Expert Column: Creating a Personalized Shopping Experience for Each Shopper
When everything can be purchased online and delivered to your home, grocery retailers must do something to motivate customers to step foot in their stores. They have to create an experience customers can’t get online. Fortunately, technology allows the possibility of creating a personalized shopping experience for each customer.
Smartphone Apps
Imagine an app on your phone that organized your grocery list based on the most efficient route through the store. What if you could type your list into the app and it would tell you where to find all of the items in your preferred grocery store? What if that same app suggested recipes or sent coupons to your phone? Each of these possibilities is feasible, and some are already being implemented.
In-store Beacons
Beacons use near-field technology to communicate with each other, with your point-of-sale system, and with customers' smartphones. Placed strategically throughout your store, they map traffic patterns, alert customer service to long checkout lines, and enable you to send marketing messages and promotions to customers in real time.
Customers must have your store’s app on their phone, must have their Bluetooth enabled and must have given you permission to see their location. Once they’ve complied with these three conditions, the beacons throughout your store tell you when they last visited, what they purchased, the route they took through the store, whether they used the discounts you sent in real time, how much they spent, their names and other valuable analytics. Programmed properly, beacons can use the information they gather to send messages to a customer's phone in real time.
Instead of presenting customers with piles of your latest mailers or newspaper ads as they walk in the door, save the paper and reduce the mess by sending ads to their phones.
Imagine a customer with a history of purchasing diapers and baby items walking into the store and receiving a coupon for formula, or a customer in the meat section receiving recipe ideas for dinner that night while she's still at the store and can buy all of the ingredients. For a customer with a pattern of purchasing foods for individuals with dietary restrictions, receiving real-time notification of a new product that’s available in aisle 7 might be just the personalization he needs to become your most loyal customer.
To be truly progressive, take the technology a step further. Combine the smartphone app for grocery lists with beacons in the store to have a customer’s grocery shopping started for her by the time she walks into the store and her phone alerts you to her arrival. The employee who had begun the shopping for the shopper greets her at customer service with the first 10 items of her list already in the cart and marked off the list on the app.
QR Codes
Quick response (QR) codes have been around for a while, but few grocers have made the most of their technological potential. Use QR codes to provide nutritional information on produce, share the supply chain history of a Fair Trade product, or offer videos on how to prepare a new recipe or how to use a new kitchen gadget. Motivate customers to check the QR codes throughout the store by having one mystery code that offers a special prize each day.
Those are just some of the ways you can use technology to create a unique, personalized shopping experience for your customers. The sky's the limit once you recognize the value of personalized shopping and learn to use the technology you have.