If nothing else stands out to you, one statistic included within the post’s accompanying infographic should. If you’re a retail organization, you should know that it’s much tougher to attract a new customer into the store and make a sale (ranging between a 5% and 20% chance) than it is to make another sale to previous customers (ranging between a 60% to 70% chance). While some retailers may stage these averages with their strategies, most retailers will come in below these averages. Despite this, these retailers are continuing to devote their marketing and advertising budgets on campaigns committed to new customer acquisition.
Why would these retailers insist on spending so much of their limited marketing and advertising budgets on potential customers? It would be much smarter to find a balance between investing into both these potential customers and their existing ones.
While it’s important for retailers to continue to find ways to improve their revenue year-over-year, going the route of committing to new customer acquisition might not be the best move. What successful retailers have found is that providing their customers with a tailored shopping experience, both in-store and online, is the best way to invest their budgets. Through cross-selling and upselling both online and at in-store retail locations, retailers have been able to improve their revenue.
In order for any retailer to truly subscribe to this approach, they’ll need to adapt to omnichannel marketing principles. Many ‘mom and pop’ type retailers are hesitant to make this transition, but as they’ve seen, it does have a direct relationship with their success in the space. Integrating digital marketing strategies is the key to success in the retail industry.
Think about it, without digital marketing strategies some retailers would be limited to making a connection with a customer within their time in-store. Considering most customers don’t spend more than 15 minutes in a store nowadays, this can be extremely difficult to pull off. Digital marketing strategies allow these retailers to instead continue interacting with their customers long after they leave the store through social media, personalized e-mails or just their website. Retail trends such as the buy online and pick-up in-store option were brought to life as a result of these strategies.
To build upon this further, another trend that has helped move retail forward is personalization. Being able to differentiate between other retailers by providing customers personalized messages including product suggestions is enticing. Nearly impossible to accomplish in-store, though, as sales representatives are much more limited in the time they have to connect with customers.
While your retail organization may already be benefiting from the integration of an omnichannel marketing approach, there are still more ways to improve the customer experience. For more insight on how to do just that, please take a long look over the infographic provided alongside this post. Courtesy of IDL Displays.
