In-store Retargeting: Why It Matters & How to Get Started

According to recent study, 95% of all retail sales are captured by retailers with a brick and mortar presence. Therefore, it is no surprise that of recent, a number of online-only retailers such as Amazon have started to set up their own physical, branded stores. Today, the distinction between physical and digital, or between offline and online, is becoming less important. And, with more and more brands lining up to grab the attention of customers, most retailers today are investing heavily in innovative retail technology to engage customers better.

These groundbreaking in-store technologies are equipping retailers for success, by providing them with actionable data sets on how their customers relate to the physical store, the merchandise and to the sales staff. For example, with retargeting technology, retailers now have the golden opportunity to make a second or third impression on prospective customers who happened to visit their retail website on brick and mortar store and leave without taking any desired action.

However, the new challenge faced by most retailers today is in their ability to bridge offline and online data at scale, thus enabling online retargeting based on in-store behavior data. Unacast is one such company that aims to help brands with this by using proximity technologies such as beacons, NFC and WiFi to allow retailers to retarget their own customers online based on accurate offline behavior.

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In this blog, we will discuss in detail on how retailers will benefit from retargeting and also mention a few tips on getting started.

3 Key benefits of leveraging retargeting in the retail industry

While there are clearly many advantages to retargeting, it should never be used as a stand-alone tactic. In fact, when combined with other tactics in a comprehensive strategy, retargeting has the potential to give your brand and conversion rates an incredible lift. Let’s take a look at the 3 key benefits of leveraging retargeting in the retail industry:

(1) Helps build brand recognition

Retargeting is a great way to stay in front of prospective customers while building brand awareness. In addition to lifting up other campaign elements, both online and offline, this approach also helps build trust among customers, which is often critical when it comes to bigger purchase decisions.

(2) Offers a second chance to make an impression

Retargeting offers retailers another opportunity to get in front of prospective customers. For example, say a customer spent 30 minutes at the women’s wear section at your brick and mortar store or online store and left your store without having made any purchase. You can retarget them with online and mobile ads that contain more specific information on new arrivals or latest trends. This might inspire them to revisit your store and give your offerings a deeper consideration.

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(3) Provides great cross-selling opportunities

Most retailers sell a number of products that complement each other. Therefore, after an initial conversion for one product, you can retarget that same customer with ads for another complementary product. For example, when a customer enters the women’s section, you could use beacons to push offers on a beige shirt that goes with the trousers that she had bought earlier.

3 Essential steps to getting started with in-store retargeting

Now that you have learned about how retargeting provides substantial value for retailers,  let’s take a look at how to get started with it. Here are the 3 essential building blocks of in-store retargeting:

(1) Automated in-store mobile proximity marketing platform

To effectively manage in-store retargeting, it is essential for retailers to have a solution that can automatically handle retargeting and all the information associated with each customer out there. In practice, this means opting for a flexible platform that has various capabilities and supports large amounts of data. The platform must have the capability to provide analytics for identifying in-store customer behaviour and loyalty patterns –

– How many customers went past your stores and how many came in?

– Which section did they go to first?

– How long did shoppers actually spend in your store?

– How many customers purchased using loyalty points/ How about repeat visits?

By measuring such metrics the platform empowers retailers to make data-driven decisions, and adapt for best in-store sales performance and loyalty. Regarding this, I highly recommend you to check our recent post on the various metrics that brick and mortar store retailers need to measure to offer a better experience to shoppers.

In order to make it easy for retailers to measure the effectiveness of retargeting, it is essential that the in-store metrics are presented on a robust, easy-to-use and visual dashboard with various tools. The platform should also easily integrate with customer loyalty profiles and online account information for effective retargeting. Finally, the platform also needs a rule engine to manage location-based triggers and a campaign management system to create and manage campaigns

.

Beaconstac is one such proximity marketing platform that comes with a dashboard that allows retailers to create complex rules and define appropriate ‘actions’ to be triggered by the mobile app. Learn more about the platform.

(2) Indoor location technology and beacons

In order to keep track of data points that are needed to identify in-store behaviour patterns, it is recommended that retailers set up a Wi-Fi-based indoor location technology in-store. This will give retailers access to behaviour-based metrics which will in turn grant them deep insights on customer data. Meanwhile, beacons are the best solution to location-based triggers because they provide good accuracy, they are an easy way to trigger content in mobile applications and their deployment is light and easy.  The Beaconstac beacons allow micro-location targeting covering radius down to 15cm.

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(3) Smartphone application & SDK

For delivering the retargeting content to the customers efficiently, it is essential for retailers to have a mobile app in place, that is well integrated with the in-store mobile marketing platform and makes good use of the location information provided by it. For this integration, the platform needs to provide a robust mobile software development kit (SDK), that makes the indoor location capabilities easily available for mobile apps. In an ideal situation, the mobile app will be linked to the customer loyalty program management software and will provide a wide range of features, including wish lists and information on product availability.

If you are planning a beacon pilot, take a look at Beaconstac, that includes everything you need to get started. Using Beaconstac you can set up your own campaign, without a developer’s help!

• Author Details

Author Details

Devika Girish

Check out other posts by Devika on Beaconstac! You can also explore the related posts below to help you maximize your ROI.

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