Technology in Retail:

Essential Guidelines for Local Businesses

Technology has penetrated deeply in all aspects of our lives. Knowingly or unknowingly a major part of lives has become so tech dependent that technology is no more an option, it is the only resource.

Local business owners, especially retailers, find it difficult to keep up with the ever-evolving technology trends. And on the other hand, there is this fierce competition from big retail chains that are leaving no stones unturned to woo customers through mobile and digital channels. For most retailers, catching up with technology and the huge costs involved in embracing it, is in itself a major turn-off.

If you are a local business owner and are keen on exploring technology for your business, here’s a quick brief on the kind of technology that is used in retail and how you can adopt it.

Mobile Technology

Your customers are increasingly getting dependent on their mobile devices, especially smart phones. There are a number of ways retail businesses can actually go mobile. First and foremost, a responsive website is a must. Responsive website is the kind of website that can open on different screens including computer, tablet, smart phone etc.

Then there is the mobile app. Mobile app provides better customer engagement. However, some small businesses prefer the brick and mortar way of businesses. However, one cannot overlook the importance of mobile apps. Advertising in a popular app makes a whole lot of business sense. You can advertise on social media apps like Facebook, Pinterest etc. or you can advertise on apps like InstaTeam that promote local businesses on their app http://www.instateam.net/#home. You can also get your business listed on the local yellow-pages apps and business directory apps.

Internet of Things

Though the technology seems new and pretty intimidating for technologically challenged, but this sophisticated technology is making life easier and economical for businesses, especially small businesses. Internet of Things (IoT) is nothing but the integration of Internet in everyday objects (things) to enable ordinary things perform extraordinary tasks.

Case in point, Bigbelly. This company manufactures solar powered garbage cans that can sensor how full the can is and can send notifications to officials. Officials in turn can route the trash collecting trucks accordingly saving them unnecessary trips and helping them save costs.

In another instance, RainMachine, a SME revolutionized the irrigation controlling system. The conventional home irrigation systems have been complex and expensive. RainMachine worked out a sophisticated system using sensors, smart phones and real-time local weather updates and came up with automatic irrigation through sprinklers that are triggered by sensors that are linked to weather update. Not only is the system is inexpensive, but it also helped people save costs by reducing their water bills and by helping prevent over or under watering in the garden.

Video

Video is not fancy anymore. It is a basic requirement. Create videos to talk about your brand story, showcase your collection, broadcast your local reach, reach out, foster customer engagement and do so much more. creating videos, sharing them on social media and getting people to comment on it, is perhaps the best PR in the digital age.

Beacons or Geo-tech

Beacons are small, self-contained sensors that broadcast signal to Bluetooth devices in the vicinity. In itself the technology doesn’t really mean a lot, but when combined with the right mobile app, it can do wonders to your business. Imagine a customer walking outside the bakery gets the message that fresh bread has just arrived. Or a retail customer who just arrived near the store, gets the message that since they are in the vicinity of the store, they get a special offer that can be availed within an hour. This type of real-time marketing can actually work very well for the business.

How Mobile is Changing the

Face of Beauty Industry

Beauty and personal care industry is close to 84 million dollars in US alone. The industry is not just huge but also very versatile. From pharmaceutical medicinal products to cosmetic products to natural products, there’s a market for everything. Like every other industry, the beauty & personal-care industry is also going through the digital & mobile evolution, and has some key takeaways for other industries as well.

Going Mobile Savvy

Beauty and personal care customers are as ‘mobile’ as any other industry. In fact according to research, customers aged 18-44 use mobile devices the most for information, reviews and opinion sharing about beauty products. Around 79 percent of customers use their smart phones to check reviews in-store.

Brands that understand the gravity of this huge number, make it a point to make mobile presence. Customer engagement on social media works best. Make it a point to be present on all major social media platforms. Also, be vigilant of both good and bad reviews being posted on the internet. Always acknowledge a customer comment made on social media. Make it a point to especially reply to bad reviews. That does the best patch-up work for a bad review. If you can humbly accept the problem and provide a solution, in many cases it works as good as a positive review, if not better.

