In our newest whitepaper, we will discuss,

• Why integrating mobile is a must-have not a nice-to-have
• The ways in which you can integrate mobile into your existing digital strategy
• How to integrate mobile into your offline strategy

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This has become a problem for retailers especially those that do not offer an online presence and rely on the sales that happen in the store. Resources are spent entertaining and providing knowledge to consumers who don’t intend to make a purchase at the location at all.

The major reason for this phenomenon is that consumers are more conscience of price and are more educated on the fact that they have options beyond the item being offered at the price in the exact store they are visiting.

A recent research study by Pew identified that in a 30-day period around the holidays, 52% of shoppers used their phone to perform research while in the store looking at products. And of those that did, 19% made their purchase online, not at the register in the store.

So how do retailers overcome showrooming? Here are a few things you could consider doing:

Be fully alert and aware of shoppers using their phones while looking at items.

Huge tell-tale sign that a shopper may be checking prices in other store or ecommerce shops is that they are on their phone

Bring online content into your offline store.

Sonia Misak writes in the MediaPost article that ‘We know from online retailers that there is a huge value in consumer reviews, so if these were made accessible in-store, value would be added to the purchase. The opportunity to do this certainly exists with retailer-specific QR codes and barcode scanners. (Target, for example, has an app that allows shoppers to scan a UPC code to pull up reviews.)’

Advertise price match guarantees (if you can offer them).

If you want that purchase to happen in your store, then empower your team to make it happen. A major reason people leave stores to make a purchase elsewhere is price. If you are prepared to offer a price match against any retailer offering the same item at a lower price, then make sure each and every one of the people that walk in your store know about it.

Offer products that are not found online.

Want a simple solution? Offer products that your customers cannot locate online. Sure, they may be able to identify something comparable but you have a unique value proposition the second you say ‘we are the only retailer that carries this model/color/brand/style/etc.’.

Disconnect the WiFi

This may be a bit bold, but we didn’t always have a cell signal while we were in a store. In fact, I remember walking into Wal-Mart as a teenage and saying ‘gotta go, I’m going into Wal-Mart and there is no service.’ Why give the option to surf the web and compare your products and prices to the mass market?

Have you experiencing showrooming at your location? Have you done it yourself? Please share your stories. And if you have any tips on taking on this phenomenon, then share those too!

{image by Mioi}

Audience targeting to me is the demographic make-up of the audience. This is where we get into gender, age, household income, geography, etc.

Contextual or content targeting to me is the behavioral make-up of the audience. What the audience reading, listening to, interacting with, etc.

Is audience targeting really more effective? Is this really the driving point to ‘better targeting’?

I think it’s a hard nail to hit.

You could define personas for your ideal buyer and wrap some demographic profiles around them. That would help you targeting messages. But where would you place your message? This is where content comes in.

Is your demographic looking at the same content? Probably not.

Is the content being consumed by a certain demographic? Probably not.

So why are we leaning one way or the other?

All in all, we want better targeting, but I don’t think we should be narrowing our focus to delivering messages based on the audience profile or the content being consumed. I think it’s going to be somewhere in the middle. All things considered, if we want to focus on targeting, we need to account for the demographic make-up of our consumers and what exactly that group is paying attention to. The overlap is where the return will be.

The longevity of Super Bowl ads ensures interested parties will not miss those ads. Even before the game, some brands released their Bowl ads or teasers on YouTube – something previously unheard of. The best of them will have millions of views. They will be written about across the internet and voted on by AdAge, Adrants, consumers and more.

Yet, while I was watching the game, I was hardly engaged even with the TV. The Super Bowl is a social event, and many people don’t pay attention to every part, especially if their team isn’t playing. Friends are gathered around and fans are likely vying for the waitress/bartender’s attention or focusing on buffalo wings and party dip. While I can’t say my experience this year way typical – I was in a conference room with 200 other marketing/advertising people, all trying to network – I can’t say that is would have been much different if I had been in a bar or at home. I didn’t have much of an opportunity to scan QR codes or tag the halftime show using Shazam, so for me the mobile portion was a fail.

But I tried, and maybe that’s what really qualifies as success.

What were your favorite Super Bowl commercials and did you use your phone to interact with them?

The line is now officially blurred and will continue to get blurrier until it no longer exists.

Why?

For one thing, technology has grown at such a fast pace that, as consumers, we have these expectations from companies. We look at our phones, computers and tablets and if they don’t do something, we say ‘why can’t I do such and such? It should be possible!

While technology advances and becomes more sophisticated, so do the consumers.

Take a step back for a moment

A few years ago before the smartphone or the tablet took off, if you were a consumer shopping online, then you would probably describe the scenario as sitting at home in front of a computer browsing the web

Now consider offline shopping. This would consist of you driving to a retail location, walking through the aisles browsing merchandise. You may pick something up, try it on or check to see if they have your size and then bring it to the counter to complete the purchase.

