5 ways your firm can stay ahead of the retail tech curve

Like any business sector, there are many touchpoints between retail and tech.

And while traditional customer service, communication and emotional intelligence skills are still worth their weight in gold, keeping abreast of digital, data, hardware and software developments means you won’t get left behind while competitors adapt and thrive.

With that in mind, here are five ways your firm can stay ahead of the retail tech curve.

1.   Beacon Marketing

Traditional beacons include lighthouses and fires – and modern beacon marketing can illuminate your customers’ shopping experience in a similar manner.

Perfectly placed beacons can send shoppers useful information on your store opening times, special offers and promotions straight to your app on their phones, whenever they’re in the vicinity of your physical store.

If you’re interested, grab more beacon facts from this Google article.

2.   AR/VR

VR (Virtual Reality) and AR (Augmented Reality) are perhaps still most closely associated with gaming.

But retailers are now turning to both these technologies to enhance customer experience – for example, if you run a furniture store, it can allow visitors to choose furniture by allowing them to see how it looks placed in their own home prior to purchase. Furthermore, it enables realistic walk-throughs of your new store for promotions.

3.   BOPIS

BOPIS stands for Buy Online Pick Up In Store – and for customer groups like Millennials, the combination of convenient online and tactile physical shopping it offers is extremely attractive.

Get the BOPIS lowdown from this Adweek piece and you’ll see that in the US last year, BOPIS grew 73 per cent between Thanksgiving and Black Friday, so it’s certainly worth considering adding it to your customer relationship armory.

4.   Mobile apps

Monetising your website for ecommerce and making sure that it’s optimised for mobile phone users are no-brainer moves for any business serious about online retail.

However, apart from capitalizing on beacon technology, which we mentioned earlier, there are multiple other reasons that it’s worthwhile developing your own ecommerce app.

According to a recent Entrepreneur app article, retail apps are one of the top four apps surfed on a customer’s phone and 62 per cent of phone owners mostly use them for purchases.

5.   Data education

The billions upon billions of bytes of data floating around in cyberspace offer unparalleled opportunities for retailers to develop new and innovative ways to get close to customers and offer the types of experiences that keep them coming back for more.

So in order to enhance decision-making at a strategic level, studying for an MSc in Data Science with a provider like Anglia Ruskin Distance Learning allows you to earn while you learn, apply cutting-edge AI and machine learning techniques instantly and earn a valuable vocational qualification.

Follow these five tech tips and your retail brand will be fit for the future – you can thank us later!

That’s our list! Share your own retail tech tips in the comments section.