How In-Store Remarketing Empowers Retailers’ Omnichannel Strategies

Online remarketing continues to be one of the best performing channels for retailers. That fact is only increasing, given that so many shoppers begin researching their next potential purchase on their mobile devices, before setting foot in a store. But the use of these same tactics applied once inside physical store and afterward, is still an early and critical opportunity. Does the use of the word critical seem sensationalist? Not when you realize that $0.64 of every dollar of physical store sales is affected by digital and growing.

The best online remarketing strategies look at far more than the last product browsed. Online retailers are well versed at collecting deep and meaningful data from website visitors – unique and return visits, dwell time, pathing, number of products engaged with at what depth and frequency - whether or not they’ve already gone to one of their retail stores - and then remarketing to the shopper based on their browsing history and related behaviors. In order to open similar opportunities for digitally remarketing to store customers, corollary data capture in the store environment should be the goal.

Driving omnichannel success with in-store remarketing is based on this fact: If retailers are going to use data modeling and ecommerce to drive more sales inside their physical environments, their on-site digital experiences must take advantage of all the unique intent data the physical store has to offer. And there is plenty of it.

In order to remarket intelligently to store customers, like online, retailers should implement interactive technology in their stores to get real-time information about how, and why their customers behave the ways they do inside their stores. Armed with those insights, retailers can take actions to provide better experiences — that delight shoppers, leads to more sales, at and after the store experience. Not only are retailers creating a good store customer experience that can lead to a transaction then and there, they’re also building a relationship that encourages customer lifetime value, blending the online and offline dichotomy.

If in-store technologies can measure the frequency and effectiveness of interactions between sales associates and shoppers, that may tell retailers how to adjust training incentives and deployment of sales staff to increase their efficiency, helpfulness and productivity. Additionally, it’s possible to know that those customers are more likely to buy if remarketed to digitally. If retailers can track where shoppers go inside of a retail store, how often they go there, and how long they linger in certain spots, there is an opportunity to shift a floor plan to promote special items, expose visitors to more products, and target cross-channel selling. Retailers are then able to determine what to focus on with personalized messaging to engage appropriately with remarketing.

If retailers want to truly shape and own the in-store digital and mobile experience, stores should take a page from their online counterparts and develop these kinds of in-store data collection and analytics capabilities. Since this yields concrete, useful metrics tied to real-world, in-person shopping as well as intelligent digital media strategy, retailers can readily see the value of investing in these resources.

Being able to gather and interpret information about in-store shopper traffic and activity as it’s happening – when people are actually entering, browsing, and leaving the premises – will tell store managers and owners how to merchandise their goods and remarket their business to turn more in-store shoppers into buyers. Retailers who exploit these digital touch points to glean intelligence on store visitor habits, and apply customer-friendly lessons learned from that data, give consumers a powerful incentive to spend money in their stores.