The sudden shutdown of brick and mortar and uncertainty in consumer spending leaves the industry that is retail to figure out how to best drive business forward. 

In a recently available webinar,(they anticipate to be the biggest challenge post-pandemic: 54% were most concerned with in-store sales loss, followed by inventory management (15%) and staffing/re-opening their stores (15%)*******) we polled enterprise retail marketers on what. New customer acquisition and customer that is online were also concerns. 

While there is certainlyn’t a crystal ball to see how a industry will likely be fully impacted when you look at the near or distant future, there are specific strategies retailers can employ now to successfully pivot their marketing to ecommerce-only, keep customer experiences as convenient as you are able to, while increasing retention and loyalty even after all of this settles. 

1. Make visitor identification & identity resolution a priority

As frequent shoppers that are in-store both new and returning visitors are headed online, many retailers are seeing a spike in web sessions. To help recover any lost revenue that is in-store it’s imperative to find a way to identify as numerous visitors as you are able to during this time period period.

This means identifying those people who haven’t yet logged in or created an account, in addition to anyone who has clicked with an email and now haven’t entered their current email address somewhere else in your site. 

Having an answer in place that will accurately identify each visitor, even anonymous ones, and resolve their behavior as a customer that is single is key to ensuring it is possible to build relationships each customer when you look at the right way and personalize to them appropriately.

This will also allow you to in the future in better focusing on how their behavior is evolving and certainly will change because the crisis continues. 

2. Use offline data to continue to engage previous in-store shoppers

As noted above, nearly all retail marketers are most focused on the impact************************************) that is COVID on in-store sales. If you haven’t already, be sure to leverage your in-store customer data in your online marketing campaigns to ommunicate with those specifically who’ve been afflicted with store closings.

Introduce these customers to the ease of your experience that is online and benefits, and educate them from the perks of connecting to you digitally. 

By combining offline along with the rest of one’s cross-channel data, you may then cross-sell and recommend items to your brick and mortar customers via your internet site, email, app or push that is even mobile are similar to or complement their in-store purchases.

Retailers may also engage shoppers that are in-store this time around by reminding these customers that the consumable products and perennial favorites they’ve previously bought in person could easily be repurchased or refilled online.