can unlock the door to a new level of business success.
The latest generation of solutions can reveal which aisles and products customers prefer, which products they purchased in the past and what influences their buying decisions. This level of visibility makes new, deeper transactions possible and empowers loyalty applications to evolve to deliver even more value to customers, such as:
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Offer shoppers store maps to quickly find the products they want;
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Prompt associates to tend to customers who linger in certain areas;
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Communicate promotions based on shopper proximity and relevancy; and
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Marry retail and eTail for a seamless, personalized shopping experience.
To make locationing a reality and reap all of its considerable business rewards, retailers need several important things: A loyalty app with a strong base of users and a compelling value proposition to continue to drive engagement and downloads. From there, a new level of mobile marketing can take flight.
How It Works
Next generation locationing engines use the Wi-Fi or Bluetooth Smart features of mobile phone carrying customers to determine where they are in the store and define the action that should take place based on that location. Easy and cost-effective to deploy, these solutions deliver three powerful levels of identification capabilities, allowing you to consistently provide every customer with “personal shopper/concierge” style services right from the app in the palm of their hands.
Presence: Presence provides some critical pieces of customer information. It detects when a customer walks in the door via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth Smart, or if network coverage extends outside, when they pull into the parking lot. This allows for the opportunity for a personalized welcome message, promotional coupon or the location of items on their shopping list.
Zone: Zone allows Wi-Fi or Bluetooth Smart to identify when customers are in specific areas of the store, like the lobby or electronics department. This allows you to dispatch an associate to the area for assistance or again, push product information or personalized coupons to their mobile devices.
Position: Position-level details allow retailers to pinpoint a customer’s exact location. This type of visibility can identify individual aisles and product interaction, leading to any number of potential and real-time interactions.
Bottom line? The more real-time information you have, the better service you can provide and the more revenue you can generate per customer.
Locationing is definitely the next big thing in retail. It puts more power behind your loyalty app, giving you an opportunity to add value to your customer relationships in new, dynamic ways via a device that is always within reach. The latest platforms deliver instant visibility to what’s happening in your store — how many customers there are, where they are in relation to your staff. This helps reduce wait times, speed checkout and present an invaluable opportunity to provide exceptional customer service.
When evaluating options, look for solutions that provide multiple levels of presence, capture and store data and allow access to the system from anywhere on virtually any device. Advanced analytics will help you identify buying trends, traffic patterns and customer behaviors so that all elements of the store experience you deliver can be optimized in real-time to drive efficiencies and greater profitability.
Sue, and others like her, await. Investing in the right locationing solution will give you an opportunity to engage with her in exciting new ways. And win her business — and loyalty — every time she shops.
For more information about mobile marketing solutions, please click here.
Gary Singh leads global product and strategic marketing for the enterprise network communications division at Zebra Technologies. A twenty-year Silicon Valley industry veteran, Singh joined Zebra as part of the Motorola Solutions acquisition and was previously with Nokia where he was MD/General Manager Nokia Mobile Payment Services. Singh has also held leadership positions with Obopay, Aruba Networks and Symbol Technologies. He holds multiple patents and graduated from Punjab University.
