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Back to School: Not too early to start planning as new trends factor into strategy

In this first part of a 10-part series on back-to-school retail strategies experts offer up insight on new trends and why you need to start planning for the school shopping season right now.

July 6, 2015 by Judy Mottl — Editor, RetailCustomerExperience.com & DigitalSignageToday.com

This is the first of a 10-part series Retail Customer Experience will be publishing through July and August to help retailers shape and hone the all-important back-to-school sales strategy. We’re looking for some great ideas and efforts from the retailers for the final series, so if you have a back-to-school retail experience to share, emailus!

While high school and graduation parties are coming to a close, and summer officially kicks off given the July 4 holiday, it’s not too early to start planning the annual back-to-school sales and customer experience strategy.

In fact, if you started even before warm weather hit you’re in great shape, according to sales marketing and experience optimization gurus.

That’s because the back-to-school (BTS) shopping season is undergoing some big changes, partly due to a growing number of mobile consumers, a greater reliance by shoppers on mobile devices in seeking out the best deals and — on the retailer side —  the need to make a mobile retail experience as easy and satisfying as the brick-and-mortar and website experience.

As of March of this year, a little over half of retail shoppers were using a desktop for online purchases, but mobile device use is catching up, accounting for 34 percent of retail sales. In addition another 13 percent of shoppers are using tablets, according to IBM’s annual Online Retail Readiness Report. In terms of online retail traffic, 50 percent of all traffic is taking place via a mobile device and 26 percent of sales this year will be made with a consumer using a mobile device.

Yet the mobile experience is just one of a few emerging trends playing into customer experience. As one marketing expert told Retail Customer Experience, customer analysis is becoming a requirement in the BTS planning and strategy effort.

"The summer months are an ideal time to get a handle on your cross-channel data by synthesizing it with consumer management technology in order identify your best customers, understand their behaviors and preferences and devise a strategy to both engage them and motivate other customers to emulate them to drive value and affinity for your business," said Mark Harrington, VP of marketing at Clutch, a provider of advanced consumer management, shopper intelligence and customer loyalty solutions.

Harrington said consumers are getting more complex in terms of shopping tendencies and trends.

The "always on" state of a typical shopper, he said, has made it critical for brands to better understand customers.

"With the digital footprints they leave on an ongoing basis across online, in-store, mobile and social channels, it's never been easier for a brand to gain multidimensional insight into their preferences and behaviors with consumer management technology to driver personalized engagement and experience."

That’s why, in terms of mobile, the BTS retail strategy must align with the overarching goals. For example, building an app just to claim a mobile presence and not provide a benefit to customers or the brand is worthless and a waste of time and money.

"There is no getting around the increasing mobile adoption among consumers, so ensuring your online and ecommerce sites are mobile compatible is critical so consumers can easily navigate and shop your business with their smartphones," said Harrington.

The BTS strategy should also be one of matching creative messaging and campaign goals to the buying stage, advises Pieter Mees, co-founder and CEO of Zentrick, which makes solutions for measuring and tracking of return-on-investment of consumer interaction. Zentrick’s client list includes HBO Nordic, Activision, Redbull, eBay, WSJ, Unilever, Nissan and L'Oreal, etc.

"As we get closer to back-to-school, urgency increases to make those final purchases and we'd recommend more bottom-of-the-funnel transactional engagement, focusing on purchases, discount/coupon offerings, and ‘shop all’ functionality in campaigns," Mees told RCE.

A related marketing and customer experience change to the BTS retail strategy is enhanced bandwidth now available, which is allowing retailers to take greater advantage of video technology. Video is becoming increasingly pervasive and exploding given a 150 percent growth in video use month-over-month.

"It makes sense: Video transfers stories and emotions in a very efficient way, it captures user attention, combines several forms of creative (audio & images)," said Mees. "The downside in the past was that once you've told your amazing story the ad ended and the viewer moved on to the next thing. Luckily, as an industry, we're figuring out how to bring measurement, conversion, transactions into the video," he said.

"Mobile is still the most undervalued platform, it has huge potential for people willing to 'tame the beast.' The early movers will win big, the stragglers will build on a more mature market but with much less potential to win big," he said.

About Judy Mottl

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Judy Mottl is editor of Retail Customer Experience and Digital Signage Today. She has decades of experience as a reporter, writer and editor covering technology and business for top media including AOL, InformationWeek, InternetNews and Food Truck Operator.

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