Tag: retail

Pinterest Narrows Ad Focus To Retail And CPG To Match Users’ Interest

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
In a bid to restructure its ad sales and focus its resources on key categories that match the interests of its users, Pinterest has announced that it will slim down its ad team support to brands in retail and consumer packaged goods. Brands in other categories are still welcomed to buy ads on its site, but only through either a self-serve interface, or a third-party ad tech platform that works with Pinterest.

What Brands Need To Do
This adjustment should come as good news for brands in retail and CPG, as they can receive more attention and hands-on support from Pinterest, therefore offering them a better chance target Pinterest users. However, for brands in other verticals that have been using Pinterest as a marketing channel, the news should serve as a prompt to reevaluate their communications strategy and ad spending on Pinterest.

Source: Wall Street Journal

How A Salon Leverages Free Wi-Fi To Run Digital Promotions

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
The Edges Salon & Spa in Calgary, Canada knows what today’s customers crave when they walk into a store: free Wi-Fi. That’s why for the past seven months Edges has been offering customers free Wi-Fi to engage them on mobile and learn from their behaviors. Upon logging in, customers are shown several digital promotions the salon is running, and management then evaluates how each offer is doing and makes changes accordingly.

What Brands Need To Do
Today’s consumers crave connectivity, and the fact remains that mobile data plans can be rather pricey. Therefore, brands with physical stores would be wise to offer free in-store Wi-Fi and leverage it to incentivize customers to share personal information and data. Businesses can also piggyback on the connection provided by in-store Wi-Fi to deliver value offers right into customers’ hands and draw insights from the behavioral data it generates.

Source: StreetFight

 

Google Uses Foot Traffic Data To Inform Retailers During Holiday Season

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Google is opening up its vault of user data to help retailers during the holiday shopping season. Pulling aggregated, anonymized data from Google Maps, the Mountain View-based company is for the first time revealing foot traffic insights for various retailers to help them better reach consumers when they’re most in the mood for shopping. Google will also provide a more detailed view of offline measurement by giving advertisers the ability to break out store visits at a keyword or ad-group level, thus helping them understand which keywords or ad groups drive the most store visits.

What Retailers Need To Do
With the help of Google’s data, retailers and advertisers can optimize their store hours and staffing to best serve the holiday shopper crowds based on the ebbs and flows of foot traffic. The ability to break down store visits and attribute them to a specific keyword search can also help retailers get a better understanding of which products are driving the store visits, and adjust their shelf placements accordingly. All retailers aiming to make a sales push during the holiday season would be smart to tap into Google’s data to become better informed of the trends in holiday shopping this year.

Source: AdWeek

On Trend: How Ecommerce Is Eroding Black Friday

Posted on by Richard Yao

Amazon might have just severely undermined the cultural relevance of Black Friday.

On Wednesday, the ecommerce giant announced its plan to start offering its Black Friday deals on Nov. 20 – a full week ahead of Black Friday. Amazon Prime members will be granted a half-hour earlier access to many deals than the general public. Facing pressure from Amazon’s aggressively proactive approach, traditional retailers like Best Buy, Toys “R” Us, Kmart, and Sears are all starting their Black Friday sales early this year so as not to be left out.

More importantly, as more and more people start shopping online and taking advantage of easier comparison shopping, most retailers are now offering the same Black Friday deals online, giving customers less incentive to visit the store. No more lining up for the doorbusters at Walmart this year, as the retail giant has opted to provide nearly all of its deals both online and in stores, with the online deals becoming available at midnight on Thanksgiving day, 18 hours before the stores open.  

Overall, the disruption ecommerce has caused what analysts call the “graying” of Black Friday, where holiday sales start earlier and are spread out evenly throughout the holiday, thus making Black Friday less relevant. For retailers, this means a longer holiday sales period that starts earlier. Some retailers, such as Amazon and Toy “R” Us, are offering their loyalty program members early access, which creates smart sales windowing to incentivize the shoppers.

Besides starting early and rewarding loyal fans with early access, retailers should also consider making a push for mobile shopping this year. Amazon, for example, plans to offer a slew of mobile-only deals in hopes of driving more consumers to its app. Using mobile-exclusive deals to incentivize more shoppers to download branded retail apps can help retailers establish a digital touchpoint on shoppers’ smartphones, allowing them to connect with shoppers on the go. Apps can also provide consumer data for retailers to learn valuable insights into consumer insights.

Ecommerce may be eroding Black Friday’s importance as the biggest annual sales event, but it is also what will help retailers to reach today’s connected consumers and stay relevant in the long run.

