Menu
Retail marketing is a tricky business. That is why, for this guide, we consulted the retail marketing experts at Acceleration Partners, an award-winning, global partner marketing agency with extensive experience in retail, to give you a deeper understanding of what a great retail marketing strategy involves, and the best tactics for retail marketing success in 2024 (and beyond!).
Retail marketing as a whole doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Most people focus on e-commerce alone and its potential, but in reality, it only accounts for 14% of global retail sales. The other 86% comes from people walking into stores and buying products in person.
This presents a unique opportunity to use online and offline marketing to drive revenue for your retail business. If you don’t use the right retail marketing channels, potential customers will go to a competitor without thinking twice.
So, what makes for a truly successful marketing strategy, and how do you develop and implement one that works for your unique brand?
That is exactly what we’re covering today—everything you need to know to create and implement your own successful strategy, along with examples, case studies, and tips from the best in retail marketing!
At its core, a great marketing strategy for retail starts with knowing your customer. This means going beyond basic demographics to understand their needs, preferences, and shopping behaviors.
By developing detailed customer personas and analyzing data from past purchases and interactions, retailers can tailor their messaging and offerings to resonate with their ideal customers.
Another crucial element is creating a cohesive brand experience across all touchpoints.
From the layout of your physical store to your website design and social media presence, every interaction should reinforce your brand identity and values. Consistency in messaging, visuals, and customer service helps build trust and loyalty among your target audience.
A third crucial element for a great retail promotional strategy is Omnichannel integration. By ensuring that customers can interact with your brand effortlessly across different platforms, you enhance their overall experience and increase the likelihood of repeat business.
In today’s retail environment, customers expect a seamless shopping experience across all channels – whether they’re browsing online, shopping in-store, or using a mobile app. A successful retail strategy must integrate these various touchpoints to create a cohesive and frictionless customer journey.
Let’s take a closer look at these three key elements, with real-world examples and a retail marketing strategy case study from the experts at Acceleration Partners:
Do you have a clear enough understanding of your target customers?
Do you know what they want and how they perceive certain brands and marketing styles? Are you turning them off or hitting the right notes?
Achieving breakaway success will be difficult until you can confidently answer these questions. The good news is that you can cheaply and effectively gain a deep understanding of your customers.
By sending out questionnaires to past customers or those visiting your store and website. This isn’t a customer satisfaction survey. Instead, you’re trying to understand what they’d like to accomplish with the kinds of products and services you’re selling.
For example, if you sell beard care products, you’d want to know why customers buy. Is it to boost their confidence, live better lives, get a date, etc.? The answers inform both what you offer and how you position those products.
Beardbrand deeply understands its customer base and showcases that with its Keep On Growing® mission.
The company launched successful retail marketing campaigns, which fostered loyalty and culminated in a partnership with Target stores.
Here are a few questions you can ask to get a better understanding of your customers:
In online questionnaires, you’ll want to determine the customer’s needs. If you have a bigger, more expensive product that takes some time to consider, you also want to know which buying funnel stage they’re in. This gives you the ability to adapt your messaging accordingly. The AARRR lead funnel framework is a helpful method to optimize communication for ‘Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and ultimately Revenue.’
A cohesive brand experience stands out as a cornerstone of successful marketing strategies.
This concept goes beyond visual consistency, encompassing every facet of how customers interact with a brand.
From the moment a potential customer encounters a store’s signage or visits its website to their final purchase and beyond, each touchpoint contributes to the overall brand perception.
A truly cohesive branding experience ensures that these interactions are consistent and meaningful, reinforcing the brand’s values and promises at every turn.
Here are a few key features to consider when optimizing brand experience for your customers:
This involves maintaining a consistent visual identity across all platforms. This includes the use of the same color schemes, logos, fonts, and overall design aesthetic in physical stores, on the website, in advertising materials, and on social media platforms.
The brand’s voice, tone, and core messages should be consistent across all communications. Whether a customer is reading an email newsletter, browsing the website, or talking to a sales associate in-store, they should receive the same key branding messages and values.
Customer Service Alignment: All customer service interactions, whether online, over the phone, or in-person, should reflect the brand’s values and personality. This means training all staff to understand and embody the brand ethos in customer interactions.
