Customer engagement is a topic that is mostly popular in the online marketing circles. Among marketers of brick and mortar businesses, customer experience matters more. There is a difference between the two. While customer engagement mostly includes the process of customers interacting with the brand (or vice versa), customer experience is the outcome of such interactions.
As you can see, nothing here pertains specifically to the digital medium. Customers interact with brands offline all the time. Yet, there is very little literature that pertains to this topic specifically for brick and mortar stores. Offline business marketers simply choose to focus on experience over engagement.
Unlike a website where a banner message or pop-up chat window can trigger engagement, businesses trying to engage with their brick and mortar customers may often come across as pushy. This, in turn, ruins the customer experience. But that does not necessarily have to happen. Let us take a look at some ways brick and mortar businesses can engage with customers and enrich their experience.
Communication That Aligns With Your Brand
While not all customers prefer being waited on by sales reps when you are doing your purchase, businesses can still engage with customers through non-verbal communication. This can be in the form of banners, catalogs and other in-store elements. A computer store for instance could have a doormat that is shaped like the ‘Enter’ button on the keyboard, or a store could communicate their latest offerings over promotional banners – such engagement strategies help communicating with the customers and contribute to the brand experience and this is ultimately what marketers want.
Personalizing Your Store
Personalizing a brand to suit a customer’s likes is practical in a digital commerce medium. That is however not always feasible in a brick and mortar store. However, newer technologies are making it possible for businesses to personalize a customer’s engagement in an offline world. Businesses are making use of big data mining to map customer purchase patterns and devise a store layout that aligns to this pattern. For instance, if a business knows that a customer buying cola always ends up buying chocolate in the same transaction, they are more likely to place these two items next to each other in the store. This is also an example of a non-verbal engagement from the business that improves the customer experience.
Make Engagement Easier
Having a sales rep shadow your customer is an outdated concept and is often counter-productive. Modern IoT-based technologies make it possible for businesses to monitor customer activity and behavior from afar. This way, it is possible to identify customers who need help and thus approach only them as against shadowing each of your store visitors. This enriches the engagement between the business and the customer and also improves the experience that your visitors have in your store. Businesses that cannot afford such modern tech investments can instead deploy regular ‘help’ buttons across the various aisles on their store so that a customer who needs help can ask for it without much hassle.
Customer engagement is an important component of experience and is critical to improving business relationship with your customer. The strategies above should pave the way for brick and mortar stores to improve engagement levels with their customer and this, in turn, helps them meet their marketing objectives.
