Predictions declaring the death of the high street shops have long flooded the internet and at times, you wouldn’t be blamed for believing it. However, it is now time for this prophecy to say its final farewell for we are not witnessing the end of our high-street, but a transformation of its role in the buyer journey fuelled by technological developments.

Technology has not only given birth to online shopping. It has made e-commerce the most popular shopping channel, to be worth over $27 trillion by 2020. And while it can be held responsible for the decline of the high-street, it is now technology that is also responsible for its transformation. Our high-street stores are increasingly adopting tech to improve in-store experience – and more specifically, doing so in a way that mirrors how tech is being effectively used online for e-commerce.

Tracking user behaviour

We all know that the most successful e-commerce sites are tracking their visitors down to the smallest movements, helping them understand what the individual user wants, when and where – and so enabling them to lead the user down the buyer journey to conversion.

But with the use of tracking technology, high-street shops are also now better understanding their in-store visitors. Firstly, a combination of Wi-Fi hotspots, big data and cameras are being utilised to understand footfall, while websites track traffic volume. This will also allow shops to understand the in-store ‘conversion rate’, analyse the effects of recent marketing campaigns and better assign staff at given days and hours.

However, it goes even deeper than this. The likes of Topshop, Dune and Morrisons are reportedly implementing this tech to track visitors’ movements around the shop through the individual’s smartphone as it searches for Wi-Fi networks to join. This allows them to understand which parts of the store attract the highest footfall, what items are taken to the changing rooms to be tried on (and either purchase or returned) and what areas shoppers browse in, and for how long. And if shoppers don’t come back to the shop for a given period of time, there may be a major in-store improvement needed.

By analysing this data, just like online high street retailers, high-streets can better understand their visitors and in doing so, provide an improved in-store experience.

Flexible payment options

When you shop online, you are often – and usually with large brands -offered a variety of payment options. In particular, more and more e-commerce sites are catering to consumer demand and providing finance to their customers, allowing them to pay for their purchase in convenient, monthly instalments. This flexibility helps to encourage conversion at a stage when the customer is at great risk of abandoning.

For high-streets, offering flexible and immediate finance in-store seemed impossible, but with the development of technology, however, this has been transformed. Brick-and-mortar shops can now provide their customers with point-of-sale (POS) finance offering at the checkout. By simply installing onto a tablet and integrating it with an existing POS or using stand-alone material, customers can easily apply for finance whilst in the store and receive an immediate response, completely paperless.

As a result of offering such finance to their consumers, sales can be boosted, average order values increased and customer satisfaction improved.

Personalisation and timely messages

Many e-commerce websites have perfected the art of marketing automation, delivering highly personalised messages at the most relevant time to gain maximum engagement; whether through email, onsite engagement or targeted advertising.

And now high-street stores are trying to achieve the same timely, personalised messaging with the technology of geo-targeting. By using GPS to identify mobile device location, stores are delivering messages to an individual’s smartphone when they pass through or enter a set ‘boundary’. Most stores are utilising geo-targeting to identify when an individual is nearby the shop, triggering a notification to be sent to their mobile containing useful information such as the store’s location, or a discount voucher to encourage them to come into the store. So next time you pass near a store and receive a notification from them on your phone, the likelihood is it isn’t coincidence.

The only major setback to geo-targeting is that the user must have downloaded the specific store’s app on their phone. However, when it is downloaded, the retailer can gather data about the user’s demographics, behaviour and purchase history which can then be used to deliver more targeted geo-targeting and boost engagement. By 2019, the location-based services market is expected to be worth almost £30 billion as more and more retailers adopt this technology.

Technology has transformed online shopping more than most could have ever imagined a decade ago. And now it is doing the same in perhaps an even more unexpected area – brick-and-mortar shops. This is not to say that footfall and sales will instantly rocket, but technology will certainly transform how marketers as well as consumers regard our high-street shops and ensure that it retains its importance in our world of commerce.

The post How Technology is Transforming our High Streets (For the Better) appeared first on PerformanceIN.

The UK’s economic climate is in for a bumpy ride over the next few years, and retailers are going to find it hard not to get caught up in the middle of it all. This month in July, GfK reported a record decline in consumer confidence, last seen in March 1990 in the build-up to a UK recession.

Optimising the website should be every retailer’s first move in order to understand the gaps in the buyer journey and identify where they are losing customers. And nowhere can this drop off be seen more than in cart abandonment. Every retailer knows how severely a high cart abandonment rate can damage their bottom line. But not enough retailers know of data-driven strategies they can use in 2017 to guarantee that more of their visitors who place items in their basket follow on to purchase them.

1. Instil urgency

Our psychologies are wired to avoid loss. So much so that psychologists have shown that we would rather avoid a loss than acquire an equivalent gain. This is known as loss aversion, and this psychology can be influenced by retailers to drive purchases. For example, you could show a countdown timer during sale periods or display stock levels – both designed to suggest that the product they want to buy could soon be unavailable.

Retailers can also provide real-time figures of customers viewing the product to indicate its popularity and so infer it will run out of stock. These tactics also play upon another behavioural psychology known as scarcity bias – the psychology of placing a higher value on an object perceived to be scarce than on an object considered to be abundant. Utilising retargeting strategies, an email could be sent to a user of a product they have browsed but not bought, indicating it is running low in stock and so stirring a sense of urgency to transform abandoners into buyers.

