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!

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

When the first transactional shopping website went live 20 years ago, the future of retail threatened to become a battleground between bricks and clicks. Today’s reality is very different; the battle cries have been replaced by courtship and now marriage, thanks to consumer behaviour. Shoppers have turned out to be channel agnostic, wanting a frictionless customer experience in which quality, price and service are consistent, whether they shop online, mobile or in-store. To my mind, it makes absolute sense for physical retailers to collaborate with e-tailers to build platforms that combine the strengths of both sets of business processes, resources and skills. Walmart, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Amazon, Alibaba, to name but a few, have all recognised and acted on this belief. Physical retailers have their established product supply chains, store estates, distribution and logistics, in-store team experience, visual merchandising expertise. E-tailers bring with them cloud-based agility and speed, order fulfillment, digital infrastructure, customer knowledge, personalisation and deep data insights. The challenge for both becomes one of engaging with the right partner(s) and transforming operations by deploying… Read more »

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.

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.

Integrating that kind of analytics into brick-and-mortar operations is essential, and it will be accomplished when those brick-and-mortar stores stop seeing a division between brick-and-mortar and ecommerce. Increasingly, the customer expects his or her journey to incorporate elements of both. Working with that expectation, and incorporating digital tools in the physical world, is the beginning of retail success – not only because those digital tools serve the customer on their journey, but because they give the retailer greater insights than ever into who that customer is, what they want, and what they are likely to want in the future. The “smart store” is the future of retail, where the store’s intelligence anticipates the customer’s needs; and more importantly, the “smart customer,” armed with more information than ever, is a reality to which retailers must adapt. The advanced analytics brick-and-mortar retailers must bring on board go much further than general demographic information and buying trends gleaned from shopper cards. Today’s analytics will help retailers – both online and brick-and-mortar – understand more deeply who that customer… Read more »