Retail marketers’ biggest challenges of 2023 and how to overcome them

Retail marketers are facing new macro challenges every quarter, including shifting regulations, supply chain issues, cost of living increases and inflation. Coupled with the challenge to build real loyalty with consumers when they are price-conscious and competing against e-commerce giants like Amazon, retail marketers have their work cut out for them.

But with these challenges come opportunities to evolve marketing so that it’s more aligned to what consumers want. For example, make sure that you are using the first-party data you are collecting. An article from The Drum shows that only 15% of consumers surveyed feel they’re getting good value from granting access to their data. Marketers can also recognize the opportunity to use that data to deliver compelling cross-channel experiences for your consumers. The Boston Consulting Group found that only 1%-2% of brands they spoke with are using data to deliver a cross-channel experience for customers.

Consumers in different regions also have varying expectations. McKinsey & Company shared that a majority of grocery sales are expected to be delivered in the ‘next-30-minutes’, so not even the next day or in two hours. While this is great for the consumer and what they want, it opens up new challenges for grocers and the marketers responsible for attracting, engaging, and retaining customers.

What does all of this mean? We boil it down to three points:

• Macro challenges are here to stay
  
  Even if inflation goes down and the cost of living either stabilizes or reduces, there will always be regulations coming that are impacting how marketers can go to market. This means that marketers need to build as close of a relationship with their audience as possible.
  
  
• Don’t just collect data, use it
  
  Be aware that your consumers may notice more than you think. If you ask for their first-party data like the number of children they have, their zip code, or their hobbies, know that it’ll go far if you use that data to create better experiences for your audience.

• Interactive content and experiences are key
  
  For marketers wanting to cut through the noise and create meaningful experiences for their audience, interactive content can accomplish this. By encouraging participation from your audience, they’ll spend more time with you and it’ll create a better brand association.

The rise of ‘retailtainment’

Retailtainment is the rise of interactive shopping experiences, especially across retail sectors like grocery, fashion, and beauty. These kinds of experiences, which are interactive in nature, often use game mechanics like competition, challenge, or rewards to help both marketers and consumers win. In addition to being fun and memorable, it can also build brand awareness and loyalty, increase engagement, provide better data on your consumers, and more.

How are retailtainment and interactive experiences connected? Just as entertainment is core to retailtainment, it’s also an essential part of interactive experiences which are immersive, fun, and meaningful. As humans, we can’t help but engage with games and play when we get the chance, so brands that use playable experiences will spend more focused time with their audience as well as provide better experiences. Interactive content can be a competitive advantage, especially for retail marketers or those looking to use retailtainment to engage their audience.

The name of the game is efficiency

Given the macro challenges marketers are facing, constricting budgets, and the need to do more with less, what marketers need is a tool they can be sure is efficient and reliable. Playable marketing does just this and can be used to make your marketing efficient, however you define that. Perhaps it’s the volume of gamification campaigns, maybe it’s creating one hero campaign and localizing that for your markets, or maybe it’s even using gamification to create more revenue for your retail brand. Gamification works hard for marketers, and isn’t that what we need in the tools we use today?

The results also speak for themselves. Our customers see, on average, a 41% registration rate on their gamification campaigns, and 61 seconds of valuable time spent per gameplay. That focused time means a lot considering how many ads consumers see each day and how fast they spend on ads (an average of 1.5 seconds for a mobile ad, according to venture capitalist Mary Meeker).

Gamification in action

Take Sokos, a department store chain, for example. They started using Playable’s gamification platform to accomplish goals, including increased customer engagement, helping customers find the right product, lead customers through the shopping funnel, increase newsletter subscribers, and become more fun and memorable for their customers.

They accomplished this and more, including increasing their AOV (average order value). Sokos’ Digital Strategist, Veera Korvenkari, explains, “The AOV, we are talking about real money that our marketing team has made with Playable, is nearly 10% higher than the site average. When it comes to the hard conversion that every e-comm player wants to have, the Playable conversion rate is over 135% higher than the site average. So it’s wow!”.

They introduced gamification as a tool in their toolbox to add value to existing campaigns and the brand’s e-commerce strategy, which led to improved business results.

Want to learn more? Retail marketers can gain a competitive advantage by using Playable’s gamification platform, and by adding this to your toolbox, you can look forward to reliable results.