A mistake many marketers make is to cover their product and checkout pages with phrases like ‘last chance’ and ‘hurry’. This can instil an emotion similar to the phenomenon known as banner blindness whereby users consciously and subconsciously refuse to interact with advertising. In this case, shoppers instinctively ignore these types of urgency-fuelled phrases. Marketers must, therefore, be more intelligent with their wording. Use terminology that infers the popularity of a product, and so the likelihood of it selling out, without using cliche and so untrustworthy wording; for example, ‘Hot Buy’ or ‘A customer favourite’.

2. Offer flexible finance

Of 100 users who place an item in their basket, on average only 23 will complete the purchase, whilst the remaining 77 will abandon. Although there are a plethora of causes for this, there will always be one that stands out most firmly in the customer’s mind – price.

To tackle this, and without simply offering sales and cutting prices that will damage the bottom line, retailers should offer flexible customer finance at the checkout. At the precise moment when a customer is hesitating at the thought of spending a large lump sum, retailers can present a finance offering, allowing the customer to pay for the item in flexible monthly instalments at 0% interest.

The obstacle to purchase is therefore immediately removed, reassuring a range of shoppers who could otherwise have abandoned. It’s not all about cost, however. Many customers of finance are accepting of the price, but would rather the convenience of spreading the cost, rather than paying upfront or using a credit card that charges a high APR or that they are untrustworthy of. Offering finance, therefore, caters to a variety of buyer of personas.

3. Optimise the checkout for mobile

Mobile shopping has undoubtedly boomed in the past few years. In fact, according to the latest IMRG Capgemini Quarterly Benchmarking report, an average of 54.5% of all retail sales came through mobile devices in Q1 2017. However, although this figure may seem promising, a study by Barilliance reveals that retailers could be doing much more to boost these sales on mobile.

According to the report, mobile phone cart abandonment stands at an unappealing 85.65%, whilst desktop drops to 73.07%. To reduce this abandonment on mobile, you must ensure your checkout is not only mobile optimised but has a mobile-first design. Firstly, you must take into account how a user interacts with their mobile. Studies have shown that most people use their smartphone with one hand, with the majority using their right thumb. You need to, therefore, ensure that you position the most important elements in areas easily reachable by the right thumb. Wide end-to-end CTA buttons will also improve usability.

Utilise mobile UI elements too, such as increment selectors rather than drop down menus, the phone’s inbuilt data selection UI and digital wallets to facilitate a one-click checkout. Implement these elements and retailers can truly take advantage of the boom in mobile shopping.

4. Implement dynamic cart recovery

Of the users who view a checkout form, 43.5% begin filling it out yet only 12.20% complete the form. This is an exceptionally large drop-off but it can be improved. These users shouldn’t be considered lost. By implementing a cart recovery tool, you can dynamically capture these user’s email address they have entered before abandoning the form.

With this information, you can then deliver automated emails to these high-intent users and bring them back to site to complete the purchase. What’s more, these emails can be personalised, containing the products that were in their basket before they abandoned, as well as targeted promotional content based on their order value to drive them to purchase. Easy to set up and delivering high CTR, cart recovery can be a highly effective conversion rate optimisation (CRO) strategy.

We are a nation of browsers with a psychology of constant change, so cart abandonment will never disappear altogether. However, this is not to say that it cannot be extremely reduced if retailers adopt the right strategies for their customers and in the process, upturn the record fall in consumer confidence.

The post 4 Cart Abandonment Strategies You Need to Maintain in 2017 appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Historically, data and design haven’t talked to one other. They were unconnected, actively kept apart – in theory, and in practice. More recently, however, marketers have begun to realise the error of this – and yet there still remains a gap between the two elements that needs bridging. 

Today, marketers have access to vast amounts of data and many are using this effectively to inform their strategies, particularly seen in programmatic advertising – who to serve the ad to, when to serve it and how frequently, to name a few. Tech companies can track millions of devices to gain extensive user data, ensuring the most engaging messaging can then be delivered to each client. Without this data, this communication would have to run on guesswork rather than insight and precision. 

However, many marketers are stopping here, and so in the process neglecting a major element of the ad – the design. Too often the design minds are brought in when the big decisions have already been made. But why would you go to great lengths to ensure your ads are being served to the right audience, and yet not first give proper thought to whether the ad’s design will grab the individual’s attention and engage them?

This is where data can and should come into play – the combination of the science of data with the art of design. Design teams should be given access to the same data points that are already used in programmatic media buying and brought in at the beginning of the project before any major strategies are made. If this is achieved, marketers will then be able to serve targeted design that achieves visual brand impact and data performance goals.

And what’s more, if tightly connected, this combination could provide insights into branding too, informing marketers what visual elements best appeal to the target audience.

The combination of data and visuals does not, of course, need to be restricted to programmatic – it can inform almost any advertising medium. Take British Airway’s AR billboard for example. As a BA flight flew over the board, BA fed real-time data into the giant billboard triggering a child to look up and point to the actual plane in the sky as it flew overhead.

So what does the future for data-led design look like?

Over the past few years, as customer data has increasingly dictated marketing strategy, brands are coming to realise the importance of this data in design too – but there is still a long way to go. Design and media teams still work in silos in even some of the most successful advertising brands, preventing designers from accessing data that media teams have been effectively using for years to target with. 

However, though this convergence may seem idealistic, it will soon have to become a necessity. For consumers’ expectations are not relaxing, but quite the opposite. Consumers are demanding an increasingly personalised and intelligent experience, and if this isn’t supplied, brands will fail to engage them.
 
If they can learn how to merge data with design, however, brands will be able to achieve relevant targeting coupled with engaging design, in the process creating a product far more effective than either one of the elements can achieve in isolation – the combination of data and art, a perfect blend of reason and emotion.

The post Programmatic Marketers Must Learn How to Blend Data with Design appeared first on PerformanceIN.