Understand how to use online retail marketing to restructure
In this FastTrack Episode Christian Bartsch provides you hands on guidance to get from painful retail to thriving eCommerce. Lockdowns, riots and changed customer habits will keep hurting your business. You need to reinvent your retail business so you can regain your existing customer base. Make sense of what kind of steps will help you thrive again. That is why retailers around the world have to adjust their efforts towards online retail marketing in order to survive and grow their market share.
Many smaller and outdated retailers will be going out of business in the next 12 to 24 months. Governments are handing out cheques that do not last long. Customers are avoiding overcrowded shops and therefore prefer home deliveries. This requires an easy to use online catalogue and great purchase experience. If the delivery of the ordered goods is unreliable then retail marketing would need to identify this as an important issue to fix.
Listen to clients who have been loyal as your shop had been forced to close its doors during lockdowns. Do your transition to a better online experience with an open mind for improvements. Make it a habit to do customer surveys as part of your marketing strategy.
You have to become more of a practitioner. Listen from a practitioner who does both strategy and hands-on marketing. Our advantage is that we practitioners listen to other practitioners and learn from their mistakes and aha moments.
#MarketingForTheNow #NewBusinessDevelopment
I will share more tips on Twitter @capbartsch
Transcript for this episode
[00:00:00] So we have been seeing the last few days quite some crazy things happening in the US as well in places like Europe as well, with all these activities of people going out and not being quite sensible or even creating riots. But it shows that businesses that are only dependent on shop floors have a high risk of getting amidst all these pandemic conflicts. But what does it mean for us if we are able to maybe even to go back to the office?
[00:00:37] So let’s say being able to move all our operations towards having a home office / back office environment plus warehouse. It means we do not expose our businesses so much to the high risks of such crazy activities. And these activities are going to happen. All different countries around the world, we cannot necessarily avoid them because they are out of our personal control, but we can avoid or limit the impact on our businesses.
[00:01:11] So let’s have a look at it as a fast track at what we could do, taking this as an online retail marketing idea for the now. So what can we actually do? Especially if you have a small and medium sized business and have maybe more than 20 employees. So what could you do?
Customers are changing they shopping habits
[00:01:41] You are aware that your customers are changing their kind of purchasing behavior, even their attitudes towards what you’re offering. Certain services and products are being high in demand. Others are absolutely collecting inside your stores. So that’s something that you can really go and change in your opportunity of doing business. So, Everything is going towards e-commerce. That’s the thing.
[00:02:15] E-commerce, whether it’s eBay, Amazon or your own Web site, you can have an online shop. And even if your business hasn’t got an online shop and you are thinking, okay, I’ve got lots of stock, I need to get the stuff out, but I have a customer base I can send out emails, e-mail marketing and so on. I need to have something that works easy and fast to implement. Most of the commerce systems often have some kind of warehouse database where you know what you’ve got.
[00:02:54] Of course, some stock is in your shops, some stock is in a warehouse, some stock is moving. So you can set up a special Web site as an example, You can go and take “shop dot … your domain name dot … end of the domain”, for instance, “shop dot business, booster to day dot com” as an example. And there you can then go and send your leads to there.
[00:03:30] So you would go and create a marketing piece, marketing copy and send it also all the different channels, whether it’s on your Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, linked in e-mail, texting as well on all of those things. And even if you’re thinking, OK, texting, OK, how can I automate it?
[00:03:49] There’s lots of different opportunities. You can use platforms like Twilio you, which is a very good platform you can automate that can use other platforms to connected so it doesn’t have to be rocket science. The key thing, you have to go and start using it. Take a. That’s what my what I would do.
How to stracture your online retail marketing
[00:04:11] Take a notepad or even if you’ve got notepads with lines and logos and other kind of stuff. Take the notepad. Turn it around. Tare off the back cardboard. Tearing off the cardboard back. Then you’ve got a blank sheet of paper. Take a felt pen or anything that’s soft writing and start writing down how you can structure that all in elements that come into it.
[00:04:37] Now, let’s say we have a warehouse, stock database. You have the website. You have the shipping guys and so on. And then drill down. Tare that page off. Go down. Down, down. Until you eventually take the whole thing. You can even go and sellotape it on to your wall and eventually create like a storyboard which helps you build a quick, fast to market strategy.
[00:05:07] And you use that in order then to go and start building it because you’re setting up a better WordPress site with woocommerce, connecting that with stripe and paypal. That’s the fastest, easiest way you can do it. Doesn’t cost you really anything big. No big expenditures.
[00:05:26] Of course, you need a server that is able and capable of holding the traffic that you will eventually be sending in, because it depends whether you’ve got a thousand clients in your database or you have got 50 million clients that you are going to send on market copy. You will have certain traffic.
How to secure your share of the market
[00:05:44] You have to have SSL keys, all these other security things to do this thing fast, properly. But don’t take ages. If you’re the last one, you will be the first one to go out of market. You don’t have to be the first one, but you have to be the follower, the fastest follower, and you will get the best part off the market eventually, which is the one that follows on the first one.
[00:06:11] That’s usually the piece of cake that is most juiciest because the big chunks are eaten up and you can take the best part. So follow up on that suggestion and work it out, because you have to get your ecommerce running. You don’t need any kind of crazy stuff. You don’t need any five month projects. This has to be done within one week.