Products should be displayed and described consistently across all channels. This includes product photography, descriptions, and how items are arranged in-store versus online.
A great way to gauge and test all these is through a practice known as ‘mystery shopping.’ Your business can hire individuals to act as secret shoppers or customers to gather information about various aspects of the shopping and customer engagement experience.
The final piece of the retail marketing puzzle is ensuring your products appear wherever your customers can easily find and access them. If you opened a new physical store, would you go deep in the woods and put it in a place that could only be accessed after a 2-hour hike?
Of course not. It would make a great getaway but a horrible store location!
Whether customers browse products on a mobile app, purchase on a website, or visit a physical store, omnichannel integration ensures a consistent and fluid experience throughout their journey.
As consumer behaviors evolve, with shoppers frequently switching between online and offline channels, retailers who master omnichannel integration gain a significant competitive edge.
This strategy enhances customer satisfaction, drives loyalty, increases sales, and provides valuable insights into consumer behavior.
Watch this video to learn how Starbucks used an omnichannel marketing strategy to grow brand loyalty.
Now that you have a better understanding of the core elements of a successful retail marketing strategy, let’s take a look at a case study to demonstrate how powerful a good strategy is when you take a data-driven approach and fully understand your customers and how best to meet their needs:
Acceleration Partners was engaged by a large global retailer who wished to expand its customer base to include millennial and Gen Z women.
Engaging these previously unengaged demographic groups could drive exponential growth and revenue for the retailer by opening up a whole new market segment.
Supporting research data points showed that:
To engage the new target demographics, Acceleration Partners took a data-driven approach, researching the best ways to leverage existing affiliate partnerships and the most effective new partnerships to engage Millennial and Gen Z women.
Based on their findings, the client services team recommended that they continue to pay affiliates a percentage-based commission but add the option to pay flat fees for specific placements.
They also recommended that the retailer engage 10 new Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) enabled partners because most BNPL users are Millennials or Gen Z (75% of BNPL users in the US and 80% globally).
Adding BNPL partners drove purchases by meeting the target demographic where they were and offering them an easily accessible and more convenient shopping experience that involved fewer clicks.
Using BNPL partners also meant that the retailer could implement a one-time card, where customers within the BPNL app could break payments up into installments without the partners needing to be added as payment solutions on the retailer’s website.
This innovative, data-backed approach led to some incredible results for the retailer:
The retail marketing strategy developed by Acceleration Partners integrated into the retailer’s existing affiliate partnerships and added new BNPL partnerships. The success of this strategy is demonstrated by the measurable results they achieved:
As you can see, a good retail marketing strategy is essential for success and, when done right, can drive exponential growth and revenue for your brand.
Now, let’s look at different marketing tactics you can use to make the most of your strategic marketing efforts.
Social media, when used properly, is a powerful way to connect with your ideal customer. Advertisers from every industry have taken note. Worldwide retail digital ad spending will surpass $50 billion in 2024.
This shows just how effective social media marketing can be for your business. However, there’s one problem most people don’t realize – it’s difficult to grow a large presence on all social media channels at once.
Look closely; you’ll realize that most successful social media businesses start with one or two platforms. After building up their presence, they expand to other social sites. It is important to do the same thing to succeed in retail marketing.
What channel works best for you based on the products you’re selling and the audience you’re targeting?
For example, brands such as Frank Body have built large Instagram followings. In fact, it used Instagram to grow to $20 million in annual revenue and secure deals with Target, Sephora, and Ulta Beauty.
This platform is introducing even more tools, like Instagram stories, that retailers can use to grow their reach and build an engaged customer base.
Other brands are using Facebook to reach their ideal customers. Thursday Boot Company went from selling a few boots a week to selling thousands a month with targeted Facebook Ads focused on its customers’ lifestyles.
Williams Sonoma focused heavily on Pinterest and has grown a massive following. It now derives a lot of referral traffic and sales from the platform.
I’m not showing you these examples so you go and try your hand at each of them. Select a single platform that works well with your products and audience and focus on growing there first.
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to connect with customers and generate revenue.