Now build your bridge

With both scenarios in mind, consider how your most recent shopping experience went. Did you have access to online information at the exact time you were shopping offline? Did you interact with online content by searching for locations of retailers, online coupons or even inventory of an item you were interested in?

Online and offline are no longer two separate entities. The shopping experience has blurred.

We are now shopping online and picking up in-store.

We are in the store and ordering items via our mobile device.

We are being served mobile offers that are tailored to our preferences.

We are using our mobile device to pay for items at the check-out counter.

We are using smartphones to scan barcodes on items to avoid the check-out line.

We are checking for inventory in nearby stores when items are sold out.

In a recent article on Advertising Age http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/mobile-commerce-brings-online-offline/231327/, Michael Lingenfelter, senior consultant at Maia Strategy Group, states

Marrying the online experience with the tactile and visual in-store experience, combined with the ability to take the product home with you, is the key to utilizing the potential of mobile commerce

And this is exactly where brands need to focus because as we all know, the consumer is in charge and the technology available is only further enabling them.

This post originally appeared on BizChanger.com on January 11th.

Now I am not talking about the various lengths we go to in order to ensure our target audience sees our message, I am talking about the actual interaction between brand and consumer.

I was watching a presentation the other day put on by Celtra http://www.celtra.com/ about mobile advertising formats and the way brands can design and deliver marketing messages to extremely targeted audiences. As I was watching the demonstration of how one would design a mobile ad that enabled a consumer to swipe mildew off their mobile screen to reveal a bottle of Tilex and the ad campaign for Starbucks that allowed mobile users to actually design a cup and submit it for a contest, I started thinking about how mobile has really removed all separation between consumer and product.

With touchscreens, we are physically performing an action and that action is ‘touching’ the brand. Some may say we accomplish this with online advertising but I would argue that navigating a mouse and clicking on something is a lot different than feeling it.

Now let’s think about other mediums like email, TV, radio, billboards, print media and events. The degrees of separation of apparent. With the exception of email that people can consume, touch and navigate on their phones, the rest do not afford brands with the ability to directly interact and engage consumers.

You cannot touch TV or interact with the brand and you, as the brand owner, have no actual metrics on how many people watched your commercial or did something because of it.

You cannot touch radio or interact with the brand and you, as the brand owner, have no actual metrics on how many people listened to the commercial or did something because of it.

You cannot touch a billboard or interact with it (QR codes are the exception but how many of us have our scanners at the ready as we drive by these things at 40mph?) and you, as the brand owner, have no actual metrics on how many people not only drive by it, but noticed it and did something because of it.

See the pattern here?

Mobile removes the barrier between consumer and brand. We touch the brand, we play with it, and we do something as a result. And it’s all tracked and measured. There is really no medium that can compete with that.

Are you integrating mobile into your current investments? How are you using this medium to reach and engage with your core audiences?

- We place billboards in areas that are highly trafficked by our target audience or in strategic locations that are relevant  to our business.

- We work with editorial teams to place print advertisements in appropriate places within publications.

- We optimize our websites to be found by people searching for relevant topics.

- We mail our materials to the people who are most likely to take action and buy or influence a decision to buy.

- We attend and participate in events that are revelant to our business and what we offer.

As we add mobile marketing and advertising to the mix, brands now need to consider how their mobile efforts align with what the consumer is doing and looking at.

According to a recent study by eMarketer :

The ability to align ad creative with site content undoubtedly creates a more cohesive user experience and helps brands more closely approximate users who may be in-market for related products and services.

While connecting the ad you are serving to the content that is being viewed is one way to be relevant, if you take a look at the results of the study, geographically
relevant ads are ahead of contextually relevant ads when it comes to tactics.

How to be geographically relevant

1. Work with a mobile ad network that is able to serve your ads based on the mobile users location.

Not all ad networks require the publishers (mobile websites and mobile apps) to provide them with location information. If location is important for you, then ask the question and also ask how they are doing it.

2. Decide how you want to be geographically relevant.

You may decide to target based on your store locations or perhaps you want to target consumers who are located in or near your competitors. In other instances, brands target based on the temperative in a location or an event like a concert or football game. Consider how you want to be relevant in terms of the location of the consumer.

3. Ensure your ad copy and graphics make sense to the region and season.
Consumers in Boston may not be as prone to click on an ad for an ice coffee in December as someone in Florida. When you are targeting geographically, consider how your consumer would want to see you ad and what would make sense for them to react upon based on where they are, the season and even the time of day (if you are not 24 hour business, you may not want to serve your ads at midnight for example).
 

