To truly conquer the connected shopper, you need to encourage your customers to buy as much as possible in one shopping journey. In today’s retail environment, shoppers are presented with overwhelming choice. Here’s how you can influence their decision-making to ensure they buy as much as possible from your product suite and brand.
Combating shopping on “autopilot”
Shoppers have always made hundreds of decisions in-store, and now connectivity has created an explosion of further options. To help cope with the confusion of too much choice, consumers tend to shop on “autopilot”, navigating real and virtual stores by the products and brands they know and have bought before. If you’re to encourage shoppers to buy more from you in a single visit, you need to understand this behavior to interrupt and change it. You also need to make the experience of shopping as easy and convenient as possible.
One way to do this is to sell to consumers’ “need states”. Whether it’s a last-minute child’s birthday party invite to an impromptu barbeque, organizing products by “need states” rather than category in a highly effective way to fill shoppers’ baskets both in-store and online. For example, displaying cards and wrap next to the toys is an effective way to ensure that you maximize sales from the birthday party shopper. It also discourages them from making a second shopping trip to a stationer to buy gift wrap materials. The same technique can be used online – for example, by suggesting other barbeque related products the moment a shopper adds burgers to their trolley.
Follow the shopper in the real and virtual store
We help you “follow” the customer journey by combining numerous behavioral data sources with observations and interviews to create a 360° profile of today’s connected shopper. Virtual stores enable you to decipher decision-making at the point of purchase – both in-store and at the shelf. For example, it can help you identify optimum product assortment and understand which promotions are most effective in-store. You can also use it to assess the impact of packaging on consumers, perfect your pricing strategies and evaluate the customer experience. Virtual stores are also key in allowing you to understand shoppers’ need states and then to organize your offering to sell to them.
Optimizing your retail environment
Knowledge is power when it comes to conquering the connected shopper. By measuring the retail environment with the many data sources available, you will be empowered to optimize it. By evaluating in-store activities, you can maximize your investment in marketing, and generate sales across channels, store formats, categories, segments and variants. Let data be your guide.
Marco Wolters is Global Industry Lead Fashion, Home & Lifestyle at GfK. He can be reached at Marco.Wolters@gfk.com.
