Monthly Archives: October 2016

Tips and Tricks for Retailers Preparing for the Sale Season

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With the onset of Diwali around the corner, as a retailer, we assume you might have prepared your best to make the most of the festival sale season.

 

Customers expect good variety and discounts, but what truly gets their attention is when retailers exceed their expectations through personalized orders and precise deliveries.

 

It’s worth an effort to review last year’s performance and identify new ways to get organized that can yield maximum revenues from one of the biggest Indian festivals of the year:

 

Diwali Omnichannel Promotions Pre-Planning

 

  • Product Performance: Check on the product categories and promotional strategies that performed the best last year.
  • Compile a list of marketing campaigns and creatives to help expedite the process of launching campaigns.
  • System testing: it’s not too late to run load tests on your eCommerce websites to check if your systems have the capacity to handle heavy volumes of sales traffic.
  • Optimize System Performance: based on the outcome of your load tests, you can add additional capacity and/or increase the speed of your website with the support of additional hardware vendors or through a scalable content delivery network (CDN).
    Tip: Decreasing the size of the images of the products on your eCommerce site to improve its performance.
  • Product recommendation strategy: Diwali is also one of the best times to promote personalized loyalty coupons. Check the customer’s preferences, buying behavior, color-design-brand preferences, to plan for daily/weekly recommendation updates.
  • Inventory readiness: Double check your product inventory systems and the inventory availability against the sales forecast. If necessary, create a backup plan for items that are at the risk of being sold out.
  • Skim Your Competitors Strategy: Although out-rightly aping your competitors’ campaigns and promotions may not yield the same results, being aware of the different types of promotional offers run by the competitors can help you implement few creative quick fix sales strategies.
  • Digital asset readiness: Ensure to plan the design and content of your emails, landing pages, and online ads on a weekly or daily basis. Don’t forget to personalize the mailers based on the target segment to make it highly relevant for the visitors.

 

Collaborate and Deliver

 

  • Meet up: Schedule daily cross-functional team meetings throughout the Diwali season.
  • Adhere to shipping threshold times: Ensure to create a centralized calendar that includes shipping cutoff times and guaranteed delivery dates.
  • Take note of the complaints received: with respect to shipping or delivery issues and record the resolutions or solutions in a centralized repository that needs to be shared with the customer support team.
  • Monitor your inventory: in real time to ensure that you have enough time to match promotional and marketing campaign schedules.
  • Measure and Improve: Monitor product placement, pricing, response to the marketing promotions on a daily basis and make adjustments to maximize revenues and profitability.

 

Apart from sales data, it helps to keep a daily tab of the following data:-

 

  • The best-selling products in various product categories
  • Stores Sales across different regions at store and regional levels
  • The number of customers that frequently buy from your retail stores
  • The number of customers that frequently buy from your e-shops
  • The customer’s journey from online to in-store
  • The daily/weekly ROI on Diwali marketing $$ spend for campaigns, promotions, merchandising etc.

 

Rush Hour Sales Quick Fixes

 

  • Capitalize on Diwali sales to increase your fans/followers/re-tweet numbers by offering discounts/freebies by requesting visitors to encourage checking in to your retail stores and request them to review the store experience.
  • Find queue busters. You can also put few kiosks and tablets across your high traffic stores to enable customers to purchase items without making them wait in line.
  • Ensure to install boards and placards across the store where you can share information and direction on which aisle or on what shelves the respective products are located.
  • Don’t forget to publicize or advertise the events and loyalty programs as part of your in-store promotions.
  • Promote gift cards and declare in-store product bundling coupons to make great last-minute Diwali sales.

 

Don’t Lose Sight of the After Sale Issues and Queries

 

Expect to see a number of returns/issues/ queries either during or immediately after the Diwali dhamaka sale rush. Although many brands don’t offer an exchange or returns on sale item but depending on the size of your retail store, consider allocating a specific area to address the issues related to the Diwali sale items.

 

Once the Diwali rush is over you’ll have time to catch your breath but that feeling may just be momentary. Then, it is time to start preparing for the big Christmas and New Year holiday shopping season all over again!

The Right Way to Influence Pre-Purchase Behaviour

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Remember when marketers ran newspaper ads with discount coupons to encourage outlet visits? Customers had to cut and fill the coupon and present it at the billing counter. Such tedious tactics seem outdated in today’s digital world in order to influence pre purchase customer decisions. Retailers now have the privilege of personalizing coupons based on individual customer preferences by analyzing all the relevant data captured through the customer’s buying patterns and purchase history. Each customer can then be targeted with personalized offers and recommendations based on specific insights.

 

Advanced technologies can aid Retailers Identify Customer Buying Behavior Patterns and Preferences

 

To target a customer with tailored offers, he or she must have a unique identifier – a mobile phone is the obvious choice, given its ubiquitous nature. Retailers are now turning to facial recognition technology and AI-powered footfall counters. These intelligent technologies also help retailers study their customers’ likes, dislikes and navigation patterns around the store, and enables them to offer superior personalized experiences.

 

Retailers are also using location-based technology to study their customers. Geo-targeting technology can help brands target its customers based on their location – for instance messages about a sale in a particular locality can be pushed to customers’ mobile phones. Within a certain virtual marked off radius around the store, the brands can further target customers with short-time discounts using Geo-fencing, which employs GPS technology in a customer’s smartphone to push specific messages to the device. Retailers can also use in-store beacon technology that can communicate with a customer’s smartphone and send out targeted offers. Beacons can also be used to personalize the shopping experience for its customers. While these technologies help retailers reinvent the shopping experience, there is a flip side to such advancements. These technologies will work only after the customer takes specific action – i.e the customer needs to download the store’s mobile app, keep it active, and ensure that the bluetooth or GPS is turned on. There is always an inherent risk of annoying customers or losing their interest by asking them to take a concerted effort to avail offers or coupons. The need of the hour is to adopt a non-intrusive method that eliminates the above mentioned pitfalls and helps influence customer behavior in a subtle manner, by enabling the retailer to initiate a customer-oriented action.

 

For retailers, customer retention has always been a big challenge, especially when it comes to influencing pre-purchasing behavior and gathering customer data without asking the customer to carry out certain set of tasks. So how can you determine a non-intrusive method to engage with your customers? The answer lies in adopting new-age technology initiatives and big data capabilities that have the power to indirectly influence the customer’s pre-purchase buying behavior. Stay tuned to our product and blog updates to learn more on how you can positively influence pre-purchase consumer behavior patterns by avoiding any annoying and intrusive techniques.