There’s one big challenge: inboxes are crowded. The average office worker receives over 100 emails a day. Unless your emails stand out from the crowd, they’ll be ignored, and people will unsubscribe.
Prevent this by using simple behavioral segmentation to send targeted emails to your audience members and past customers. I’ll touch on a few of the highest-impact tactics:
The average e-commerce store has multiple products for sale, each with a unique page. When someone visits, they’ll interact with the product pages they’re interested in and ignore the rest. Track this using your email marketing software and send relevant email automation based on the pages a visitor has viewed.
There was a time when the software was very expensive, but modern email marketing tools are quite cheap, and they make it simple to segment people based on website activity.
Start by setting an automation trigger that sends an email to people who’ve visited a page two times or more within 30 days (or however long it takes people to go from consideration to purchase). If you have a large product catalog, focus first on the most popular product and expand from there.
This segmentation method focuses on finding the kind of content your subscribers are interacting with and sending more of it. When someone first becomes a subscriber, it’s natural to lead them through a welcome series and send them different types of content.
After that, what do you do?
It would be far from ideal to send them multiple offers about products they may or may not be interested in. To avoid this dilemma, you can track what kind of emails subscribers are opening and the links they’re clicking.
For example, someone signs up for Acme Inc.’s mailing list about an active lifestyle and activewear. Acme Inc. doesn’t know whether the subscriber is a man or woman, whether they prefer running or weight training, or if there is any other information about the subscriber.
Acme Inc. sends out all kinds of emails to new subscribers and notices that they’re only clicking on links related to women’s products and content. It also realizes that the subscriber likes yoga pants and running shoes. In the future, Acme Inc. will send more content tailored to the subscriber’s behavior.
This is not a manual process. Advanced tools like Active Campaign or OmniSend allow tags to be applied or contact records to be updated based on behavior. You can then send messages to specific groups of people, which get opened and clicked and generate revenue.
This may be the most powerful type of behavioral segmentation. Your subscriber has told you they’re interested and is ready to spend cold hard cash.
You can send similar promotions to them regularly. Even if they don’t buy from you, it’ll be well received because it’s something they’re interested in.
ASOS takes this strategy to heart. The only things I bought from it were shoes and jackets. The company sends me an email every few days. About 70% of them are focused on shoes and outerwear. The other 30% are emails about interesting content and different product categories.
These emails are created through email content automation. The software inserts the right products for you. But there’s an important aspect to keep in mind when you’re segmenting based on behavior. Your customer may be interested in much more than you know. In addition to emails promoting similar products, add different product categories to the mix.
E-commerce has a significant drawback – you can’t touch, feel, or smell a product before buying it. In many situations, that matters. Another thing to consider is that some consumers only shop at places they’re familiar with. That means they’re unwilling to try a new brand they found online.
A pop-up shop can help you reach a segment of your market that would otherwise be inaccessible. Other benefits include:
These are just a few of the many benefits associated with pop-up shops, and brands like Kylie Cosmetics have recognized their power.
People reportedly waited outside for 11 hours or more before getting inside. Smaller retailers are also creating meaningful experiences for their customers who often travel to participate in the activity.
For offline businesses, it’s possible to partner with an online retailer to expand your reach. As long as you remember what we said about marketing and brand consistency,
There are several things to keep in mind when you’re planning a popup shop campaign. It’s more than choosing a retail space and sending out an email to your subscribers:
It takes a considerable amount of effort, but it can be one of the most powerful ways to connect with a larger market because it’s an experience.
RealReal launched a pop-up shop and had guests from Vogue and Vanity Fair cover it. The end result was exposure, revenue, and goodwill.
The last retail marketing tactic I want to touch on is using brand ambassadors to extend your online and offline reach.
A brand ambassador is someone who’s paid (or otherwise rewarded) to endorse a company’s products and services. They work closely with your in-house teams to create and conceptualize marketing campaigns that increase awareness and revenue.
In fact, this is the exact strategy Lululemon used to grow from a single yoga studio to a multi-billion dollar company.
I want to clarify something: a brand ambassador marketing initiative differs from an influencer marketing initiative. Read this article to get a sense of how other brands are empowering their ambassadors.
