Within 24 hours last week, Jeanswest entered voluntary administration, and headphone giant Bose revealed it will shut all retail stores in Australia. Both announcements follow recent news that a total of 98 Harris Scarfe, EB Games and Bardot stores across the country will also close.
The result of various factors, from low wage growth to international competition, the primary driver looks certain to be online shopping, and ever-changing consumer buying preferences and habits.
Competition is fierce, customer expectation even more so, and the question remains: how do businesses survive these industry realities? They need a point of difference, and to create compelling consumer experiences. The solution – to differentiate in a noisy, changeable marketplace – remains as hard as ever.
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Retailers, especially, need to observe their audiences closely in-store, but more-importantly online as well. They need to track any number of influences and preferences that drive sales, whether those sales happen online or in-store.
What are the trends in engagement, add-to-cart, purchasing products and those that peers and friends recommend? What pain points do customers have, what type of content do they want to see, and how do they describe your brand online and on social media?
The clues to optimising sales lie in data – in social media channels and search.
Accurately measuring and testing the success of different approaches, across several different platforms, is time-consuming. Even analytics geeks, like Henry Reith, found it difficult to track what was going on with his digital and social marketing efforts.
Henry is the Marketing Director of OhCrap, a business that sells compostable dog-poop bags online. He adopted Digivizer about 18 months ago.
With one login, businesses can see the entire customer conversation, around engagement and conversion. That’s analytics from Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and Google – in one view.
OhCrap now reviews and refines its digital marketing strategy on two-week cycles. The company started with no Instagram followers at all a year ago and now has nearly 4,000. Facebook followers have grown from 2,500 to 23,000. Stock deliveries have grown from 30,000 to 3 million doggy doo-doo bags per shipment.
Watch: How Henry Reith used Digital Insights to Scale his Business
Easy Living Footwear started as a direct mail order business and is now a mixed store-online footwear retailer with four stores across regional NSW. Technology has always played a key role in the business, but as Founder and CEO Robyn McLennan says, “you have to understand your customers, and you have to understand your business and what you’re actually involved with”.
Easy Living Footwear uses Digivizer to build its brand online and to expand its engagement with customers in new ways.
Easy Living Footwear has increased sales by 59%, increased transactions by 66%, and grown online sales by 86% (Oct-Dec 2019 v. Oct-Dec 2018). By using Digivizer to test, measure and refine content, the business harnesses every opportunity to engage customers online and in-store. Social and search data lets them better understand customer needs and respond accordingly.
Digivizer is also a Shopify partner which allows retailers to integrate their on-line and e-commerce systems with the Digivizer platform and seamlessly measure digital marketing performance against sales.
Digivizer lets you create your own single-source of truth to help fast-track your digital marketing strategy. Sign up for free.
