After the Covid-19 pandemic, everything changed right? Especially for retail shopping experiences.

Retailers have made significant efforts to entice customers to visit their shops. Once they are here, now what? What is the best way to market your products and make them attractive to your customers?

It’s all about in store marketing tricks. Let’s discuss how to influence product sales inside of retail space.

Online Shopping Vs Offline Shopping

There are multiple key differences between online and offline shopping experiences, with pros and cons to each. But first, we need to understand what they are, and only then we can figure out how to improve your in store marketing.

In online shopping, retailers are able to get customer information such as name, mailing address and what they purchased easily. However in offline shopping, customers simply pay with cash or card, then there is no way to build up a customer profile in your database as there simply isn’t sufficient information captured. How can you, as a retailer, build excellent customer relations if you don’t know who they are. Additionally, this limits your growth. Let’s see how we can work to solve this problem.

How to build relationships with your customers?

Here, the retailer’s primary motivation is to know more about your customers. Only then do retailers get to know what are the customers’ needs? When do they need it? and what are they looking for? Ultimately, how do we entice the customers to come back and shop again?

As retailers, we cannot simply ask for the customer’s data directly or contact them out of the blue (Email follow-up, nurturing with SMS alerts, etc) So here, we want to play smart. Why not use the latest technologies available to help to achieve our data-gathering goal, without disturbing your customers.

Technologies in Retail

They’re more technologies in play now within retail, especially after COVID-19, where shopping styles and expectations were changed dramatically in offline shopping.

Think of Scan and Go, Self-Checkout machines, Click and Collect, Amazon Go, Facial Recognition, Visualization, and much more. These retail technologies enhance the shopping experience and help retailers gather insightful data about their customers.

Once we have our customer data, we can now promote all the relevant and related products directly to our customers in our marketing. Let’s take Scan and Go technology for example.

In store marketing implementation

MishiPay is one of the market leaders in Scan and Go technology providers. The technology is live right now at retailers such as FTC, MUJI, Paradise Lagardere, VIVA supermarkets, Stellar and Hudson, overall in 400+ stores.

There are many Scan and Go technology providers across the globe, but MishiPay’s Scan and Go technology is able to provide Scan & Go users with instant Item Recommendations based on their previous shopping history. Imagine taking one of the best online shopping features and enabling it for your offline shoppers when they are physically in your stores, that’s amazing.

The data backs this up also:

1. 56% increases in ABV with Item recommendations
2. 33% Increase in-store visit frequency with shopper engagements
3. The in-store shopper data is worth £25 / $30 per retailer.

For example, In late Q4 2021, MishiPay deployed the first version of in store Product Recommendations technology with MUJI and how it works

1. 18% of what customers purchased came from MishiPay Product Recommendations
2. Customers discovered and bought on average one new product via Product Recommendations
3. MishiPay took care of all the heavy lifting; zero involvement was required from the retailer to enable this feature

This is one of the most innovative ways to promote your products to your customers. Apart from this, there are also other ways to handle in store marketing:

1. Provide a frictionless payment experience
2. Cashless checkouts
3. Offers for the next purchase
4. Free bag(s) for shopping
5. Go green with digital receipts
6. Prize draws or wheel spin to promote purchases
7. Customer of the day campaign
8. Smart placement for in-demand/high-margin products
9. Upsell products near checkout areas (Last minute influence)

There are simply too many to include them all. However, always think of the primary goal and objectives for your business and choose your solutions accordingly.

Summary

Inside your store, take marketing approaches that are genuine. Don’t always think of hard-pushing your products to your customers, they know what they are looking for most of the time so think about helping them in finding those products in the easiest way possible.

If your customers have a wonderful experience at your stores then they will want to revisit again, and often. This will make a permanent impact on your business too.

According to a recent survey, customers want to feel that they are everything to the store and empowered with technologies in all the right places. So why not in your store? Use technologies to influence frequent visits.

Siva Prakash N

Product Marketing Engineer
Follow him on LinkedIn
For more related studies – Engineering Medium