Tag: Retail Digital Marketing
Over the years, digital evolution has transformed the way we shop!
The lockdowns and store closures due to the unprecedented events of 2020 has moreover accelerated this evolution and mainstreamed online shopping.
Today consumers don’t just make purchases online. They compare brands, shop for deals, join communities, and engage in immersive experiences. According to Forbes, roughly 21% of all retail purchases will be online in 2023.
There’s no denying that digital technologies are changing the retail industry as we know it. The only question that remains is whether your business is ready for the future of retail.
To help you prepare, we explore the state of the retail industry and shed light on some of the most significant challenges your business faces. Most importantly, we reveal some technology trends you can leverage to compete with major players in the retail space.
Read more: Custom Software Solutions for Retail: All You Need to Know!
The State of the Retail Industry
In a 2023 retail industry outlook report, Deloitte researchers examined how labor challenges, supply chain hurdles, and market volatility would impact retail businesses in the new year.
Of the various predictions made in the report, the most notable is that retail sales growth in the U.S. – barring a recession – will be minimal due to a meager GDP growth forecast of just 0.9%.
Additionally, researchers found that nominal average weekly earnings rose by 8.3% between December 2020 and December 2022. However, real earnings decreased by approximately 5% due to inflation. In other words, consumers have less purchasing power even though their weekly earnings have nominally increased.
In light of these predictions, retail businesses must remain fluid and agile. In 2021, many retailers increased inventory volume by 11% on average to contend with supply chain volatility.
Continuing to maintain an extensive inventory with a potential recession just over the horizon would be unwise, as doing so would leave retailers with less liquidity and could hinder their ability to capitalize on emerging technology trends or shifts in consumer spending habits.
Retail Businesses Must Evolve or Fail
Like many others in the retail industry, you probably hoped 2023 would represent a continued progression toward “normalcy.” However, many of the changes affected by the global pandemic are here to stay. Modern consumers expect a more technology-centric retail experience, even if they choose to shop in-store.
In addition to adapting to the new consumer, you must also navigate the aforementioned economic challenges poised to persist throughout 2023 and beyond. To make matters worse, the quit rate of employees in the retail industry remains at about 4%, significantly higher than the national average.
While these interconnected issues seem to have created a perfect storm, it’s possible for your business not only to survive the future of retail but thrive in it. To do so, you must familiarize yourself with the latest tech trends and how they might affect your reimagined business model.
Key Tech Trends Shaping the Future of Retail
To stay relevant and competitive, we suggest you consider how adopting the following key tech trends can impact your business:
1. A Shift to Digital Goods and Services
Even if your company sells physical products, offering digital goods and services is an excellent way of differentiating your brand from retail businesses that aren’t so forward-thinking.
For instance, you might commission a development agency to create a custom mobile app for your business. You could then use this app to connect with customers, deliver digital goods (i.e., coupons or top customer badges), and nurture feelings of loyalty among your target audience.
You can take this concept further by creating a digital community that lets shoppers share how your products and goods make them feel or improve their daily lives.
2. Omnichannel Shopping Options
The shopping experience is no longer linear. Instead, customers typically interact with a brand along multiple touchpoints and channels before actually making a purchase. With this in mind, you must adopt interconnected technologies to seamlessly guide leads through each phase of the purchasing journey.
What does that look like, exactly? First and foremost, you should have a dynamic, user-friendly, mobile-optimized website in place.
You’ll also need to give consumers multiple ways of interacting with your brand, such as your website, mobile app, and brick-and-mortar store. The top brands are already doing this — your company should follow suit.
3. Social Media-Centric Campaigns
While you already have social media pages for your company, you may not be using these channels to their full potential. The most successful brands have tapped into meme culture, hashtags, influencers, and other trends that are native to social media to reinvent the customer journey.
Putting social media at the center of your marketing campaigns allows you to fuel online shopping in new ways and connect with younger audiences.
There are many ways to up your social media marketing efforts, including hosting live events, holding Q&A sessions, and interacting with followers in the comment section.
4. Automated Pricing
Automated pricing involves using software to set prices according to variables of significance to the store. Automated pricing technologies have become a valuable resource for big-box retailers in recent years. Smaller businesses are catching on, using this convenient technology to ensure that product prices are set to optimize profitability for both online and in-store products.
Implementing pricing automation solutions will reduce the workload on your staff, as they’ll no longer have to set prices manually. This will help you overcome labor shortages and improve productivity. Automated pricing tools also allow you to deliver better value to customers by running short-term sales or discounts.
