drive-to-store: the marketing strategy for stores
Romain Didelot
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Introduction
The Internet has become a privileged point of contact between retailers and their potential customers. But in-store sales are not dead. It is evolving and benefiting from digital technology, particularly for its marketing and, more specifically, for bringing web users into physical stores. This practice is known as drive-to-store. Find out how to generate qualified traffic in-store with SMS marketing, and how this technique can boost your sales.
What is drive-to-store?
Drive-to-store refers to all the marketing actions implemented to generate in-store traffic. It brings together a variety of communication strategies, all converging on the same objective: to use prospects'/customers' geographical data to drive them to a physical store near them.
And drive-to-store isn't just an acquisition technique, it also (and above all) concerns loyal customers, about whom you already have useful information for running a targeted campaign in a geographical area. What's more, you already know their interest in your brand and your products.
Why conduct drive-to-store actions?
The consumer 's in-store experience, the physical interaction with the product and the expert advice offered by the sales assistant all mean that in-store sales still have a clear advantage over digital. However, digital is king in other areas: acquisition, targeting and interactivity. Drive-to-store lets you combine the strengths of both businesses to boost your sales.
Retailers who succeed in the ever-changing digital landscape are those who anticipate and adapt to marketing trends. This makes drive-to-store an essential investment. In fact, it accounts for 66% of French retail advertising budgets, or nearly 74 billion euros a year (source: hub institute).
Many consumers have a ROBO (Research Online Buy Offline) approach, and drive-to-store allows you to be the store where customers finally come to buy.
The drive-to-store benefits of SMS
The first advantage is control. SMS gives you cost control, agility and total independence in managing your campaign. In fact, it's possible to set up drive-to-store SMS campaigns whatever the size of your contact base and your business. SMS marketing can also be used for many other purposes, such as click and collect, e-booking, couponing, competitions, promotional codes or loyalty rewards...
Another important competitive advantage is that SMS is distinguished from other advertising channels by a number of KPIs:
- A 95% open rate and a message generally read within 3 minutes.
- A recall rate of 60%.
- Close proximity to the customer through the use of a personal communication channel.
- A conversion rate 3 times higher than email.
- Easy to set up with the creation of an account in a few clicks.
- A message that can be customized using direct mail variables.
Discover our major study based on 745 million SMS sent.
How to run a successful drive-to-store SMS campaign
Good targeting
The first step is to qualify your database. To maximize your chances of success, you need to segment your contacts according to their geographical location (city, department, postal code of your customers/prospects). You can also further segment your database by selecting consumers according to purchasing habits, inactivity time, loyalty points, etc.
An offer adapted to your objective
Choose your strategy according to your sector of activity, the size of your company and the objectives you wish to achieve:
- Highlight an exceptional discount that encourages people to go to sales or private sales.
- Send an Enriched SMS with a geolocation link to announce a store (re)opening.
- Use purchasing habits and the direct mail option (variable messages) to promote a specific product that has just (re)appeared on your shelves.
- Send an SMS with a link to a competition or an exclusive promo code giving access to discounts to boost your visits.
- Communicate a special offer for loyal customers to pamper them.
- Redirect your targets to a mobile landing page for Click and Collect or e-booking, to drive additional in-store visits and sales.
- Include a countdown timer on your landing page to create a sense of urgency.
Extend the mobile experience with rich SMS , for interactive, multimedia exchanges
The different drive-to-store strategies
Even if the goal is the same, there are different approaches to drive-to-store (and different results 😉 ). Some methods are search-oriented, such as :
- Local referencing: in particular Google My Business, which allows you to be present on a localized expression (e.g. Marseille shoes).
- Google Ads: with location extensions in your ads.
- The store locator: designed to point potential customers to the nearest store
- The product locator: designed to indicate the availability of a product in a local store, as well as product reviews.
- Click and collect and e-booking.
Other techniques on display :
- Geolocalised ads in mobile or desktop display.
- Display on a GPS application like Waze.
- Facebook Ads or other social networks with "point-of-sale traffic" functionality.
- Geofencing displays like beacon, a Bluetooth transmitter that sends push notifications via an app to customers entering a defined zone around the point of sale.
Unfortunately, most of these techniques have their drawbacks. First of all, there's the lack of information about the target. For most of these actions, we know nothing about the consumer, his intentions, his relationship with the brand...
Then there's the cost. Whether it's a product that needs to be installed on your website (like the product locator), developing your presence in search results or running large-scale advertising campaigns, a lot of investment in time and/or money will be required, with conversion not always forthcoming.
To overcome these problems, you need to be able to aggregate data on your prospects (zip code, town, telephone number, e-mail) and use a channel where your advertising cannot be missed, without the cost being prohibitive.
You can collect information in a number of ways: tracking browsers, filling in forms, creating online or in-store customer accounts...
The most effective channel for distributing your advertising is SMS !
How to measure the impact of my drive-to-store campaign
Of course, the aim is to generate in-store traffic, but you also need to be able to measure the impact of your campaign. Performance analysis will need to combine online and offline information. The best way to do this is to integrate a specific element into your promotional offer. This can take the form of a barcode, a QR code or a special visual. When your customer visits the store, he'll present this code to benefit from a promotion. For your part, you can collect the relevant data to measure the impact of your campaign and learn more about purchasing behavior: sales generated by the campaign, purchase times, conversion rate, product type, number of units per ticket...
All this data will allow you to know if your campaign was a success, but also to determine the type of customers who are sensitive to drive-to-store, the most attractive items or the most appropriate type of message.
The incremental visit
The incremental visit is an increasingly popular type of analysis for calculating the impact of a drive-to-store strategy. It compares the behavior of two groups of users segmented according to their exposure to the advertising campaign (control group or NON-exposed group VS exposed group). The analysis carried out over a given time interval is used to determine theuplift, i.e. the variation in the number of visits attributed to the drive-to-store campaign.
Drive-to-store: a numerical success
- 3 out of 4 consumers say they complete their orders in shop. (Samsung smart Retail study)
- 8 out of 10 French people have the "digital reflex" to prepare their purchases online before going to the point of sale. (arcep)
- 76% of smartphone users who have received a communication from SMS have already visited a point of sale following this communication. (MMAF)
- Drive-to-store accounts for 58% of total retail advertising spend (The State of Drive-to-Store Advertising 2019″ conducted by IHS Markit)
What about drive-to-web?
If drive-to-store uses different channels to generate in-store visits, drive-to-web works on the same principle, with the aim of generating traffic to your website.
Although certain techniques differ, advertising via SMS remains highly effective for drive-to-web. For example, it's possible to direct consumers to your products by sending them a Rich SMS containing a link to your website.
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