DISCUSSION
Can customer journey methodology level the playing field for brick and mortar retail?
Written by RetailWire Staff
Photo: RetailWire
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.