As a retailer, you can respond to this perfectly by providing the customer with inspiring content the moment they find themselves in your store. You can give customers new ideas or move them in a certain direction. Or provide on-demand information about the latest trends. That way you can add just that little extra to your shopping experience. In this blog, I will give you five tips to inspire your customers in your store.
1. Cross-selling by actively showing suggestions.
Many online clothing stores have been using it for a long time: displaying matching accessories or items of clothing in a customer search result. The original search was a jacket. Through algorithms and settings in the software used for the web store, the customer is shown a matching handbag or trousers with his search. Of course, you can also do this in the physical store as a sales employee, but some customers deem this to be too forced. Moreover, unsolicited or non-expert advice is still seen as a major annoyance for consumers. Fortunately, there are numerous solutions that can provide this without the intervention of an employee. Let’s look at a smart mirror, for example. Smart mirrors are innovative solutions that extend store visits. Above all, you surprise the customer. Smart motion sensors and RFID technology can be used for multiple purposes. When picking up a piece of clothing, the mirror automatically shows product information, information about the available stock, or a matching article. That contributes enormously to cross-selling in your store. Also, perfectly suitable for an advertisement or atmospheric images, which appear when there is no customer in front of the mirror.
2. Compare products: omnichannel in-store experience.
A major advantage of online shopping is being able to easily compare products. Most online stores have convenient filter options that allow you to refine your search. The possibilities in the physical store are limited because no physical store can offer an almost endless range. Not counting the giant department stores. But even if you enter such a department store as a customer, navigating to your desired product is still difficult. An endless aisle solution or an information kiosk in the store can be of great value in guiding the customer in the right direction. The solution, often in the form of a digital kiosk, offers the advantages of online and offline in a combined solution. If a product is no longer available in the store, the customer can easily place an online order via the endless aisle application. The solution can also act as a decision aid, for example, by comparing different options and also mentioning reviews from other customers. That way, online and offline are completely intertwined.
A more visual and interactive solution is the Lift & Learn solution. This may concern a visually attractive display on which, for example, three versions of a product are displayed. Whether or not in the form of a miniature, each is equipped with an RFID chip. Maybe you sell barbecues in a garden center and want to show off in a striking way which variants you have at home. As soon as a customer picks up one of the miniature barbecues and places it on a tray near a display, information about that model appears on the display. If the customer also grabs a barbecue, information about that model also appears and the most important differences between the two models are also immediately made clear. In this way, the customer can see at a glance the price difference, the difference in weight, the heating source, and the material with which the barbecues are made.
3. Time or Seasonal Content.
Days, days of the week, certain months and seasons; they can each trigger certain feelings or habits in consumers. As a retailer, you can give that extra push to get customers to take a certain action. What you need for this is a healthy dose of creativity and preferably also information about your customers. Do elderly people in particular pass by your store in the morning? Then it would be nice if you could show different content in the morning than at the end of the afternoon, when more people in their thirties and forties come along. A digital shop window display makes it possible to make the layout of your shop window dynamic. Of course, this also applies to other specific moments. Are we going to have a very mild winter? Then images with ice fun, hot chocolate and warm winter clothing are less appealing. You can also easily respond to this with digital solutions.
4. Content to prevent waste.
It can happen to any retailer, but it is especially annoying for food retailers: too much stock that threatens to be wasted. Suppose you have a nice stock of broccoli because you know from experience that more broccoli is eaten in a given month. Only, that works out a little differently and you are left with too large a stock. You can try to turn this tide by inspiring your customers through the dynamic content on the displays you have at the fruit and vegetable square. With messages such as ‘what are we eating today?’ and an image with broccoli or tips for recipes with broccoli, you can ensure that the shopping cart is filled with at least 400 grams of green delicacy.
5. Contextual relevance in a physical environment.
Just as it is becoming increasingly difficult for online advertisers to reach the target group (the end of the cookie era is in sight!), as a physical retailer you never know exactly who you have in your store. Personalized content is difficult or impossible in the physical store. But you can of course base content on the data you do have. You can, for example, retrieve this data from external databases or collect it yourself using a sensor. This sensor in your store can detect the age and gender of a customer. Combine that with common sense and you’re pretty close. An example: a clothing store located in a wealthy part of Utrecht has a shelf display in the section with jeans for young men. It is logical to show atmospheric images with (role) models for that target group and not an image of elderly ladies who are having a nice cup of tea with each other. Continuing to collect data in every possible way provides a wealth of information that you can adapt your content to. Place the displays strategically and combine this with the right mood images and messages to achieve the desired effect.
Experience it yourself.
Do you have more ideas, but are you not sure how to realize them? Come and have a look at our experience center in Tilburg and let’s exchange ideas.