Step 1: Anticipate threats

The backbone for any successful crisis communication plan is to visualize and catalog anything that could possibly go wrong. What if the customer is charged double? What is the power goes out in the middle of a service? What if the customer tries to return something without a receipt?

Step 2: Conquer the threats

Now for each scenario you listed in step 1, draft how you would resolve the issue. Would you direct the customer to a support email? Phone number for a contact center? Would you issue a refund or a gift certification for a future visit?

Step 3: Empower your employees

The minute that a response requires approval from several steps ‘up the ladder’, you potentially lose credibility with your customer. Empower your employees to respond appropriately within the guidelines you define. If step 1 and 2 are well documented and thorough, your employees should be comfortable responding to and handing things that arise.

Step 4: Ensure all communication methods are monitored

Now while your customers may be standing in front of you with a complaint or compliment, there are other methods for them to communicate to the world about your brand. Consider review sites like Yelp, Orbitz, and Patch.com and assign someone within your company with the responsibility to monitor these sites. You also need to take into account social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+. If there are conversations being had about your company on these sites, you want to ensure that you not only know about it but that you chime in.

Step 5: Monitor and adjust plan accordingly

There will always be new ‘situations’ that arise in which you need to proactively engage in a plan that may sometimes be ‘out of the box’. Document these instances and train your team on how to handle them. Step 1 and 2 will continuously evolve over time – especially if you offer different/new products and services on a regular or semi-regular
basis.

Positive reviews and negative comments are both very important to your business and you can learn a lot from them. The important piece is to ensure that you have a plan in place to communicate with your customers especially if there is a crisis involved.

{image by MarkyBon}

Mobile coupons make a lot of sense for several reasons.

1. The ability for a brand to serve you an ad when you are in their actual store or within a certain vicinity of a retail location is really only available with mobile.

2. If you have the coupon on your phone that’s in your pocket at the store location, you are highly likely to use it.

3. It is electronic which enables the viewer to pass the coupon along to friends and social networks.

4. Brands have technology available to push coupon offers and alerts to target consumers.

5. Consumers can opt-in to receive coupons in an alternative format (text message, email, app, etc.)

One of my go-to coupon apps is the Walgreens app. They have a coupon section that changes every day or every couple of days. Each time I am in a Walgreens location, I check the app to see what coupon is being promoted to see if I could take advantage of the offer that day. I have never been a ‘coupon clipper’ and my adoption of mobile coupons has been purely based upon convenience and relevancy.

Yes, I like savings and every time I watch ‘Extreme Couponing’, I get the ambitious desire to clip coupons and get an entire grocery cart’s worth of food for free but I am not likely to do it.

Mobile coupons make it simple for me to save these savings to my phone, quickly check for applicable discounts at the exact point of purchase and pass along to my friends and family.

Now start to combine hyper-local mobile ads that serve coupons and you could start to see an increase in the number of consumers shopping in your location that had not originally intended to.

Do you use mobile coupons personally? Are you seeing higher redemption levels in your stores that offer and promote them?

{image by posguy99}

First off, if you are not optimizing already for mobile, then I hope by the end of this post I have convinced you to put it high on your list of priorities. And if you are already delivering mobile optimized emails, then enjoy the statistics from the report and use them as a baseline against your own analytics.

Here are 4 reasons why your email needs to be ready for mobile in 2012:

1. Email open rates up on mobile and down on desktop

As we continue to literally have access to all our accounts at any time using our mobile phone, it’s no wonder that open rates are exponentially higher on mobile devices than desktop. With that being said, it is imperative that the emails you deliver to your subscribers, partners and employees be optimized for viewing on any screen size.

2. Consumer Services ranks highest for mobile email opens across all industries

This seems about right seeing as the consumer service industry is operates on a 24/7/365 schedule. Mobile has made it easier to have a proper work/life balance when issues do arise and a consumer needs support at any time.

3. Consumer Products click-through rates highest across industry segments for mobile and desktop

People who are receiving emails regarding consumer products have seemingly opted-in to receive offers, updates and announcements so we can safely say they are more likely to click-through on these types of things. But as you can see from the next data point extracted from the report, this is highly dependent upon the email being optimized for mobile.

4. Click-through rates overall were exponentially higher on desktop

If you cant read the email and don’t know what you are clicking on, then how likely are you to click? Probably not likely. This seems to be the reason why desktop continues to squash mobile when it comes to CTR on email messages.

Also interesting to note was that open rates on mobile were heaviest between 5am-7am and 11pm-4am and click-throughs were heaviest between midnight and 3am. Food for thought when you are deciding when to schedule email communications (doesn’t seem like the Tues or Wed between 1pm and 3pm ‘best practice’ is valid).

{image by fiveforfun}