By Michael Brewer, Vertical Solutions Marketing – Retail, Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company
With surveys quantifying the game-changing benefits of unifying in-store and online experiences, it’s no wonder retailers are embracing mobile engagement innovations to increase conversions, boost cross-sales and enhance loyalty.
However, simply deploying the necessary technologies, such as wireless, beacons and mobile apps, doesn’t guarantee success. Winning implementations require a carefully designed and executed strategy. Following are key steps for providing shoppers with personalized experiences and keeping them engaged, informed and delighted.
Gather the Appropriate Stakeholders. Because effective mobile engagement is a unified, omni-channel endeavor, it requires bringing stakeholders from across your organization to the table for planning, implementing and evolving your platform. It’s particularly critical to involve line-of-business and customer experience decision makers, while also including marketing, IT, e-commerce and others crucial to your particular organization.
In our experience, failing to assemble a cross-functional stakeholder team often results in a common mistake: an app not tied into store inventories, loyalty systems, and/or the e-commerce business. As a result, the app provides little value to the end user and gets deleted.
In other words, mobile engagement goes beyond designing an elegant user interface. You must ensure all the puzzle pieces – planograms, inventories, loyalty programs, etc. – work together in concert. To engineer this type of holistic solution requires multiple perspectives contributing to the mix.
