Can customer journey methodology level the playing field for brick and mortar retail?
Segmentation, predictive analytics, evolving real-time customized offers. Sounds like the sole domain of ecommerce pure plays, but brick and mortar retailers are moving toward the deployment of these and other tools to better understand how a customer journey approach to marketing and merchandising can help stave off ecommerce competitors and, maybe, beat them at their own game.
The customer journey approach focuses on the business value of integrating and operationalizing data, and leveraging that knowledge to truly understand how consumers behave during the process of buying products and services. It helps optimize marketing and the customer experience, based on integrated capabilities for connected data, analytics and interactions. And does it by enhancing each customers’ experience over time, across multiple channels and touch points, delivering relevant, timely and context-based communications. This, now more than ever, can and should be an imperative for brick and mortar retailers.
Customer journey provides marketers at brick and mortar retailers with a 360-degree view of their customers, helping them gain analytical insights to drive the path to purchase and execute multi-channel campaigns, powered by real-time decision making. This is a critical need for brick and mortar retailers facing increased competition from ecommerce pure plays.
Some leading brick and mortar retailers are already pursuing customer journey activities by making their businesses all about driving loyalty and maximizing shopper value by offering personalized, data-driven offers relevant to the lives and lifestyles of their customers. Costco, for instance, is sitting on a mountain of customer/member data it is mining for analytic insight to augment its already very strong intuitive sense and almost tribal knowledge of the likes and dislikes of its members.
Brick and mortar retailers need to catch up with the ecommerce pure plays by using data to better engage shoppers throughout the entire buying cycle. And, by the way, this is the way Millennials and now Gen Z expect retailers and brands to market to them.
- Curated Customer Journeys Level the Retail Playing Field – CMS Wire
- Note to Brick-And-Mortar Grocers: Amazon Truly Believes in You — Now Act Fast – The Shelby Report
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: How can bricks and mortar retailers more fully integrate the kind of analytics more commonly used in ecommerce?
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19 Comments on "Can customer journey methodology level the playing field for brick and mortar retail?"
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Vice President of Marketing, OrderDynamics
Brick-and-mortar retailers are starting to adopt omnichannel more and more throughout most of the retail world, including the U.S. Retailers need to make sure that when a customer shops online, they immediately recognize the shopper and suggest an option they may have used before — like doing a pickup on their order. This is a positive example of leveraging both techniques and buying methods to boost a retailer’s overall sales.
I haven’t seen this level of personalization, yet. First one out with it will be reaping the benefits!
President, Integrated Marketing Solutions
Brick-and-mortar retailers have a long legacy of product-centric marketing and driving traffic to a location. Big box retail stores were built on reaching the masses through broadcast media.
Customer journey marketing and personalization is built upon marketing to the “unit of one” — the individual. Instead of frequency and reach of mass media, retailers now need to focus on collecting individual customer data across time and place. That requires Big Data and analytics that most legacy systems were never designed to analyze. It also requires investments that stretch many retailers’ capital and budgets.
However in the age of omnichannel consumer behavior, CRM trumps market segmentation.
Global Retail & CPG Sales Strategist, IBM
One of the keys here is to focus specifically on the unique characteristics of store engagement technologies. The newest machine learning/A.I. capabilities I’m seeing in the marketplace can drive new insights in store-level shopper journeys, including the pure integration of the digital experience analytics with store data insights. In-store customer experience analytics, predictive customer intelligence and other tools are indeed becoming requirements for marketers and e-commerce to leverage today.
Principal, Retail Technology Group
The basic requirement for brick-and-mortar retailers to implement these tools is to know who the customer is. E-commerce retailers have this information by default. The Costcos of the industry know this because of the membership model. Once the traditional retailer can identify each customer, it knows who bought what on what day and time and with what other items, and can then put these tools to work for them just like e-tailers and Costco.