 

Ralph Lauren And Sephora Testing Interactive Retail Experiences

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
In a bid to lure more customers into their stores, some retailers have been experimenting with new technologies to make their in-store experiences more fun and interactive. Ralph Lauren will soon start testing interactive fitting rooms at its Polo flagship store in New York City. Equipped with smart mirrors created by Oak Labs, these fitting rooms will be able to recognize the clothing items that shoppers brought in via RFID tags and display them on a large touchscreen. Shoppers can use it to request different sizes and colors of items to try on without leaving the fitting rooms.

Similarly, Sephora also added some interactivity to its new retail store in San Francisco. The new store features a “Beauty Workshop,” where customers can watch makeup tutorial videos, take a class with a Sephora sales member, and share their makeup results online. Sephora also set up a digital “Beauty Board” in store, which displays user-generated content from social media that coincides with current beauty trends on a shoppable screen.

What Retailers Need To Do
Studies show that millennial consumers value experiences over ownership, creating the so-called “experience economy” as a result. Brick-and-mortar retailers should tap into this consumer trend by offering unique in-store experiences in order to better compete with online retailers. In this regard, both Ralph Lauren and Sephora serve as good examples in incorporating digital technologies to create engaging in-store shopping experiences that ultimately drive in-store purchases.

 

Source: Engadget and Digiday

Pinterest Launches Visual Search To Help You Find Specific Items

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Earlier today, Pinterest started to roll out an interesting new image search tool for its apps and website. The visual search allows users to zoom in on a specific item – for example, a lamp, a coffee table, or a pair of shoes – in Pinterest images and search for pins that contain that item or similar-looking ones. Users can also filter the visual search by topic to narrow down the results.

What Brands Need To Do
Hailed as a “sales conversion powerhouse,” Pinterest has been beating all other social media sites in ecommerce conversion rate, especially in categories such as fashion, home goods, and food. In order to capitalize on Pinterest’s conversion prowess, brands marketing on Pinterest would be smart to create a pinned inventory of their products, with each pin linked to the corresponding purchase page. This will make them more likely to show up in the new visual search results. Popular items can also be promoted with Pinterest’s one-click “buyable pins” to boost sales.

 

Source: Wall Street Journal

Header image is a promotional image courtesy of Pinterest Blog

How Elle Used Proximity And Beacon Tech To Drive 500,000 Retail Store Visits

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
For its September issue, Elle magazine launched a Shop Now program that uses proximity technology to send readers location-based notifications and value offers. As Elle readers select their favorite brands in its fall collection within the ShopAdvisor app, they can opt to receive notifications when they are within one mile of the retail locations that carry those brands .brands’ retail locations. And if they choose to visit one of the stores carrying items featured in Elle’s curation, they will receive a digital coupon via RetailMeNot’s app powered by in-store beacons from Swirl. By leveraging editorial curation into push notifications, the magazine helped drive 500,000 in-store visits over a five-week period.

What Brands Need To Do
Elle’s early success with the Shop Now program points to the promising possibility for publishers to use proximity technology to move readers down the sales funnel. For brands, working with publishers to ensure a feature in such curations can help their products stand out among competitors. By joining forces with publishers, fashion, CPG, and other brands can leverage the publisher relationship to a partnership with retailers and app owners with reach beyond what they get from their own apps.

 

Source: Digiday

How Amazon Powers Its First Physical Bookstore With Data

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Amazon may be responsible for the demise of traditional bookstores, but that certainly won’t stop the ecommerce giant from opening one itself. The company that first started as an online bookseller has opened its first ever physical retail store – a bookstore, to be exact – in Seattle’s University Village on Tuesday.

Unlike other brick-and-mortar bookstores that typically categorize books by genre, the store will be relying on Amazon’s existing data — including customer ratings, sales totals, and Goodread popularity — to decide which books to stock and how to display them in store. In addition to books, Amazon is also setting aside a section of the store to its hardware products such as the Kindle, Echo, Fire TV, and Fire Tablet.

What Retailers Need To Do
Amazon’s physical bookstore showcases an interesting example for retail brands to take advantage of the data it gathers from online shoppers and use it to optimize the offline shopping experience. Visiting physical retail stores also allows customers to browse at leisure rather than searching for specific items, encouraging the kind of serendipitous buying that is rare in ecommerce. With some ecommerce brands dipping their toes into the brick-and-mortar space, it is key for retailers to bridge the gap between online and offline shopping with user data.

