#nrf14

Photo courtesy: Digby

If you were at NRF's 2014 BIG Show, you know that location was a hot topic.  More retailers are recognizing that to successfully engage cross-channel shoppers, they must understand their entire path to purchase, and provide relevant offers and messages along the way -- especially while they're in store.  Implementing a location-based marketing strategy can present many benefits. Using timely, relevant mobile marketing while consumers are in or in proximity to a store can help increase foot traffic and optimize in-store engagement. In addition, retailers can have a better understanding of shopper behaviors and overall store performance, which can help them improve store operations strategies. Although many retailers may know of these benefits, most still don't know how to get started. 

A new resource provided by Digby, titled: The Location-Based Marketing Playbook, outlines four steps to achieving a successful location-based marketing strategy. 

Plan: First and foremost, establish goals. Determine why you're creating a location-based marketing plan, and be sure it integrates with your general marketing goals. Then, identify locations that are important to your brand to set up geofences. Geofences created around stores enable brands to engage shoppers as they embark on their shopping journey. 

Listen: Compare stores that have implemented geofences. Analyze traffic patterns and in-store customer engagement based on geofence entires and exits, time of day and even day of week. Understand which stores attract specific audiences, and segment messages based on these different consumer types.

Execute: Once you have an understanding of specific locations, their traffic patterns and target customers, you'll be able to further refine campaigns to make them more relevant and compelling. Try to align location-based marketing campaigns based on other initiatives. Evaluate your content calendar for email, SMS, TV, radio and other campaigns and see how location-based marketing can complement or enhance these communications (and vice versa). 

Optimize: After campaigns conclude, it's important to analyze the results. As you go through this process, compare analytics based on campaign type and location type. This will allow you to improve your campaigns and further personalize messages based on individual customer profiles. 

At the conclusion of the first day of the NRF Big Show 2014, Retail TouchPoints editorial staff members shared their insights on meetings and sessions from the show. The growing relevance of "beacons" dominated many conversations, remarked Debbie Hauss, Editor-in-Chief. Publisher Ed Cleary mentioned some of the retail implementations announcements; and Senior Editor Alicia Fiorletta talked about omni-commerce and payment challenges for retailers. Tune in later today for the Day 2 chat.

At NRF14, “clienteling” is a big topic once again. The idea of clienteling is pretty simple and isn’t necessarily new. Instead of using a bucket approach to each customer that walks into your store, clienteling is meant to leverage information about an individual customer, and their past buying habits online or offline, as inputs for the your store associates' interactions with them in-store. That said, it’s extremely difficult to execute.

Sure you may be one of the more than 50% of retailers moving to a mobile Point of Sale (POS) system that will put connected tablets into the hands of your retail staff, but how will you verify a customer’s presence and shopping history pre-purchase? Unless you’re a phone retailer like Verizon or AT&T, you’re probably not going to be able to get them to enter their phone number immediately upon entering the floor. And if you are lucky enough to get them to give you their email address (in the wake of all these retail data breaches), it’s probably not going to be until you bag their purchase.