Although e-commerce may seem like the enemy of brick-and-mortar, it can actually be a major asset. So said Bryan Wargo, head of worldwide sales at RetailNext, an in-store analytics company that describes itself as “the market leader in Big Data solutions for brick-and-mortar challenges.”
“In the last 10 years, more has changed in the brick-and-mortar landscape than maybe the previous hundred years,” said Wargo. “With e-commerce, we know who [the customer] is, we know what magazine she was reading before she came to the Web site. We’re not going to know that level of detail [with brick-and-mortar], but we can still know a lot about her. We can know what age range she is in, or how often she comes in the store.”
Wargo noted that the in-store experience is now centered on optimization for the customer. “Retail is meant to be fun and to be an experience,” he said.
To capitalize on what e-commerce has taught the retailer over the past ten years, Wargo pinpointed five ways traditional commerce spots can better attract, and maintain, a strong customer base: redefine the role of each individual store; maniacally focus on the customer experience; make big, bold changes; move and fail fast; and don’t guess, but rather, use analytics to test, learn and transform. “As you scale your business, there is an opportunity to use a lot more information that you have at your fingertips about your customers,” Wargo said of the latter point. “A lot of retailers that we have been working with have been pulling what we call a retail lapse concept. It’s about experimenting with things we can do right now, and then seeing what the impact on the customer is. There are all kinds of data that we can actually gather inherently from these test and control stores, and then eventually apply those leanings to the rest of the chain.”