Christian Nahas, Radiant Systems’ Director – Retail Channel, recently shared his thoughts with VSR Technology magazine on what he sees for the Retail Marketplace in 2010 and beyond.
His words: "In the Specialty Retail marketplace, 2010 will be all about getting back to basics". In sports, they call it the ‘blocking and tackling’ of the game. You can’t win without it……."
"The blocking and tackling of retail are: getting customers in the door and selling. 2010 will see a renewed interest in not only attracting new customers, but also retaining the ones you already have."
"Though the theme is not new, the tools used will be, as small businesses look [for] fresh, inexpensive approaches such as email marketing and search engine marketing to drive traffic both online and into the physical store".
"Email marketing is emerging as the go-to-medium for communicating with your customer base. 2010 will see retailers begin to finally really use all of the loyalty/customer history data they have been collecting to get much more focused in their email campaigns".
"Search Engine marketing will be the go-to-service [for new customers to find out about your store]. 2010 will see a boom in this type of marketing. Research shows that nearly half of all customers now start their buying process on the web. Building a strong web presence – if only to drive customers to your brick and mortar store – is required".
Tomorrow, we’ll cover Christian’s thoughts on "Now that you have the customers, what are you going to do with them"?