Blis, WBR Insights and Future Stores Study Shows 91% of Retailers Are Embracing Digital Strategies to Build Loyalty to Physical Stores

By STS News Desk On Apr 29, 2019

Strategies like location-based targeting and retargeting help drive foot traffic

Blis, the global martech leader, announced the launch of a new report with WBR Insights and Future Stores. The study, Brick and Mortar Loyalty: How Brand and In-Store Engagement Strategies Go Hand in Hand, surveyed 100 retail professionals in a variety of roles. The results provide a unique guide to how the most successful brands are combining online and offline data, including location-based data, to create a unified, seamless experience between digital and physical channels for a competitive advantage in today’s digital economy.

With consumers increasingly taking an omnichannel approach to their shopping, retailers are seeking to replicate that approach in their strategic and marketing thinking. Location-based data plays a key role in this, especially as 70% of respondents said they take a mobile-first strategy to customer engagement.

Location-based data allows retailers to target consumers with tailored content, including ads and discount offers, at a time when they are most receptive to taking a trip to the store. As the range of data becomes larger and more in-depth, it is informing a greater proportion of marketing activities, from ad targeting to product design.

Additional findings of the study include:

61% of retailers have changed their brand strategy to create a more inclusive, personalized in-store environment.
64% of respondents say they provide a “phygital” experience that can’t be replicated online in order to compete with digital channels.
55% of respondents say they leverage augmented reality that consumers can use on their phone to enhance the in-store experience.

Marketers are growing ever more creative in their uses of data such as location data to reimagine the in-store retail experience. Tactics include delivering an in-store multimedia experiences (cited by 61 percent of respondents) and emulating an “endless aisle” approach (cited by 54 percent).

“Retailers have woken up to the need to create true omnichannel strategies to reach modern consumers,” said Gil Larsen, VP, Americas at Blis. “The work to translate that into a truly personalized in-store customer experience drawing on real-world intelligence about consumers, fueled by location data, is still in progress. As the competitive environment in retail gets ever more difficult, retailers will increasingly find these strategies to be vital to their overall success.”

To gather this information around retailer strategy, WBR Insights and Future Stores surveyed respondents working in retail marketing (38% of respondents), store operations (26% of respondents), store merchandising (22% of respondents), and store planning (13% of respondents). In terms of size of operation, 43% of respondents said they had 100 – 500 stores, 20% said they had 501 – 1,000 stores, 27% said they had 1,001 – 5,000 stores, and the remaining 10% said they had more than 5,000 stores.