A shopping mall is a place where people can visit even to window shop and still end up enjoying the experience. But nowadays, window shoppers may choose to browse their favorite retailers via their websites, making it a bit harder for brands to create an entertaining experience. Brands must take advantage of those consumers who choose to still invest in experiences rather than just products. For customers like these who would like their shopping experience to go beyond walking into a store, purchasing a product, and leaving, brands should create an immersive retail experience. Creating an immersive retail experience allows brands to interact with consumers in a non-intrusive way that builds affinity.
What Makes an Immersive Retail Experience?
Thanks to technology, there are several ways for brands to provide customers with an immersive retail experience. Brand immersion shouldn’t be an intrusive experience and should avoid the use of missives such as pop-up ads, product placements, or spam. These forms of marketing feel pushy and intrusive to your customers, and while some brands wrongly believe that any sort of attention is good, negative engagements can be detrimental.
Instead, an immersive retail experience should be:
- Seamless: An experience that blends into a customer’s daily routine won’t interrupt the norm and will be easily adaptable.
- Interactive: When creating an immersive retail experience, brands should be sure to provide a way to enable customer communication, such as through social media or using an app that collects feedback.
- Enhancing: Immersive shopping uses new technology to enhance the customer’s experience while they are on the retail floor. For example, many stores now feature touch screen displays which customers can use to browse products in the store.
- Convenient: Apps provide convenience during a shopping experience, enabling customers to look up products, gather information, and read reviews that help them make purchasing decisions, even in the shopping aisle.
In creating an immersive retail experience, brands must understand the difference between immersive and invasive. Customers never want to feel like they are losing control over their buying decisions and don’t want to feel pressured by advertisements. Not only do mobile shopping apps provide customers with the control they desire, but they also give retailers a way of communicating with customers while they’re in the store.
Create an Immersive Retail Experience With Shopkick
To provide an immersive retail experience, brands should consider partnering with a shopping app such as Shopkick. The app is perfect for augmenting an immersive shopping experience because it offers an environment where customers can discover and interact with brands in an engaging and non-invasive way. Shopkick creates fun, memorable, and rewarding experiences for shoppers, helping to build brand affinity and drive sales.
In creating an immersive retail experience, brands must understand the difference between immersive and invasive.
Once customers download the Shopkick app, it travels with them all along the shopping journey via their mobile device, sending push notifications that raise brand awareness and drive traffic. The app enables customers to interact with brands from any location and incentivizes engagement while they’re already in a shopping mindset. And when a customer enters a participating store, interacts with a featured product at shelf, or makes a purchase, they are rewarded—which makes for the perfect immersive retail experience.
Shopkick is dedicated to helping our partners provide immersive retail experiences for customers. We’ve partnered with many businesses to help them improve the brand engagement and experiences they offer their customers. Read our success stories to learn more.
Image courtesy of Monkey Business Images
