As we are in the middle of 2016, there are many advanced trends and priorities flying around us, but don’t know which one are likely to reflect on our retail business? So we took a focused look at all retail marketing surveys and reports, and found these top priorities that retail marketers should keep in mind and plan for upcoming years.

Assimilate Digital Marketing in retail business

We know that we are living in the digitalized world, on all touch-points customers expects delivery on the brand promise. In order to meet the customer’s high expectations, it’s important to understand the customer journey in different ways. Understand how they interact with the brand using different channels to purchase, “test-dive” and service products. As customers are adapted to use social channels, then it should be adapted or influenced it in the retail business

To meet all the expectations from the customers, retail marketing must collaborate to define and enable customer journey for their brand. This will drive an integrated marketing strategy and deploy digital and social channels to deliver marketing messages to engage their customers.

So as a customer engagement channel, smart gadgets must be seamlessly integrated with your retail enterprise channel and with the growing global system.

Unified Commerce convergence 

Combine all selling channels such as social media, stores, eCommerce in unified commerce convergence methodology and this stands as a top retail business priority.

Interfacing all channels with different data stores may be crucial for decision making and analyzing the customer journey. So Unified commerce convergence is the upcoming trend, plan for it. Integrating the same vision for all selling channels can assist to share common merchandise data with engines for tax, branding and pricing. This is a junction where all data shared from data silos is being merged in common, without interacting with the customers. Now it’s the time to clarify with the vision and make sure a multi-year strategy to reach your goal. Finally, evaluate whether existing selling channels and merchandising systems will accommodate all the convergence.

Mobile is vital in click-and-collect initiatives

In traditional click-and-collect service typically involve customer shopping online then they need to pick up in store. In 2016 though, we can expect mobile in click-and-collect initiatives.

Nowadays, retailers are experimenting with the mobile to facilitate their customers with click-and-collect service. Now they enable customers to buy via mobile and pick up their items in store. To grab more customers, mobiles are used to send notifications whenever an order is ready for in-store pickup.

These are only few examples for how mobile is vital in click-and-collect initiatives. There are still more ideas that can be seen with mobile in 2016.

2016 Priorities Of Retail Marketing

More Payment Options

The rise of online payments and the EMV chip card technology will prod merchants to update with the new payment models. This will not only help retailers with security, but also allow them for more payment options.

Many retailers include PayPal, it is compatible with both IOS and Android devices and also build to accept EMV and magnetic stripe cards. Recently PayPal rolled out with the new feature i.e. PayPal chip reader. Similarly Mercury is another payment method that provide retailer with the hardware device so that they can accept EMV cards from the customer.

As retailers include more payment solutions, customers can expect more stores accepting additional payment options, most notably EMV cards and online payments.

Start Building Retail Mailing Lists

A retail mailing list helps you to stay connected with your customers as well as to find people similar to your existing customers. If you want to grow your retail business, start collecting email address at the end of your call and there are several other ways to collect new additions to your retail mailing lists. In the same way there are many e-mail lists service provider in the market to provide you the best service for the effective mailing campaigns.

IoT to enhance the shopping experience

Usage of smartphones is just the beginning in the retail business. In addition to using in-store tablets and smart gadgets, some retailers will look into the Internet of Things (IoT) to enhance the shopping experience for customers in their locations.

In many surveys it is proved that the uses of IoT in retail business could have an electronic impact of $410 billion to $1.2 trillion per year in 2025. This may take a longer way, but it doesn’t mean future thinking in retail marketing won’t step up to the plate sooner to enhance the shopping experience.