Marketing games in retail: the drive-to-store strategy
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The widespread accessibility of high speed internet has put a wealth of information at anyone’s fingertips who knows how to use a smartphone. It has created numerous jobs and spawned several niche industries and innovations, but for all the good it’s done, it initially had a fairly negative effect on the retail industry.
As courier services have expanded to meet the demands of modern online shoppers, you can decide you want item X on Thursday and have it delivered to your door on Friday. That rapid feedback cycle has caused a decline in footfall for most shops with a physical presence. Some retailers in certain specialties have even adopted a direct-to-consumer model to both compete with lower prices, and to maximise their profits.
However, while business may have declined in terms of pure numbers for the retail sector, the bricks-and-mortar shops are still there. Customers still like to go to a real place and buy their goods from real people, particularly when they’re looking at specialty items, where expert advice counts, and having a point of contact to advocate for you in case of warranty and manufacturing issues can give peace of mind. So while the value of a bricks-and-mortar retail presence from a customer perspective cannot be denied, we must be innovative in our approach to driving footfall and in-store trade to justify the overheads for businesses.
What is the drive-to-store concept?
Drive-to-store is a marketing strategy that aims to generate in-store traffic by encouraging customers to buy at physical points of sale. Gamification and marketing games can carry a lot of weight here. By creating interactive, gamified experiences that can be easily shared on social media platforms, or accessed from QR codes on billboards, posters, and in print advertisements, customers become players, and can compete for promotional codes that can only be redeemed in store, or prizes that they can collect from their nearest branch. By driving users from your digital environment to your physical environment, you’re taking them on a journey to get to know your brand and your business better.
You can also encourage customers on your online channels to head to your nearest branch if they require more indepth service, or their query really requires them to be looked at in person by a trained member of staff (such as in the case of sized equipment, sporting goods, clothing, or if they have an existing purchase to trade in, or even return). This could be through more traditional marketing, but could also be through a call to action within a game, like the Product Recommendation Quiz. Most people’s answers to such a quiz will probably all line up to select products A, B, or C, but some people’s answers might create so much ambiguity, that you could include a results screen that suggests they head to their nearest branch to speak to a team member face-to-face about their needs.
Including this option could allow you to better serve your customer, as it will prevent them from making a potentially unwise choice, and being unhappy with their purchase. This latter marketing game idea is also a great example of a “phygital” strategy, which is a contraction of the words physical and digital. It may serve the customer who knows exactly what they want to purchase to buy product A quickly and efficiently online, but the customer who is a little less sure of their needs will benefit from talking to a product expert who can help them make the best decision, and give them some peace of mind about their purchase.
What is the difference between drive-to-store and web-to-store?
You’ll hear or read both of these terms, but they’re essentially the same thing.
The term web-to-store refers to a customer that starts their purchase journey by researching on the web before deciding to go to a physical shop to buy a product. This web-to-store strategy is primarily aimed at stationary web users browsing from their home or office. Drive-to-store was originally a sales strategy more focused on customers on the move. It mainly involved offline marketing and advertising campaigns, such as the use of billboards, posters, and signs. The aim was to catch the eye of the customer while they were walking down the street or driving.
A drive-to-store strategy can now be considered to cover all digital and mobile marketing tactics, whether they are aimed at smartphone users on the move, or people researching product specs against online reviews on their home computers.
Get customers into your stores
Having a strong online presence is a foundation for any modern drive-to-store strategy. If you are not visible on the internet today, with a content-rich website and active social networks, you simply won’t have an audience. Everyone is so connected and plugged in that the online world is as real as the high street, and ultimately, far more influential, as it gives you a market beyond geographically proximal postcodes.
It is therefore important to share with internet users all the relevant information about your company and your shops by regularly updating your company information: a change of hours, or a change of address, or the opening of a new store, or exciting new product drops.
Ultimately, a stronger online retail presence will benefit your bricks-and-mortar retail presence. If people enjoy interacting with your website, they’ll be far more inclined to interact with your physical location.
Adding gamification to your shopping experiences
Another “phygital” technique you can use to liven up your in-store experience is to add gamified elements to the customer journey. As part of your marketing games strategy, you could customise games to be played on touch screen units, or that could be accessed by QR codes on shelves, where customers could play branded games to try and earn discounts on promoted products.
Advertising this in-store experience through your social media channels and relevant product listings could go a long way to encouraging in-store shopping, and creating a more memorable customer journey. Any marketing game you create on the Drimify platform that your customer interacts with, whether that’s online or on the premises, can ask for personal details such as name, date of birth, and contact details, with obvious incentives like discount codes to give you a higher chance of obtaining personal details than if they were requested outwith your marketing game. This will give you more user data and more information with which to analyse the development of your drive-to-store strategy and retail marketing games strategy.
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