All we hear at the moment is how high street retail is dead, that with everyone buying things online, bricks and mortar stores are losing major business.

Certainly since Blockbuster and HMV went under, things have looked bleak for chains and franchises like them who are struggling to keep up with the advances in modern technology like mobile.

In the tech and gadget industry especially, it is said that consumers are becoming more and more likely to engage in a practice known as showrooming, whereby a customer will enter a shop and browse and test the products but then later purchase it for less online.

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In fact, showrooming is not as widespread as some would believe and there are reasons to be optimistic when it comes to bricks and mortar retail. Far from destroying the industry, mobile could be its saviour. From before leaving the house through in-store to leaving with a purchase, mobile is gradually transforming the way we shop.

So we thought we’d follow a customer through the various stages of purchase and see how mobile can be harnessed for the benefit of the retailer and the customer.

It’s not just retail that has been drastically changed by mobile; see how mobile has transformed TV too.

Before the Purchase

Pre-Planned Search

Imagine a customer who wants a particular pair of shoes – some Adidas Originals for example. They have that planned purchase in mind but they haven’t yet decided how and where they’ll be buying it.

While out on a shopping trip for a different product, the customer remembers he/she wants the trainers and so decides to do a quick search for the Adidas store on his/her mobile.

One of the first things that pops up in the search results is a store locator that show the nearest store to be 2 minutes away. The customer thinks ‘well as I’m here, I might as well’ and goes to the store to make the purchase.

Now that may be just a story but it fits with a study conducted by iProspect and Adidas who wanted to find out the true value of mobile, knowing that it brings more than just eCommerce to the table.

Based on years of data about customer intent and conversions, they were able to deduce that 1 in 5 customers who clicked on the store locator actually visited an Adidas store and of those, around 20% would complete a purchase averaging $80.

This means that every click on the store locator is worth $3.20.

According to Google, when using mobile search to make a decision about something, users will be 57% more likely to visit a store as part of a follow-up action.

The lesson here then is:

• Have a store/venue locator page
• Have targeted, localised ads

General Spontaneous Search

Sometimes a customer won’t be searching for a specific product but might just be looking for a bargain. When shopping for food for example, a customer will be most likely to search for a deal on a product they often buy or one similar to it.

Coupon apps and sites like Shopitize provide customers with a deal and retailers with footfall, but it’s the product-maker which sees the most benefit.

Services like this also provide the retailer with information about where and when the offer was claimed so they are able to learn more about the buying habits of their customers.

The cost to retailers is minimal because all they have to do is offer a small discount or cashback – the sort of expense that can be covered with a few decent sales.

The points here then are:

• Get onto coupon sites and apps
• Strike deals with resellers and affiliates – it may not maximise your profits initially but will lead to greater exposure and therefore more customers in the long run.

‘Hi-Jacking’ the Search

The great thing about mobile is that its exactly that – mobile. That means that far from the old days of only being to target shoppers in their armchairs or in print, consumers can be hit with a retailer’s message literally anywhere.

Aside from the moral debate involved in this, what it means is that for retailers, targeting consumers by location is becoming ever more important.

Sites like Foursquare allow for geo-targeted ads so that, for example, as a potential customer walks past a Starbucks, they receive a notification for 10% off a Latte.

Making the most of mobile geo-targeting could be the secret for retail as it has been shown that 55% of mobile searches related to retail result in a ‘conversion’ within an hour with an amazing 81% of all conversions from mobile search occurring within 5 hours.

That could be a huge boost to daily sales and fast.

Being able to ‘hi-jack’ customers into buying a product and quickly is every retailer’s dream, so remember:

• Think outside the box with ads – consider geo-locating and making the most of location based networks like Foursquare and Facebook ‘checking in’.

During the Purchase

Showrooming

As mentioned earlier, there is seen to be a trend towards customers using bricks and mortar shops merely as showrooms to test products, only to purchase them later online for less.

The best retailers are beginning to embrace rather than reject this trend. What they have realised is that in fact the majority of consumers will be more likely to purchase a product in store if they have the ability to review it online.

In fact people are twice as likely to search for shopping related queries in-store as they are out of store.

Based on a study by Deloitte, by 2016 they predict that 1 in 5 consumers will be using their smartphone for this purpose.

That would suggest that it makes sense for retailers to embrace the trend by doing things like enabling WiFi in store or even having iPads on display as in-store ‘catalogues’.

60% of mobile searches related to retail are about product information and 1 in 3 of in-store or local searches result in a purchase; having that information as readily available as possible, whether that be via the customers own device or store-owned devices, makes the conversion all the more likely.

How to embrace showrooming:

• Make sure you have WiFi enabled(!)
• Consider integrating your web presence with your physical presence, with iPads instore for example, that can be used to peruse everything on your website as well as in-store.

Payment

Following on from this digital/physical integration comes the example of the shoe retailer Nordstrom who, like Apple themselves, have taken the approach that ‘clunky’ cash registers are old-news and instead look to using a combination of iPod Touches and iPads to collect payment from customers.

Their stores become less regimented and traditional, and give customers more freedom to purchase how and when they’d like – they could order in store on one of the display iPads to be delivered to their home, or they could order at home and pick up in store.

So while this is not necessarily specific to mobile, the fact that these devices all link to mobile certainly plays a big part in the whole payment set up.

• Consider mobile devices at hand for payment, to give customer more freedom to choose.
• Blend the digital and physical commerce aspects of your business

After the Purchase

Retaining customers is often one of the harder things required of retailers. Mobile is a great tool for just that.

The use of SMS and email follow-ups is fast becoming ‘old-hat’; what is required in this age is location-based re-targeting and the effective use of social media to keep the interest of clients peaked.

So if we return to the Starbucks example, a great way to employ both of these methods would be to offer a bigger discount upon return via let’s say, Foursquare again.

That is, a previous customer walks past Starbucks – based on profile and data stored about the customer, the retailer can fire off an offer and the customer receives a notification saying something like “you had 10% off last time, how about 20% off this time?”.

This kind of specific targeting highlights the importance of maintaining a strong and engaged social media presence, so that such an offer is both possible and doesn’t come across as unsolicited.

What to remember:

• Use location-based re-targeting to attract return visits.
• Engage with past clients on social media to increase chance of a return visit.

Long Live Retail

Retail is by no means dead or dying, it’s just having to adapt to the latest technological developments and learn to make the most of them.

Before, during and after purchases, customers are using their phones more and more in the buying process.

Retailers will have to embrace relatively old trends like store locators all the way up to more modern developments like showrooming and flexible payment methods if they want to ensure that they don’t go the way of HMV.

If you want to stay up to date with the latest trends in mobile and learn how to make the most of them for business, try one of our Mobile Development Training Courses.

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Tags

consumer patterns, local search, Mobile, mobile advertising, mobile sales, mobile search, purchasing process, retail, sales, showrooming

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