4 Tips for Taking Your Brick & Mortar Business Online

The boundary between brick-and-mortar retail and online selling is becoming increasingly blurred, bringing increased competition for merchants in both venues. Over half of adults now research products on mobile devices while shopping in stores, an Interactive Advertising Bureau study found. Fifty-seven percent end up buying a product in a physical store after doing mobile online research, but half of these consumers end up making their purchase at a competing physical store rather than at their current location. The next most popular option is buying the product from another store’s website, either by using a mobile device or a computer after returning home. For brick-and-mortar retailers, this means that having an online presence is no longer optional, but essential in order to keep up with the competition. Here are some ways you can grow your online presence in order to outdo competitors and attract more business.

Embrace Mobile Marketing

Last holiday shopping season, the number of mobile-only shoppers approached or crossed 50 percent for seven of America’s top-ten retailers, including brick-and-mortar chains such as Target, Best Buy and Kohl’s,according to comScore. For retailers, this means that brands that aren’t meeting the needs of mobile users are losing sales and loyal customers, as frustrated customers abandon mobile-unfriendly stores for competitors.

Marketing communications manager Katie Brown outlines several strategies retailers can use to effectively implement mobile marketing. Identifying zip codes of households most likely to visit your location can enable you to place geo-targeted ads to drive local customers to your store. You can use geo-targeted social posts on sites such as Facebook and Twitter to connect with networks of local customers. IP bridging technology lets you extend your ads to the mobile devices of customers who have visited your website from their PC. Geo-fencing lets you identify customers in specific retail locations for targeted PPC ads and mobile coupons.

Make Your Website Mobile-friendly

Effectively using mobile marketing requires that your website be mobile-friendly. Most mobile users prefer screen sizes between 4.7 and 5 inches,Kantar Worldpanel research found. To ensure that mobile users can view your website, make sure your web designer uses a mobile-first responsive design strategy, which uses input from your site visitor to adapt display to their device and browser. Mashable outlines some key ingredients of a responsive website, which include fluid grids that scale to user screen size, flexible images sized in relative units to display on-screen and media queries that adjust displays to the user’s browser.

Provide Customized Shopping Service

Today’s shopper wants a more personalized shopping experience, according to Accenture research. Fifty-nine percent of online shoppers appreciate promotional offers for products they are considering, while among in-store shoppers, 57 percent want real-time promotions and 82 percent like automatic checkout discounts for loyalty points or coupons.

You can deliver such personalized experiences to customers both online at home and in-store. Online capabilities offer customers the opportunity to personalize their shopping experience. As an example, TireBuyer provides 24/7 search results that match the specified needs of the customer without having to leave home. Cayan marketing senior vice president describes several in-store personalized sales strategies retailers have adopted. For instance, some Macy’s locations use Shopkick’s shopBeacon program to turn customer phones into personalized shoppers that guide them through the store.

Accept Digital Payments

By 2017, half of online payments will be made by mobile devices, Gartner projects. Growing adoption of mobile payment solutions such as Google Wallet, Apple Pay, and PayPal will help drive this trend. Platforms such as CyberSource are emerging to help retailers process payments from these competing digital wallet solutions. Making sure your store is ready to accept mobile payments will increase your customer satisfaction and translate into more sales.

Photo Credit: Social Monsters with permission to use.