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5 Ways to Successfully Engage Back-to-School Shoppers

It’s the second most wonderful time of the year for retailers — back-to-school shopping. Back in July, e-commerce provider PFSweb predicted that U.S. consumers would spend an estimated $29 billion in July and August during this buying bonanza.

Trends are changing fast for parents and kids in their shopping plans, and successful retailers should embrace the shift. Stores can utilize data to provide personalized, engaging, and trackable customer experiences, earning straight A’s and big profits during the season.

Understanding How Parents and Children Shop

Technology is changing the way adults, teens, and kids shop for supplies. Retailers who want to thrive instead of just survive must stay ahead of these trends:

  • Timing: Parents and children flood retail locations one to two weeks before school starts, while online shoppers usually like to fill their virtual carts three to four weeks early.
  • Kids get to pick: Though parents gravitate toward sales, many will allow their children to ultimately decide on final purchases. 
  • A friend’s opinion matters: The recommendations of friends are often decisive factors in children’s buying decisions. 
  • Mobile plays a role: According to the PFSweb study, 83 percent of shoppers use a mobile device to help make their back-to-school purchasing decisions. 
  • Coupons still matter: Adult will be making most purchases. That means coupons, sales, and special promotions are powerful buying incentives. 
  • Social media: PFSweb’s research suggests that 73 percent of moms use Facebook in some capacity for back-to-school shopping, while children divide their loyalties between Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

How to Win a Bigger Slice of the Back-to-School Pie

Once you understand how your customer’s behavior and expectations are changing, you can tool your marketing and stocking to match. Here are five ways to lure in more shoppers during this lucrative time of year:

  1. Beef up your mobile and social platforms.

To please your customers, you must follow their lead — that means developing mobile and social platforms that allow them to engage with your brand. Last year, Nordstrom, Inc. partnered with visual marketing company Curalate to seamlessly link their Instagram feed to a special Like2Buy storefront. When customers clicked on an image from the store’s Instagram feed, they were taken to an e-commerce page where that product was available for purchase. This type of instant engagement made purchasing smooth and enjoyable.

  1. Send targeted messaging and coupons.

The more information you can glean from your customers, the more you can personalize their online and offline shopping experiences. Offering a loyalty card program will allow you to track purchases and anticipate buying needs. Using this, you can incentivize customers with special coupons on the items they’ve already shown a penchant for buying. CVS/pharmacy is a proven genius at this game, with its famously long receipts full of personalized coupons for loyalty customers.

  1. Implement in-store tracking solutions.

Are your shoppers attracted to effective back-to-school displays? Can they quickly and easily find your back-to-school products? How much time do they spend in these sections? If you don’t implement in-store tracking solutions, you’ll never be able to answer these questions and optimize your store layout. Companies like ShopperTrak, RetailNext, and Prism Skylabs all offer in-store tracking analytics.

  1. Promote in-store engagement.

Creative in-store promotions can encourage customers to add a little more to their shopping carts while enjoying great deals. Last year, a Portuguese retailer named Zippy launched a fun, recess-themed promotion. Every hour, a school bell rang in the store, signifying recess time. During “recess,” certain sought-after products went on sale for 15 minutes. The promotion created a lot of excitement for shoppers and plenty of additional profits for Zippy.

  1. Track data.

If you’re not tracking customer behavior, then you’re flying blind. On top of in-store tracking, make sure you monitor activity on social media and mobile sites, coupon conversions, discount redemptions, and merchandise movement during promotions. Search for action items within the data. Don’t be afraid to drop promotions that aren’t working and follow where the data leads.

Even though the back-to-school shopping season is coming to a close, it’s not too late to ramp up your efforts to engage with your customers, whether in your physical store, on your e-commerce site, or on your social media pages. The lessons you learn from your back-to-school efforts can help you plan for the holy grail of shopping: the holiday season!

Roberto Ugo is co-founder and CTO of Movvo, an innovative platform that measures the flow of people in physical spaces and helps retailers enhance customers’ shopping experiences. Ugo specialized in business data networks and e-commerce at Boston University and the University of the West of Scotland and has an international background in engineering and computer sciences. Movvo won the first Venture Competition through MIT Portugal and has offices in Portugal, Boston, and Silicon Valley.

 


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