Delivering Lessons From The Holiday Shopping Season

Conventional wisdom would say a retailer shouldn’t risk cannibalizing holiday sales as well as not give consumers an opportunity to wait until the last minute because they might be enticed to buy elsewhere.

In 2018’s first understatement of the year, Amazon is anything but conventional.

The company actually elongated holiday selling efforts, beginning in September and stretching literally to the final hour before Christmas.

Sure, big revenue days were Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but Amazon catered to all, including those who turned the page on Labor Day with shopping and those who procrastinated or purposely waiting until Dec. 24 with delivery options that were as historic as unconventional.

It even prospered in year two of Prime Day in December -- 30 hours of deals for members of its Prime program  — and saw the biggest sales day ever in company history.

Most noteworthy was the activity generated by rapid delivery.

According to Amazon, which for the first time offered same-day or next day delivery in 8,000 markets, the last Prime Now order in time for Christmas was delivered in 58 minutes at 11:58 p.m. on Christmas Eve in Baltimore, MD. The order included those must-haves, at least for someone -- the Kid Galaxy Amphibious RC Car Morphibians Shark Remote Control Toy, the Crayola Oil Pastels Art Tools, 28 ct., and the VTech Click and Count Remote.

“Same day and next day delivery is starting to replace store visits,” retail expert Ryan Craver told me in an interview on The Art of Mobile Persuasion podcast that posted this week (episode 23 here - https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/art-mobile-persuasion-podcast/id1156481550?mt=2).

“The big reason why we are seeing a bit of inflection point, if you think back, we didn’t have that many markets where it was available. Obviously now word of mouth plus the press has people try it for the first time and they fall in love with it.

“The second thing is the amount of product that is now available for same day delivery. Everyone knows about Amazon but there is a big behemouth called Google who offers something like Google Express that provide access to everything that Walmart, Target, and Costco sell with same day delivery.”

Craver, a key voice in my The Art of Mobile Persuasion book www.artofmobilepersuasion.com, says price plus availability makes consumers think that delivery is the way to go.

“It’s actually a decent price,” he told me “It’s a marginal fee now. You’ve got 1099 employees delivery for $5 a pop and a tip if you hit a certain price point. That is a pretty compelling consumer experience that is tough to match and it’s going to continue to grow and grow and grow.”

Customers' use of Amazon's one-day, same-day, and two-hour delivery doubled this holiday, according to the company.

As to mobile’s role in purchasing, Amazon said that mobile purchasing increased 70 percent in 2017.

Mickey Mericle, vice president, Marketing and Customer Insights at Adobe, said that “shopping and buying on smartphones is becoming the new norm and can be attributed to continued optimizations in the retail experience on mobile devices and platforms.”

Adobe reported that 75 percent of millennials expected to shop via their smartphone.

Still, Craver reminded us that there is more to do with mobile, noting that many web sites and apps don’t allow for purchase.

“There are only a few retailers who have figured out that final path to purchase,” he said.

Of course, Amazon is one of those few. And it won’t stand still. Drone delivery awaits.

(Hear Craver’s insights on the podcast this week and in a 2018 look ahead posting later this month.)

Serving A Consumer Who Actually Wants To Be Targeted

The idea of targeting and retargeting is not new. What’s changing is the potential for cross-device targeting. We now have the capability to take the search done for an Armani necktie on a PC and use it as a trigger to send a mobile user a related communication at a later point.

But should we?

Few are as equipped to answer that question as Google’s Jason Spero, who literally has written The Mobile Playbook that is relied on by so many marketers.

“If you admire someone's shoes or their tie, in the mobile and the digital world when you didn't have connectivity at that moment, you would file it away in your head or make a note to yourself,'” Spero said in an interview for my book, The Art of Mobile Persuasion.

“As human beings, we've always had impulses, fears, hopes. What happens when you see that tie, you have connectivity. You can act on it in a way that you couldn't in previous eras. The idea of persistent connectivity makes it possible for you to act on all those impulses. You may not act on all of them. It's probably a bad thing if you act on them all because you are probably buying stuff that you don't need and tweeting out stuff that people don't want to read. But the idea of connectivity means that you can.”

“The consumer knows that he or she is connected and empowered in all these ways,” Spero explained. “The consumer's expectation is they want an easy way to buy an Armani tie if they decide to. And that's a combination of the Macy's app and Google search and maybe image search in time. Lots of different things will fuel that. But all are powered by the idea that you have a broadband connection with you constantly.

“The consumer also knows that their device has a sense of geospacial relations. You as a consumer know that with your device at any point, with a couple of exceptions, it can tell you what's around you to help you solve problems. You can go out and get the world's information with your connection or you can map the physical world around you.  You know the nearest place to get a hamburger. Or which subway will get you to the Upper East Side. Or what the check-in time is at your hotel. All these things are now available to you: the digital world and the physical world at your service.”

And with that, Spero said, comes a need for marketers to look at the world differently.

“If you start to talk about it as a commercial journey, we used to in the digital world sort of be satisfied if you will with engaging the consumer throughout her digital journey,” he told me. “But because we just said that the consumer journey is in and out of the physical worlds, presumably across many different devices, the digital experience now has to evolve.”

