Digital media can be very powerful in cementing your customer’s loyalty and keeping your business in their minds. However, many of your customers may not be very active in adopting digital venues. How do you introduce those people into your digital funnel? We do have a few tips for you in leveraging in-store QR code marketing to benefit your retail business.
Why would you even need to move offline customers to an online world?
Knowledge, visibility, brand image, and customer loyalty. Looking into each of these:
- Customer loyalty: Think of yourselves as customers: don’t you like free stuff or points you can spend on benefits? Loyalty programs are a great way to keep your regular customers with you or turn casual customers into regulars. While there are ways to run these with traditional media like coupons, it is just easier and way more effective through the digital one.
- Information: We keep saying this, any marketing effort is only as effective as you know your target audience. Short of doing paper form surveys and one-on-one questionnaires, which tend to annoy people, digital media is the only place to gain this knowledge. Perhaps the most important benefit is that you can retarget these people with the right messages to get them shopping again!
- Brand image: There are few things that can scream as loud as a good digital presence about being accessible and in tune with the times. People can use a page or an app to check whether something they need is in stock or not, they can take part in your loyalty programs, or just learn bits of cool information on your web page, social media profile, or mobile app. They will be more likely to choose you over a competitor who didn’t catch up with the digital world yet.
- Visibility: A presence in the digital world makes that online users can find you without the need of you trying to find them instead. You can advertise on popular social media sites, search engines, videos, apps, etc. Moreover, people can find you in search engines and app stores. If you can get your happy customers to this world, they can easily share their experience with you with their network, essentially becoming free promoters for you!
So, you see the benefits are many. But how do you use in-store QR code marketing to get your offline retail customers online? Better yet, how can you use them to get more people in your store to buy your wares? Let us see one by one.
Do your customers like your wares and deals? Get them to share the love!
Happy customers are among the best marketing you can ask for. A happy customer is a brand ambassador, doing your retail marketing free for you! They share their experience with friends and family to get your retail business more and more customers. While the word of mouth has a special power of its own, the digital word of mouth has the ability to propagate very wide, very fast. And you can make it very easy to share their experience in the digital world.
Put a QR code to scan under your select products, and say “like this product? Share it with your friends!” You can offer small rewards or points to further incentivize their sharing if you like.
Out of stock? No problem!
Especially apparel retailers can benefit a lot from this. Say, there is that new cool t-shirt that everybody likes… many will end up missing the color or the size they wanted. Put a QR code under them, they can scan it and tell you that they want that color and size, so you can backorder it.
Another thing you can do is that, if you have products that you don’t keep in stock, but people want to see before they buy, you can keep exhibit copies so people can see them, and scan a code under the product to go to ordering page.
Aside from benefitting the customer, this approach also gives you important information. You can know how much in demand something is from how fast it is sold alright. But how many more still want to get it after it is out of stock? What features do they want most? Also, if you allow them to place orders online too, you will not lose those sales when the product is not in stock.
Offer in-store discounts for first purchases, subscribing to your newsletter, etc
This is something we see often in online stores, but why limit it to only there? You can leverage QR codes to get people in your store to become a customer to enjoy a discount, or to add them to your mailing list, to get them to download your app, etc.
Power of smart deep links will also let you gain valuable data from customers while making their digital journey much simpler, thus increasing their conversion rates.
Now knowing what they are interested in, and having a line of contact, you can use one of the most effective retail marketing trick: retargeting!
Inform the customers about the product
While seeing a product in person is one thing, it will often take more than that to convince some customers. They need to learn about it, they need to read their specs, etc. Store staff can help with it to a degree, but they can not be everywhere every time. They can’t be trusted to know it all correctly either. We’ve all been there, asked about a product to store staff, only to get less than convincing answers.
Why not let users scan a QR code, and go to your app or web page, where you can describe the product with all the details, and rich media like videos and images etc?
As a bonus, you can get the user to subscribe to your notifications, newsletter, etc.
QR code marketing: Appgain is the automation platform to cement it all together!
We offer complete QR code, smart retargeting, multichannel marketing, and event-based automation for retail businesses to increase their sales and growth.
You can use our all-in-one marketing automation platform to create mobile and SEO optimized landing pages, generate a database of users to retarget, create social media shareable posts, and generate QR codes powered with smart deep links. Powerful analytics is the cherry on top.
Still, got questions? Do not hesitate to reach out and Contact Us! Request Demo now.
