We all know that running a retail business is a little bit different today than it was last millennium. While your grandmother may have pushed a cart around the aisles of Woolworth’s and picked up the flyer at the store entrance to find deals, you’re more likely to scour 83 different deals sites before buying a voucher for a product, then order it to be delivered to your door.
With shoppers now being able to instantly evaluate the reputation of a store with their friends help, and price-check product prices against competitors with the help of a smartphone, retail remains a rapidly changing business that has already claimed several victims in the name of progress. How is a modern store keeper to keep ahead of the curve? Toronto social media marketing agency ThirdOcean puts forward some suggestions in its just-released Currents report. The project seeks to explore how digital communications are affecting the relationships retail stores have with customers. Along the way, it unveils some good examples of simple-but-smart things Canadian retailers are doing to stay connected with shoppers.
Take Toronto’s Buytopia.ca as an example. The deals site caters to specific cities across Canada (Ottawa, Montreal, Vancouver, etc.) and is facing its share of competition in the deals site space. But it’s managed to make a name for itself and ThirdOcean highlights some of the reasons why that might be so.
Free money mentality
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Buytopia works with retailers like Sears and La Vie en Rose to offer gift cards at a discount price. Selling a $30 gift card for $15 makes the shopper feel like they have free money to spend, and they’re less likely to be price sensitive on the individual items they buy. This could help prevent “showrooming” where a customer uses a bricks-and-mortar store to get their hands on a product, but then buys it elsewhere on their mobile device.
National and local at the same time
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Although it spans across Canada and represents its brand as one unified front to the consumer, it also breaks down its shopping experience by local city. Visitors to the Web site are asked to select what city they are from before deals are presented to them, and a customized e-mail newsletter goes out to each area. They also use social media to speak directly to people in specific regions, using hash tags to drill down into the right conversation.
The operators at Buytopia must have been former Beaver Scouts, because they are true to the motto of “sharing, sharing, sharing.” The site encourages users to let their friends know about the deals they buy via Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or an e-mail message. Shoppers get an incentive to share – being paid $1 per friend that follows through and completes the transaction. As ThirdOcean points out, Buytopia considers this one of its most powerful feature.
Buytopia not only allows customers to rate and review the products it sells, but has a team dedicated to collect them. The site has got past the fear of negative feedback and are seeing better customer engagement as a result, and becoming a trusted source of product information.
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Editorial director of IT World Canada. Covering technology as it applies to business users. Multiple COPA award winner and now judge. Paddles a canoe as much as possible.
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