Ryan Craver, former Senior Vice President, Strategy, of Hudson’s Bay, told me in a The Art of Mobile Persuasion interview that he believes that targeting and retargeting is all about catering to the consumer.

Said Craver, who brought innovation into Lord & Taylor among other efforts: “If you are shopping Armani on your mobile phone, or searching for it on your mobile phone, or on your desktop computer the night before, and then you bring yourself into retailer: as long as you've been asked up front, ‘Are you willing to share your location, are you willing to share past browsing behavior?’ and then the marketer provides the customer something as part of the ad—perhaps a discount or exclusive content or something else--I think people are slowly but surely coming around to understanding that that is the way in which marketing is going to be served. It is also something that you need to pay attention to in terms of how often you send it, and how frequently you come after them.”

Another example of what Craver thought about when he started using beacons to know that opted-in users are in the brick and mortar location: “We thought a lot about cart abandonment online and how frequently we need to do something similar in stores. Certain online stores on cart abandonment, like Amazon, will hit you up the day after, hit you up seven days after, and hit you up maybe two weeks after. There are other stores, like Urban Outfitters, that will even hit you up six months later.”

So Craver and his team set business rules.

“For us as a retailer, when you come in for that Armani, if we hit you once and then we hit you two visits later, we thought that might be a bit alienating and reaching too far back,” he said. “But if it's immediate, meaning it was within the last couple of days, I think it's worthwhile. I think people are becoming desensitized to Big Brother and to this creepiness factor.”

And, surprising to some, people don’t mind being targeting. In fact, under the right circumstances, they might even welcome it.

(article first appeared on imediaconnection.com - http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/blog/2016/01/18/serving-a-consumer-who-actually-wants-to-be-retargeted/)

Serving The Self-Sufficient Mobile User

These days, it seems like the consumer has as many choices as you will find in an 11-story department store. That is, if you can still locate such an expansive retail location.

In one important way, the modern-day consumer is like those who have come before. In good economic times, we fill our closets with more shoes, shirts and jeans—whether we need them or not—and everyone from the customer to the business is happy. In the rougher patches, such as the recession that lasted from 2007 to 2009, sales drop and silence descends on retail sites: you could hear a pin drop in near-empty brick-and-mortar stores and malls.

Of course, e-commerce upended many brick-and-mortar business models. Only the strong and forward-looking survived. And now mobile devices have brought new consumer capabilities and expectations. Product reviews are a click away. Show-rooming is the norm: a consumer puts his or her hands on a product in a brick-and-mortar store, only to make a purchase—likely from a competitor, at a lower cost, that includes free shipping—on a handheld device.

That last move—the ordering on a mobile phone without the help of a clerk or the touch of a salesperson—is indicative of a significant shift toward consumer self-sufficiency. Many mobile users want nothing more than to do it all themselves. According to a report released by the Consumer Electronics Association, more 58 percent of shoppers who use mobile devices indicated that they prefer to look up information on their devices while shopping, rather than talk to store employees. This was especially true among men. And shoppers aged 25-44.

Nearly two-thirds (62 percent) of mobile shoppers perceived the information they gather via their mobile device as more beneficial than the information available in-store via product displays or sales literature – or sales people.

What is a retailer to do?

“There's never going to be one answer for all. Each one of the retailers, and the experiences that they want to deliver, and the types of customers that they have coming through the door, vary greatly,” Ryan Craver, former Senior Vice President, Strategy, of parent company Hudson’s Bay, told me in an interview for my new book, The Art of Mobile Persuasion -- artofmobilepersuasion.com.

“If you take a Lord & Taylor or Macy's, under the Hudson's Bay Company umbrella, customers are coming in the door because they know of promotions. They want to come in very quickly. They know exactly what they are looking for. They tend, though not all of them, to expect less of a customer service model and more of a self-sufficient model.”

But then there are the luxury brands, like Nordstrom and others.

“You go to the higher end—the Bergdorf Goodmans of the world and the Saks of the world—those have some promotional customers, but the majority of their customers have an expectation of a high level of service, a personal shopper level of service, where they are engaging with a person,” Craver said. “A personal shopper is providing them with feedback on what they are trying on and offering additional suggestive selling.

“The stores that have a customer who is coming in very quickly and looking for self -sufficient service—they will be the ones that adapt quickly to the new approaches. The Saks of the world—they won't rely on it in the same way, but they will need to provide something.”

If you are Lowe’s, a Fortune 100 home improvement company, and a Southeastern septuagenarian, you practice what you preach: “Never Stop Improving.”

Sean Bartlett, former Director of Digital Experience, Product, & Omni-channel Integration at Lowe's, led an initiative by the chain to put 42,000 iPhones into the hands of sales associates as a way to help customers get a more satisfying experience from the brand’s iPhone app.

The intent: to create a virtuous circle by enabling sales people to help their customers, who had already made mobile a big part of their daily routine.

And to make the self-sufficient mobile user get value from the humans in the store. Some took him up on the proposition. Others still prefer the no-talk way of shopping.

(article first appeared on imediaconnection.com - http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/blog/2015/11/10/serving-the-self-sufficient-mobile-user/)