Of course, your brand ambassadors can be influencers in their own right, but it’s not a prerequisite. Depending on your reach, products, and goals, there are many ways to run a brand ambassador program. Consider the following things before you launch it:
Take cues from successful programs in the past
Brand ambassadors have been in use for a long time. It’s not something that started with social media or the internet. Research companies that have gone before you to understand what set their successful campaign apart and how you can replicate that success.
Start small and iterate.
This is obvious, right? Not exactly.
Many retailers are so excited about the thought of a brand ambassador program that they recruit as many people as they can. In the end, they’re unable to give their early ambassadors the tools and attention they need to succeed.
It’s better to move slowly and steady in the early stages. Focus on finding people who’re already talking about you and recruiting them to your cause. Use social listening tools like Mention or Brand24 to find them.
How are you compensating ambassadors?
Influential ambassadors may require cold, hard cash, but many of your early converts won’t. The best ambassadors are people who’re already familiar with your brand and would use your products whether they were being paid or not.
That said, they’ll work closely with you to build awareness and drive revenue. This will require time and energy on their part, so a simple thank you won’t cut it.
Daniel Wellington runs a college brand ambassador program that rewards participants with merchandise, exclusive event invites, concert tickets, gift cards, and more.
Finally, let your brand ambassadors do their thing. Apart from a few guidelines, it’s important to give them room to work.
Why?
They’re advocates of your brand and are best suited to communicate what makes you unique to them. They can add their own spin to your marketing, which you may have never considered. If you make them rehearse that message or change it too much, then it loses its ring of authenticity.
Retail marketing is constantly evolving, and it’s important for you to evolve along with it. Otherwise, it’ll be impossible to stand out from the crowd.
The specific techniques may change from year to year, but the underlying strategies remain the same. It’s important to understand what your customers want and need from you and then deliver it in a way that’s convenient to them.
Focus on one or two of the tactics outlined here, and you’ll see massive revenue, engagement, and brand awareness improvements.
Let us know more about your favorite retail marketing strategies in the comments, and don’t forget to share!
Customer data is a goldmine for understanding your audience. By analyzing purchase history, website behavior, and preferences, you can personalize marketing messages and offers. This lets you target the right people with the right content, leading to higher engagement, sales, and customer satisfaction.
Email marketing is a powerful tool for online retailers. It lets them directly reach interested customers with personalized offers, promotions, and new product information. This can drive sales, boost brand loyalty, and bring back customers who abandon their carts. Effectively, email marketing allows you to connect with your audience and turn them into repeat buyers.
Here are just a few communication channels retail marketers can use:
Email marketing, which has an average ROI of $44 for every $1 spent and allows retailers to drive sales, build customer relationships, promote products, and automate communications.
Social media marketing, which helps increase brand awareness, reach new customers, and build relationships on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Peer-to-peer or word-of-mouth marketing, where satisfied customers share positive experiences with their networks, which is especially powerful as online content becomes oversaturated and paid content is trusted less.
About the author: Daniel Ndukwu is the founder and CEO of KyLeads. There, he helps retail businesses create meaningful experiences and increase audience engagement while generating more leads using surveys, quizzes, and smart popups. When not working, you can find him spending time with his family or and traveling as much as possible.
Yoobic: Retail Efficiency: Best Practices in Retail Store Operations
Insider Intelligence: US retail media ad spending will reach $31.49 billion in 2021, up 53.4% from 2020
Emarketer: Global Ecommerce 2019 and The Ad Platform: What we think about retail media
Statista: Number of monthly active Facebook users worldwide as of 3rd quarter 2022
Shopify: 53 Data-Backed Retail Statistics Shaping Retail in 2022 and Beyond
Whether you're a seasoned business owner or a budding entrepreneur, using the best e-commerce platfo...
Staying ahead of the rapidly evolving trends in B2B e-commerce is crucial for growth-minded business...
In recent years, we have all shifted to ways of working and living that rely more on the convenience...
Enroll in our free 5-lesson email course today!
Free for limited time only.
We created P2P to provide free resources to brands that believe in the power of peers to promote their service or products.
© 2019 P2P Marketing All Rights Reserved.