Customer expectations are changing faster than ever in the rapidly evolving retail landscape. Today’s consumers seek an experience that combines the best of both in-store and online shopping: they want to see, touch, and interact with products in person, but they also expect a wealth of information to be readily accessible to them, as it is online.
More and more retail stores are seeking software and hardware technologies that deliver an enhanced customer experience, blending the tactile nature of physical stores with the world of digital retail.
Bridging the in-store and online gap
Forward-thinking retailers are turning to a single Software as a Service (SaaS) platform to deliver promotional content, demos, product information, and pricing details – whether on smart screens, tablets, cell phones, digital signages, or through electronic shelf labels (ESL). Utilizing this type of technology allows retailers to gain control over what, when, and how messages are displayed to customers and sales associates, ensuring that every interaction with a consumer is impactful.
Key benefits:
- Seamless content integration: Retailers can incorporate web content, social media, promotional messages, and pricing without the logistical complexities or costs associated with traditional in-store displays.
- Enhanced sales support: By providing easy access to product information, sales associates can confidently communicate the benefits of each product; thereby, improving customer satisfaction, sales conversions, and operational efficiencies.
Driving efficiency and savings
Through a single platform, retailers can deploy promotional, operational, and pricing content across multiple devices and digital signage with minimal added cost. This reduces the need for, and waste of, physical signage, allowing retailers to scale their marketing efforts with greater ease at lower operational costs. By cutting down on operational expenses, such as printing and workforce-related costs, retailers not only save financially but also enhance in-store efficiency and consistency throughout their stores.
Cost and operational advantages:
- Reduced operational costs: From printing to labor costs, these solutions are designed to deploy pricing, promotion, and operational content designed to save retailers money.
- Improved sales conversion: Real-time, up-to-date product information, managed through a platform, makes it easier for retailers to align marketing initiatives with customer interactions and drive sales.
Elevating in-store engagement
With a highly customizable SaaS platform, retailers can create dynamic in-store digital demos that communicate product pricing, features, and details with ease. Whether on a smartphone, digital smart screen, or large digital signage, this type of software allows retailers to offer customers a visually elegant, content-rich experience that goes beyond basic in-store signage. Displaying engaging, informative digital content improves the customer journey while helping to address operational issues like incorrect pricing and promotional inconsistencies.
Platform flexibility:
- Messaging: Update promotions, pricing, and content across an entire retail store’s network in real time, ensuring consistency throughout retail chains and especially during peak periods like holidays.
- Campaigns: Customize content by region, store, or even device, and present it in multiple languages that speak to diverse customer bases.
Interactive customer support
Retailers are seeking technologies that allow them a self-service experience and empower customers to explore product features, view accessories, and learn about additional services immediately at the point of interest. By strategically positioning devices and digital signage, retailers can promote new or underserved products, encourage self-education, and increase cross-selling opportunities.
Customer engagement tools:
- Multilingual support: Present content in multiple languages, catering to regional or city-specific demographics.
- Customer interaction: Support customer education with on-demand information, driving greater engagement with featured products and store offerings.
Enhancing brand consistency
Maintaining a cohesive brand identity across all store locations can be challenging. Retailers create and manage branded templates for digital promotional campaigns while preserving design consistency, and they are looking for a software platform that ensures brand compliance and consistency.
Brand management highlights:
- Flexibility: Customizable promotional templates enable retailers, and their designees, to deploy digital content without compromising brand standards.
- Consistency: Retailers ensure brand uniformity across all their locations, building customer recognition and trust throughout their footprint.
Actionable insight and optimization
From measuring marketing effectiveness, and store compliance, to capturing facial detection data and user interactions, more and more retailers are looking to gather customer behavior and make data-driven decisions that enhance store layouts and displays. By tracking key performance indicators down to individual stores, software solutions can uncover opportunities to improve their in-store environment, educate sales associates, and streamline retail operations.
Data-driven benefits:
- Enhanced decision-making: Track and analyze customer interactions and device performance.
- Field team efficiency: Identify exactly what, and where, devices are in use, saving valuable time and resources for on-the-ground teams.
Retail smarter
In an era of increasing customer expectations, retailers need solutions that go beyond traditional in-store experiences.
Unifying in-store digital content through promotional, operational, and pricing platforms provides a more modern, streamlined approach to in-store communication, enhancing both customer engagement and operational efficiency. From promotional campaigns and real-time messaging to powerful digital signage, MPC offers software and hardware solutions that empower retailers to bridge the gap between online and physical retail, creating a shopping experience that is as informative as it is interactive.
MPC’s software and hardware leverage powerful visual features such as video and digital images to create compelling displays in retail stores throughout the country, regionally, or globally. The platform’s user-friendly design makes digital content updates quick and effortless, enabling brands to showcase promotions and product information that capture customer attention, build brand loyalty, and drive meaningful engagement.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chad O’Leary is the CEO and co-founder of Mobile Price Card (MPC). Founded in 2015, MPC first offered wireless retailer carriers software that digitized pricing; however, the company quickly expanded its offerings to provide software and hardware solutions that enabled national retailers to manage and unify all their in-store digital content in one platform. Currently, MPC’s solutions are used in over 20,000 locations across 30 countries.
Before co-founding MPC, Chad owned and operated multiple wireless retail carrier stores. In less than a decade, he grew an initial $15K investment into a multi-location business with over 50 employees and $14 million in annual gross revenue.