During last years, with the birth and the rapid increase of the e-commerce, there have been many changes in how people buy: it is not necessary anymore to walk in a store in person to shop, and this is affecting a lot reality as the malls, that struggle to attract and maintain customers.
In America, the mall homeland, this situation is already in development, because of the huge numbers of stores involved, but that is also verifying in Europe, just with more contained figures. Among the categories purchased on the internet, durable products stand out: books, music, clothing or accessories, event tickets, consumer electronic and IT products.
September 2017
Re-thinking retail marketing: shopping centers best practices
Mobile strategy
Is the e-commerce devouring shopping malls?
Retailer and consumer relationship has changed
It is very important, then, to consider the modifications of the market and where it is going. To survive to the competition against e-commerce and the other centers, it’s fundamental creating a well-defined identity of the shopping center, beginning with the consumer profiles. A first step is to collect data about their shopping habits, or about what they would improve in the mall: in this way you can offer the best shopping experience, which is the key, along with attention and care, to improve customers loyalty, and not seeing them running away on-line at first chance.
The center is the client: tech is the path to follow
To create a new marketing strategy, you need to start from the concept of personalization: a client doesn’t want to feel like for you he’s only a consumer, when he buys something he wants to live a unique experience. Nowadays technology offers many and many means to achieve this goal, but there are some best practices off-line that you can use, strengthening them with the IT later:
– to create aggregation, to make the mall a place of meeting;
– to aim at unique events, target-related;
– to involve the territory.
To support these guidelines there are so many tools: dedicated app that send notifications through beacons, little transmitters that use the Bluetooth to track the presence of mobile devices; stores web sites with an e-commerce section that promotes the in-store withdrawal, etc.
Retail marketing according to NearIT
NearIT, with its contextual mobile engagement and proximity marketing platform, goes further on IT strategies: it make possible to create a relationship with the clients, using targeted content and harvesting data on their behaviors; that’s the way to guarantee the best shopping experience to your customer, increasing their satisfaction loyalty.
These strategies are possible thanks to geofencing, that is to ideally fencing the mall with IT so you can track what happens in that area in a certain moment: in this way can be recorded the flows of people and also to involve the consumer through the mall app.
Through the smartphone, in fact, will be sent coupon, feedback requests, targeted contents, news, but not all of the sudden: notifications will be sent only when the consumer is in proximity of that area, giving him the support he needs just when he needs it.
Do you want to know more about NearIT solution to defeat the stores’ crisis?