 

Source: The Verge

Fast Forward: How Yext’s Xone Can Reach Black Friday Shoppers On Cyber Monday

Posted on by Lab Team

•  Yext launched Xone, a beacon network for offline-to-online engagement
•  Retailers can message shoppers in real-time or retarget later on Facebook and Twitter
•  Analytics dashboard gives transparency to repeat visits and increased footfall driven by ads

What Yext Announced
Yext, a leader in digital location management and one of the 500 fastest growing private companies in the US, launched a location-based real-time audience engagement tool which is integrated with retargeting and online-to-offline attribution analytics. The new product is called Xone (pronounced “zone”). The Lab had a chance to sit with the Yext team on Friday, and we came away impressed.

Yext Xone App

Working with commodity beacon hardware, the SaaS tool allows retailers to accomplish three main goals. First, if a customer opens a Xone partner app while in range of a store’s beacon, the retailer has the option of displaying a “Xone Tip” that could promote a specific product or offer a discount. Note that this only happens inside a partner app as Xone does not do push notifications. Second, all customers with a partner app and bluetooth on that come within range of the beacon have their device IDs added to a database and can be retargeted on Facebook and Twitter now and soon on Instagram, Pinterest, DoubleClick, and more. That audience retargeting can be filtered by location, number of visits, and visit age. Third, there is an analytics dashboard pulling everything together, including attribution and analysis of visits to stores after online retargeting.

What Retailers Need To Do
The holiday shopping season is coming soon and it’s not too late to install and implement a complete system in your stores. For example, if you want to retarget customers that come in on Black Friday for Cyber Monday sales, Xone is the best way we know of to do it. While you’d have the option of in-store messaging that most people associate with beacons, you can also buy ads for both real-time or later placement in Facebook’s News Feed or Twitter’s Timeline. Black Friday or Christmas Eve deals are a great reason to target in real-time, even with different messages throughout the day, followed by retargeting on Cyber Monday or later in the holiday season. The retargeted ads on Facebook and Twitter can be cross platform, to appear on mobile, desktop, or both.

Xone’s attribution analytics can also help you calculate ad effectiveness in driving customers back to your store, even without new creative. For example, you could measure repeat customer visits for an audience that is seeing your ads versus a control group. Xone is the first beacon ecosystem product we’ve seen that completes the full circle from in-store data aggregation and messaging, retargeting, through attribution. If you’ve been waiting to try beacon technologies in your stores, the cost and time associated with setup have past the point of impediment.

We’ll soon have a demo of Xone in the Lab and can walk you through the setup, retargeting, and insights you’ll gain. Please contact us to schedule a demo.

Market Impact
Yext represents retailers’ digital location data for more than 500,000 locations, giving retailers an easy way to push updates to store hours, phone number, or other data to more than 100 app and map publishers, including Apple Maps, Bing, Facebook, Foursquare, Yahoo, and Yelp. With that foundation supporting it, we expect the platform to get buy in from more and more app owners. For now though, Xone partner app network is limited to 30 million monthly active users, not all of which have bluetooth turned on. However, with the growing adoption of wearable devices and bluetooth audio, more and more consumers are leaving their bluetooth on, so the reach of Xone’s network will expand accordingly.

How We Can Help
Please contact Engagement Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) at the IPG Media Lab if you would like more detail or to schedule a visit to the Lab to discuss strategies and tactics around retail technology and beacons generally, or Xone specifically.

For previous editions of Fast Forward, please visit ipglab.com. Please reply with any constructive criticism or feedback. We want these to be as useful as possible for you and your clients, and your feedback will help us immensely.

 

All pictures featured are promotional images courtesy of Yext

InStyle Magazine To Launch A VR-Enhanced Issue

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Women’s fashion and lifestyle magazine InStyle has unveiled its first-ever VR-enhanced issue. With the help of cinematic VR content studio Jaunt, InStyle created some complementary content that readers will have access to via VR headsets. The content includes behind-the-scenes footage of covergirl Drew Barrymore’s photoshoot, a closer look at the items she wore, as well as some makeup tutorials. The magazine is also open to exploring native advertisements and sponsorship opportunities in its VR content as a new revenue source.

What Brands Need To Do
With Amazon set to become the largest clothing retailer in the U.S. by 2017, fashion brands and clothing retailers need to think outside of conventional means in order to drive store visits and revenue. Virtual reality provides a new tool to do so through immersive experiences. Though typically associated with young male gamers, virtual reality is a versatile media platform that can be applied to many industry verticals to serve diverse demographics. With VR headsets on the cusp of going mainstream, now is the time for brands to start developing VR content that reflects the interests of their audience.

 

Source: Digiday