Customer Success Director, Salesforce
Strategy Architect – Digital Place-based Media
Journey mapping facilitated by customer experience (CX) professionals offer insights to the path to purchase which can inform investment in elements of the paid-owned-earned media model.
Too often CX professionals have responsibility but no authority, so their key change management contribution is to enable a holistic approach to shopper engagement through which insights of cause and effect are revealed. Analytics are the quantification behind journey mapping. Over two-thirds of Fortune 1000 firms have adopted Net Promoter Scoring according to Wikipedia. NPS, which draws heavily on journey mapping and analytics through contributions by multiple parts of the enterprise, offers a strong methodology for improving the productivity of places, processes and people.
Retail-Tech Specialist Advisor
Various innovative technologies are available in the market to enable brick-and-mortar retailers to integrate shopper analytics, map customer journey, measure conversion rates, allow “infinite shelf” and personalize in-store interactions. Adopting and implementing these technologies in a physical environment is more challenging than online. One of the main barriers is identifying the shoppers. To do that shoppers must agree to be identified and the retailers need to give a good answer to the question, why should the shopper agree — what’s in it for him?
Principal, Your Retail Authority, LLC
I’m going to jump in here and take a slightly different path. Customer journey is more about mapping out the potential journeys of your brick-and-mortar shoppers and then meeting them at critical touchpoints along the journey to give them what they want. Be it the right interaction or something to ease the process and make the experience more delightful. Although we do have data to personalize, a ME level of personalization is not always needed to move the customer journey along. It is about choosing the data that fits the touchpoint. But that’s just my 2 cents.
President, Global Collaborations, Inc.
To fully integrate analytics to get a better view of consumers, all retailers and manufacturers need to be diligent about understanding their consumers and retailers and manufacturers need to collaborate to identify their joint consumers at every retail location. This is a huge task but the best strategy for successfully selling a manufacturer’s product to the consumers who enter a particular store.
President, Protonik
Founder, CEO, Black Monk Consulting
Retail industry thought leader
Head of Trends, Insider Trends
I think retailers have a lot to gain by thinking about the total customer journey, for example someone who might browse online but buy in-store or vice-versa, someone who searches for product reviews multiple times or sees an advertisement and researches the product on their mobile.
The store is a great way of marketing the brand and products to customer, engaging with them and offering unique experiences, but it can be difficult to gather the level of data about the customer journey that you can online. But if you have that information about your online customers you can use it to enhance in-store offerings, alongside data that you are able to collect from the physical space. Lots of companies are now tackling the analytics in-store issue so I think retailers are going to have more and more data to work with in the future and that will present opportunities around improving the journey and offering personalisation.
Co-founder, CART
Brick-and-mortar stores actually have more potential data points to pull from than those that are purely online. The data is not only from member data, but foot traffic, camera data, sentiment analysis, etc. Retail executives can borrow a page out of the customer journey play book that e-commerce companies have been using for years and overlay store-generated information over the top.
President, Ipsos Retail Performance
CFO, Weisner Steel
I’m confused. On RW we hear preached endlessly the value — indeed necessity — of omnichannel, and yet here we have an article talking about “brick and mortar” retailers. Whatever the merits of the analytics discussed here, any retailer who thinks of themselves as being “in” some channel, and thinks they can “catch up” to some other channel — rather than incorporating into their business model — doesn’t get it.
Sr Director, Retail Transformation Specialist, Infovista
Global Senior Director, Retail Business Unit at SAP
When I engage with merchants and category managers, the single largest concern is the time they have on hand to make decisions. They are consumed with fighting a lot of fires regardless of channel purchase. It leads me to think that even though customer journey mapping, foot traffic analysis, market basket analysis etc. are all highly useful tools that something is missing from the equation in terms of how to consume these insights and act on them intelligently and at scale. As one of the earlier posters mentioned quite insightfully, there are lots of data/knowledge sources and they’re growing daily, but how to harness in a practical and scalable way will be the real breakthrough for merchant practitioners, IMO.
CEO, Motista