How Digital Media Can Increase Retail Foot Traffic

April 16, 2017

Drive Retail Traffic With These Top Digital Marketing Tactics

Retail digital marketing and e-commerce execution has been inevitably transformed by the evolution of digital media. While traditional marketing strategies such as TV advertising and physical billboards on the streets are still avenues for marketing, retailers and e-commerce businesses stand to benefit immensely by shifting to digital media marketing. It is now critical for businesses to optimize digital marketing platforms to drive footfall to realize an increase in sales and overcome the stiff competition.

Digital media is shaping mobile marketing strategies and e-commerce trends among businesses today. Below are 5 major digital media marketing strategies you can employ to influence footfall and drive customers to your store.

Tap into micro-moments

With the increased use and relevance of mobile devices among consumers, retail digital marketing and e-commerce strategists can now track consumer behaviour and target customers based on their intentions. The use of social media, email and push presents an avenue to assess consumer intentions almost in real time.

Tracking customer activities on social media or product pages on your website and app can help you target customers in the right moment.

The winning approach to capitalizing on a micro-moment is to match the customer intention with an offer relevant to them. For instance, if a customer is browsing through product listings in the fashion category, you can send a push notification with a coupon code or a promotional offer such as 'buy one, and get two at 25% discount.' While taking advantage of micro-moments may seem quite straightforward, it is really a winning strategy. It allows you to offer your customers a personalized experience and relevant offers without annoying them or interrupting their shopping experience. For you to win in digital media marketing, offering a personalized experience and relevant offers when the customer is actively intent on buying is important.

Location-Specific Targeting

Customers are technologically savvy and they are heavily invested in digital channels; this creates an avenue for retailers to target them through these channels. As a retail digital marketing and e-commerce strategist you can effectively drive in-store traffic to your store by targeting customers as they search product categories online using the iBeacons technology. The iBeacon technology will help you detect customer behaviour in or near your store and serve them with relevant offers, promotional materials and relevant information about your products. Targeting customers who are geographically close to your brick and mortar store makes you competitive and acts as a personalized invitation to your store.

While such a setup seems complicated Facebook and other advertising platforms offer more and more location specific ad forms. For example Facebooks hyper local advertising allows you to change your ads dynamically based on the users location. Here is how it works, if a cafe with multiple locations decides to run local awareness ads, they could choose to automatically populate the city name in their ad copy, depending on where the people seeing the ad are. This will ultimately lead to more conversions.

Social Media Marketing

Not only this Facebook is also experimenting with Beacons around their Place Tips technology that will allow places and businesses to push in app notifications to users within a close proximity to a physical location.

Click and collect

A survey by Econsultancy has reported that click and collect is popular among 63% of customers who shop online. Click and collect is a convenient shopping arrangement in which customers buy online, but opt to collect their products in person at the store instead of having them delivered to their physical address. Since customers who use click and collect do not have to incur postage expenses, it has become quite popular and an expectation for them while making shopping decisions. As a retail digital marketing and e-commerce strategist, you will win customer loyalty and attract more customers by providing click and collect on your website.

Social Media

Social media is equally an effective way to leverage digital media to drive retail traffic to your store. The nature of social media activity among customers gives you a channel to reach them and reinforce your brand awareness through promoting your brand values. Building a social media following and increasing its reach will not only come out as effective, but also strategic especially through boosting your social media posts to affect audience reach. Facebook social post boosting and Facebook events are strategic ways to launch campaigns to attract new customers by promoting new product collections or discounts online. In return, customers will follow up to take advantage of the offers and become part of your client base.

Email Marketing

Just like social media posts, email marketing campaigns are effective in retail digital marketing and e-commerce prospecting. You can craft exclusive vouchers for an email marketing campaign and send them to your customers for them to visit you store and redeem them. As for e-commerce stores, you can personalize the customer experience and redirect them to a product page to redeem their vouchers online. Email marketing campaigns are effective in personalizing customer experience since you have the names of existing customers by which you can invite them to attend either virtual or in-store sales events.

Bottom Line

Understanding how to target customers through digital channels can greatly improve footfall for your business, and with our expertise we can guide to exploit the power of digital marketing to increase sales.

What do you think?  Share this on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Written by
Alexander Rauser
Alexander Rauser

CEO

Alexander Rauser is the author of Boardroom Guide to Digital Accountability and Digital Strategy: A Guide to Digital Business Transformation, and creator of the DSX Program, a digital strategy and transformation program for Enterprises.

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