Read more: How To Power Your Retail Business with Augmented Reality?
Stay Ahead of the Curve with Fingent
A mixture of in-person shopping experiences and tech-centric journeys will shape the future of retail.
While many modern consumers still like to make purchases at brick-and-mortar shops, 63% of all buying journeys start online. As such, your organization must embrace the latest retail industry technology trends to provide consumers with an experience that seamlessly transitions between channels and mediums.
To achieve such fluidity, you need a technology partner like Fingent that understands the thoroughly modern challenges retail businesses face.
Fingent provides end-to-end custom application development services for retailers. Our dynamic team can create tailor-made field sales applications, inventory management tools, omnichannel fulfillment solutions, and other digital technology resources you need to maintain your edge.
Connect with us today or submit a request for a proposal to learn more.
When customers get more and more digitally advanced, what else can retailers do, but go over the top to get savvier and stay ahead in the race towards serving them better? Most retailers these days are struggling to maintain their faces with new technologies and marketing programs in the digital side of things. If you thought, a little bit of social media marketing would do the trick, then you might be wrong. True, social media does play a huge role in spicing up your digital marketing spree, but is that enough?
The answer to that, would perhaps, have been ‘yes’, maybe a few years ago. But with advancements in technology as well as the minds of the people today, who seem to be in an endless search for convenience and speed, the answer is definitely ‘no’. So, what exactly is the deal with this digital marketing and the people-the consumers, and what does it take to stay in the ‘present’?
Consumers have started to expect more from their vendors and retailers are bound to live up to this expectation. Let’s see, for example, how digital marketing has changed in retail to stay relevant and eye-candy for its customers:
‘Personalizing’ at its peak
One of the most effective and influential techniques of digital marketing is personalizing. And by that, I don’t just mean sending out personal emails to your customers, or adding their first names in the emails you send out. The in-thing now, is of course iBeacons; the latest Bluetooth LE technology used in malls and retail stores to send out personalized offers and messages in real-time. But that is when your customers are in your store. What can you do to get personal outside of your store?
The depth of the word ‘personalizing’ is starting to take new forms these days. And one of those forms is facial recognition technology. According to a recent report published by Transparency Market Research, the global facial recognition market is expected to reach almost US $2.67 billion by 2022. That is how big it is getting. Retailers can use this technology to gather information about customers, their buying habits, purchasing power etc. and then use that for marketing purposes like, presenting them with special and unique offers and deals.
Facebook, the social media channel, has been using this technology for the past few years for the purpose of identifying and categorizing pictures, and this data is being shared among other retail and social media sites, which enables them to target ads to users. Facebook also uses information from other retail sites by scanning their cookies and displays ads to users accordingly.
However, privacy concerns regarding this technology are still being discussed and how much acceptable it is going to get among the consumers, still remains unclear.
From wearable to digital assistants
This is for companies that use mobile marketing for leveraging their marketing programs. You need to really keep up with the latest advancements in mobile technology if you want to make your marketing effective. A “mobile-first strategy” is what a lot of retail brands adopt these days. This is according to Aaron Shapiro, CEO of New York based digital agency Huge. Shapiro feels that voice-activated technology, digital assistants and wearable technology are all set to change the way customers interact with their favorite brands, especially now that most of them use mobile devices rather than desktop computers and laptops. About voice-activated marketing Shapiro says, “ In cases where the screens are going to be tiny or non-existent, voice is going to be the way that we communicate.” It means brands will have to come up with ways for their customers to communicate with them in a voice context.
Shapiro also feels that mobile technology is definitely going to evolve into wearable as well.
Display advertising: Metrics better than click-through-rate
Click-through-rates are actually, most often, thought of as the best measure of display advertisements’ effectiveness. However, there are several limitations to this particular approach. It ignores factors like brand awareness and educating prospects. According to Sean Callahan, Marketing Director, Bizo, there are several other metrics that marketers can use to measure the effectiveness of their display ads. Some of them are:
Brand recall – where in, you can carry out an online brand study to see the differences in the awareness of your brand among the people who have seen your ads and among the ones who haven’t.
Branded search – where in, you can measure the lift in the number of searches for your brand, while your online ad campaign is running.
Likewise, there are a number of other such metrics that you can use to measure the performance of your ad campaigns.
All of these digital marketing techniques and tips are already being used by a number of retailers and are well on their way towards revolutionizing the retail industry as a whole. In a matter of few years, what we provide for our customers now, will probably seem outdated or maybe even absolutely ineffective. Like i said, if you have to stay in the game till the end, you have got to play it like it has to be played.