When a consumer walks by your shopping centre or browses in one of your stores, what do you do to get them to spend money? If you’re like most marketers, the answer is nothing.
The majority of marketers, who are responsible for enticing customers to visit and open their wallets, know that a customer has visited only after they bought something – and even this knowledge is limited, with little to no understanding of what the customer intends to do next, where and when.
In today’s world of physical retail, shopping centres need to think and act like Amazon, the e-commerce giant that intimately understands why and how you buy. Amazon’s success didn’t happen overnight. They spent years perfecting the collection and application of using customer data to increase basket size.
I write this not because Amazon is reportedly planning to open department stores, but because marketers need to up their game if their centre is to stay relevant – and, dare say, remain open – regardless of who the competition is in the foreseeable future.
In the last 18 months, consumer behaviour has changed, meaning that marketers must work harder and smarter to attract and retain customers. By embracing the data-centric approach, Amazon has mastered to understand, track and influence shoppers throughout the customer journey, centres will be able to reinvent themselves to prosper like never before.
What data does Amazon have on you?
The e-commerce giant has extensive information about how you interact with the various elements of its website. It tracks your journey right from what kind of products you look for on the website and what you finally purchase. It does not just stop there. It goes a step further and tracks your journey regarding the final delivery or return (if any) of the products. The website captures the entire process in which they send highly personalised emails and messages. They use this data to refine the site and improve performance that benefits you, the customer, and sellers on the e-platform. It’s pretty impressive.
Just like Amazon knows where you have come from, what you’re doing on their website, and where you go next, you also develop a single view of your customer’s journeys – and it’s not as daunting as you may think!
Personalise the customer journey
The latest technologies make it possible for you to pinpoint the location of your customers before, during and after they visit your centre and stores. Technology like IQ Reach allows you to send relevant communications at the right time to influence their behaviour based on their individual purchasing history, preferences and intentions – data that is collected throughout the customer journey.
Now, of course, a customer journey isn’t linear, and shopping centre customers don’t just use one digital channel or touchpoint like Amazon.com to purchase. However, because most shopping centres are only now developing a single view of the customer journey, it’s faster to focus on the physical path shoppers take to visit retailers. When the time is right, marketers can start connecting data from other channels and touchpoints, including website, social media, and e-commerce, to create rich customer profiles. You can then use these customer profiles to personalise communications, content and experiences that drive footfall, sales and loyalty.
You might be asking yourself where to start. Well, begin by breaking down the customer journey into three zones – before, during, and after visiting your shopping centre. Then, ask yourself what information you have on your shoppers in each zone. The sampling of questions below will help you make informed decisions that will drive footfall, frequency of visits, sales and loyalty:
Data is the key to knowing your customer’s journey and visibility of what customers are doing before, during, and after a visit. You need to have a way to follow the customer at all times, and this is one of the reasons mobile apps are very popular with shopping centres. (My colleague, Alessandra Gamba, has written an excellent article that explains why mobile apps are the future of retail destinations.)
By making a mobile app – integrated with proximity marketing and loyalty – the backbone of a mall-wide customer engagement strategy, marketers can collect and use data to truly understand, interact with and influence shopper behaviour. We call this Geo-Loyalty.
Amazon, sometimes seen as a threat to physical retail, is a source of inspiration for malls, which need to quickly change to improve how, when and where they engage customers. Marketers need to proactively attract and retain customers. Yet, there is more value here.
Malls that embrace Amazon’s data-centric approach will gain a competitive advantage over peers and against Amazon, especially when launching their own online marketplaces, which many are launching in the next 18 months to meet customer expectations.
Physical retail has an edge which is that people love to shop in stores. By leveraging data, malls can engage and influence shoppers throughout the customer journey that delivers a memorable retail experience – and create a lasting sense of local community not possible just online.
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