Artificial Intelligence & Augmented Reality

Chatbots, virtual make over, simulated makeup, hybrid mobile shopping experience, virtual makeup workshops, interactive tutorials and so much more. The head of Glossier, Emily Weiss was quoted on a popular website Buzzfeed, “Luxury today is getting what you want, how you want it, when you want it, getting a very personalized experience.”

Customer Engagement

As a savvy marketer, you not only send personalized marketing communication to the customer but also foster your customers to interact with the brand. Create contests, social media campaigns, photoshoots, makeovers, training sessions and so much more to get customers engaged with the brand. 

Awesome Customer-Engagement Examples to

Draw Inspiration From

With mobiles, online platforms and digital marketing in place, mere presence across channels does not suffice for marketing. It’s a global market and the competition is so fierce that getting noticed also is a big challenge, let alone getting a piece of the market pie.

Brands need to come up with creative ways to interact and engage with their customers. Channels are just the medium. Here are some great examples of companies and campaigns that successfully created a connect with their customers reinforcing brand loyalty.

• GE launched a smart LED bulb that can be controlled remotely with the app. It’s not just the bulb, a host of devices that connect on Bluetooth and other wireless systems can be linked. Value for the customer – well not really, but can get a great connect with customers who are fond of the toys for big boys!
• Kellogg’s “From great start comes great things” campaign was a big hit with the customers. They glued a mobile call-to-actions on the cereal boxes. When customers called a pre-recorded message by a former Olympian played. For each call that was made, Kellogg donated for food for needy children. There was a great joy-of-giving feeling that worked well with the customers.
• Coffee with newspaper is an awesome example of how you can keep it simple and still get the mobile advantage. Starbucks collaborated with New York Times to bring 12 weeks of free access to NYT through Starbucks’ mobile app. NYT otherwise has its own app that has a subscription fee.
• A simple way of deriving customer engagement through mobile is by offering convenience and replacing paper or PCs with mobiles. Although its is one of the most basic form and is very common, nonetheless it works every time. Pepsi printed codes as SMS call-to-action on the soda cups sold in movie halls. This code made the customers enter sweepstakes that gave them a chance to go to the 86^th Academy Awards Show.

Here’s How You Can Get

Your App Discovered

With over a million apps in the Google Play Store and Apple App Store, having your app discovered is a challenge. For every possible requirement there are so many options available, that chances of a newly launched app getting discovered become very grim.

Here are some quick fix ways to get your app noticed.

• Sponsored presence

This is the quickest way to getting noticed. How much you need to pay will depend on the kind of category and the amount of competition. When you do a detailed analysis of ROI on paid presence, you must also note that with every install your rating and presence on the store also gets a boost. As the number of installs increase, the chances of your showing on top also increase.

• In app advertising

In-app advertising is also a great way to get noticed by users. Advertising with popular apps or social media apps gives results faster. For instance, Facebook advertising gives a lot of options to focus on your target group along with a promising window.

• Online advertising

Apart from in-app advertising, placing ads on webpages also provides great exposure to the brand. Through retargeting, you can select the kind of audience you want to focus your ad on.

• Blog

Blogs are a great way to get directly in touch with your target audience. Blogging creates a direct connection with the end users, and if your audience relate to your story, the sale is taken care of.

• Engage customers

Create fun contests, conduct surveys, incentivize social media sharing, likes etc. Social media marketing works on exponential numbers. If the campaign becomes a hit, it can go viral bringing overnight success to your app.

Video Content

A Must in Digital Marketing Age

Creating videos for marketing is not new, but it still works as good. Rather, in the digital marketing age, videos have become an excellence medium for marketing, it helps by engaging customers and building brand loyalty.

Right from advertising to explaining the product and features to the customer or creating engaging tutorials, the possibilities with videos are immense.

