Use Your Website to Boost Brick and Mortar Visits

August 17, 2015 by Nicole Reyhle

 

Is your business’ website doing more than giving customers your location, hours of operation and phone number? Is your brick-and-mortar retail site encouraging customers to check out your website? Cross-marketing your physical and online spaces increases awareness, engagement and revenue for your business. When looking to boost your marketing efforts, here are a few points to consider:

Ensure They Boost Each Other

Marketing across channels is an excellent way to reach new customers and encourage existing ones to return. Although a website can’t deliver the highly-personalized services of a skilled salesperson, it can serve as a valuable bridge to attract customers’ attention. Make sure your website delivers the information your customers need about the products and brands you sell. Include high-quality photographs that encourage them to visit your store in person for a closer look. Boost your website by encouraging retail store customers to sign up for emails that announce sales, pre-orders and other specials.

 

Help Customers Discover Your Website

Most shoppers operate in three distinct phases, according to Boutique Window. These are:

1. Discovery: This phase gives customers who aren’t in your geographic area the chance to find you through local online searching. You can expedite this phase by adding your website to local search engine directories so local customers can find your retail space. Make sure your website content includes geographic and product keywords that customers are likely to use in their searches.
2. Connection: The second phase lets customers see if your store provides the products or services they need without making an actual trip to the store. Develop website content that informs and educates your customers about specific products. Demonstrating knowledge and expertise helps persuade them you’re a credible and trustworthy business.
3. Sales: The final phase can happen online or in your store.

 

Impress With Your Landing Page

Most online searches take the customer directly to the website landing page. Like your store, it must convey a positive first impression to encourage visitors to stay and browse. Your site also needs to make your customers feel safe and secure, not like they’re being spammed. Show perks of shopping online, such as free shipping or promotion codes. Also display security badges that testify to your site’s security. A good site will show that its site is accredited by the Better Business Bureau, approved by Norton Secured and a verified merchant from Authorize.Net.

 

Let Them Research Online and Buy in the Store

Many customers invest more time researching expensive products online before purchasing them from a physical location, according to ShoppinPal. This gives businesses with both online and in-person stores an advantage to target customers. An infographic on MineWhat cites research from RetailingToday that says 60 percent of consumers begin product research through a search engine and visit at least three online stores before deciding where to make the purchase.

Although nothing can replace a personalized, in-store experience, a well-designed website can be a valuable sales tool that encourages customers to visit your store to forge that relationship. For example, Spencers TV & Appliance embeds links on its website that users can click on to call and check on specific products, prices and availability. It’s easy to visualize a good salesperson using this opportunity to bring a potential customer into your store.

Photo Credit: Provided by Social Monsters with permission to use. 

To view the original article please visit: Retail Minded

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The new shopping behavior that is creating big challenges for the retail industry

Shoppers browse merchandise at an Old Navy store in San Francisco.(David Paul Morris/Bloomberg)

By Sarah Halzack February 11

Think back to December, when you were in the thick of your Christmas shopping.  How did you pick out that perfect scarf you put under the Christmas tree for your sister?  How did you know you got a good price on those Beats by Dre headphones for your nephew?

If you’re like most shoppers, the answer is likely that you did plenty of research before opening your wallet.

The Web has made it easier than ever for consumers to make price comparisons and to access product reviews, and that has meant that today’s shoppers are frequently armed with reams of research by the time they pull the trigger on a purchase.  And they’re not making impulse buys like they were in the days before the recession.

This dynamic is creating major challenges for retailers, who must now figure out how to thrive in an era when the consumer is ultra-knowledgeable–in many cases, more knowledgeable than the store’s own sales staff.

A new study of U.S. consumers, conducted by professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, shows just how prolific this shopping behavior is becoming.

In its annual shopping survey, PwC asked shoppers how likely they are to conduct research before making specific types of purchases, including everything from jewelry to toys to clothes.   As you can see in the chart below, the share of shoppers who did not conduct research was already fairly small in every category back in 2013.  But more striking is how much the figure decreased in every category in 2014.  In each case, significantly fewer shoppers are not researching before they buy.

Chart Courtesy of PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

This may not seem especially surprising if you remember the “showrooming” panic that became a fixation for brick-and-mortar retailers several years ago.  Back then, they were worried that shoppers were coming into their stores to try on or test out merchandise, only to go home and purchase them online from Amazon.com or another e-commerce competitor.

But that perceived threat hasn’t quite materialized the way many retailers expected.  In fact, the PwC survey, along with many other recent research studies,  suggests that “showrooming” is far less common than its opposite, a practice the industry has dubbed “Webrooming,” in which people browse online before ultimately going to a store to make a purchase.

Chart courtesy of PricewaterhouseCoopers.

So here is the gauntlet that consumers have thrown down for retailers:  They continue to want to shop in physical stores in large numbers–for now, only about 7 percent of purchases in the U.S. are made online.

But by the time they get to the store, shoppers already know exactly what they want, and they want to get in and out of the store quickly.  And this attitude makes it extremely hard for retailers to upsell them on a fancier kitchen mixer or persuade them of the merits of buying a protective case for their smartphone.  And it makes it hard for them to provide outstanding customer service, since store clerks now have to assist shoppers who might are already be experts on what they’re buying.

The silver lining in this data for traditional retailers is that it makes clear that stores are hardly becoming an obsolete part of the shopping process.  In many of the categories above, including grocery, sports equipment and even consumer electronics, more than half of consumers want to visit a store at some point in their path to purchase.  And so even in the digital era, those expensive store leases are still playing a critical role in driving sales.

To view the original article please visit: The Washington Post