In a challenging environment for retailers, the internet of things is your secret weapon to staying relevant to brick-and-mortar shoppers.
Whether you’re an entrepreneur with a retail startup or the head of a traditional global corporation, you've likely seen first-hand the increased challenges of today’s brick-and-mortar retail environment.
The headlines here keep coming: Gap recently announced it was closing 230 retail stores, right after J.C. Penney, Victoria’s Secret and Payless ShoeSource shut the door on thousands of their own store locations. Clearly, legacy retail players are feeling the pressure.
Yet brick-and-mortar retail isn't dead: It’s just ripe for disruption. Seeing success are retailers like traditional chains Target and Best Buy, as well as newer players like Allbirds. Even digital native retailers like Casper, Glossier and Warby Parker are opening brick-and-mortar store locations, following the “clicks to bricks” trend.
What do these successful businesses have in common? Their leaders have seen the future in terms of customers shopping both online and in-store, which has led them to focus on an omnichannel customer experience. But retailers need a way to seamlessly integrate their in-store experience and digital presence. And that brings us to the internet of ihings. In fact, IoT is the technology that can bridge that gap.
The omnichannel shopping experience is crucial to retail success in 2019. Some 73 percent of shoppers in one survey said they use multiple channels, according to a study reported in the Harvard Business Review, and the more channels those shoppers use, the more money they spend.
While many brands have focused on the online shopping experience over in-store experiences, retail leaders arerealizingthat today, customers want both.
IoT technology -- which collects data from smart, wifi-connected devices -- is changing the data game for brick-and-mortar stores. IoT can enrich physical retailers with data in the same way that ecommerce retailers have historically had access to data through tracking "cookies" and demographics. This is because IoT paves the way to new types of data from new sources, including in-store traffic counters, kiosks, inventory tags, even customers’ mobile phones.
Below are a few of the important ways retail leaders can achieve their business goals and enhance the customer experience by applying IoT technology.
According to Yes Marketing, 57 percent of shoppers polled said they used mobile apps while in stores; and that fact offers retailers the opportunity to use IoT to deliver a seamless in-store and in-app experience. Lowe’s, for example, offers an in-store navigation app that allows shoppers to find products in the store more efficiently, using their mobile phones.
Similarly, Sephora’s mobile app becomes the Store Companion tool when a customer enters the store, providing product recommendations based on that user’s profile and what he or she has previously browsed.