If you still need some convincing, here’s why you should have videos:

• Video is one of the best forms of customer interaction. It engages the customers auditory and visual senses and captures attention. Customers can instantly connect with the content in the video, and the message can be far more powerfully conveyed, than through a print ad in a banner or EDM.
• Videos help in SEO and social media marketing as well. A good video gone viral can give your brand many times the exposure that you would get through SEO marketing and social media posts.
• Videos also help increase the average time spent on the website. It betters the website rating.
• You can upload your video on various video sites like Youtube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Metcafe, Hulu, Facebook, Live Leak, Twitch, Vine etc. and along with the perks of video marketing, enjoy backward links.

The Big, Fat Data Forage for

Mobile Marketers

Marketing has evolved leaps and bounds since the days of traditionally defining target markets. It is beyond demographics and definitely beyond macro segmentation. Those were the days when information was limited and marketers hardly knew their customers well. Most marketing was based on surveys and even on marketers’ assumption of customer profile and customer psyche.

In the digital and mobile marketing era, the trouble is that there is so much of customer information available from so many different sources, that marketers are often overwhelmed by this information, and marketing strategy on a whole seems mislaid.

How to best use customer information

The first and foremost thing marketers need to do is access what data is relevant to them and what is not. This, in itself is a mammoth of a job. For instance, all the information about customer’s whereabouts, spending habits, social circle, internet usage pattern, all of this and more is available with marketers. But so much of information does not really mean anything until someone joins the dots and creates insights that actually come in handy as knowledge-base for marketers.

Joining dots, can be a very expensive and time consuming task that a select few big organizations can achieve fully. And when customers start aggregating, the level of precision required and granularity can become quite daunting. To achieve a certain level of datamining, the systems and technology required have to be very sophisticated, and the derivation and the analysis have to be very precise. Achieving this for billions of potential customers out there can be exorbitant and daunting, both at the same time. For small entrepreneurial firms and startups, it makes sense to just focus on the data that is directly relevant. For instance, GeoQpons uses geofencing to get real-time customer location, and based on this information, the app suggests retail stores that have a sale or discount on. Moreover, based on history, the intuitive app suggests stores and merchandise based on customer liking.

Another important insight is that there are no categories. There are fluid lines that pretty much don’t exist. From elders to kids, everyone in the family is making decisions like which car to buy or where to go for holidays, and the worst part being that the marketer does not know who’s the influencer and who’s really the decision maker. So it’s not a simple demographic categorization that would work here but a geodemographic, social breadcrumbs and psychographic analysis, all put together will give some insights about whom to target and how.

Here’s How to ‘Wow’

Your App Users

How well is your app doing? Are your users engaged? How good does your app score on the customer satisfaction index? Is your app’s ‘usage’ ratio high as compared to ‘uninstall’ ratio?

While these are questions that are common in marketing parlance, the real question that actually haunts marketers is ‘how’; how to increase customer engagement, how to avoid uninstalls, how to increase app usage and finally how to ‘wow’ customers?

Although the answer to all these questions lie deep in your offering, the value preposition of your brand, here are some general tips for ‘wowing’ customers.

• Focus on the user’s onboarding experience and the initial interaction with the app. First impressions is the last impression, and it cannot be any truer in this case. Design the whole UX in a way it is simple and fast. Follow the rule of three taps. Anything the user is looking for should be found within three taps.
• Always have an answer, whatever it takes. If the user searches for an item that is not included in the app, present a page that has options of places from where the user can find a similar product.
• And do it fast. Response time in an app has to be extremely quick since app users want answers/solutions fast, if possible real-time, which is why most of them use the app in the first place.
• An app is not about features and sophisticated technology. Those things are important, but more important is the delivery. How well do you deliver solutions that the user seeks? Add the special touch of service when you present solutions to your users. Let a real person do the communication instead of automated responses, provide telephone numbers for assistance, send surprise gifts, send hand written cards, just about anything as a gesture.
• Do not shy away from refunds. By providing a refund you may lose a sale, but gain a customer or even a brand ambassador for life. It is rather intimidating how word of mouth can go viral and a single person can influence masses.