Top 3 Marketing Trends Shaping the Retail Industry

By: Retail CIO Outlook | Thursday, October 15, 2020

In 2020, the consumer-facing industries are creating and applying next-generation marketing strategies to better the customer experience.

Fremont, CA: Innovation has enabled customers to purchase goods at any time and place, giving them control over their path to purchase. To be on top of the upcoming consumer-centric trends in the retail, marketing teams are expected to engineer memorable customer experiences by utilizing advanced, data-driven marketing analytics. Every retail organization needs to leverage marketing analytics software to meet customer demands. Staring from the manufacturers optimizing their production, to sales staff understanding how to best communicate with customers, data will be central to an organization’s overarching customer-centric strategy. Here are the top three trends that are expected to be adopted by the retail industry in 2020.

Personalization

For almost a decade, personalization has been a mainstay in retail innovation. However, the potential of personalization is expected to reach new heights in 2020. Retailers will use customized insights to create an easy shopping process. Instead of using customer’s data to send them advertisements and promotions, retailers must leverage information about a customer’s likes, needs, and values to be able to provide good shopping experiences to customers. The required information can easily be extracted from sources such as social media or IoT sensors. Then AI marketing and machine learning can use the data to create personalized recommendations based on the real-time needs of customers, which in exchange allows them to make simpler, instant decisions, leading to better customer experience.

Eliminating Delayed Gratification

Not long ago, online shoppers believed it was reasonable to wait weeks for their products to arrive, but now the consumers expect that their demands are fulfilled quickly. As a result, retailers need to respond to this trend by creating processes that can make order fulfillment agile. However, it is also vital for retailers to focus on streamlining their in-store experiences and not only near-instant delivery. Retailers will continue to embrace technology into their infrastructure, making mobile payment options more ubiquitous than ever.

Socially Integrated Visualized Search

Retailers are optimizing their product offerings for visual search as it allows users to take a picture of the outfit – or download a photo of a similar outfit – and search for articles of clothing within the image. Then, search engines provide a list of matching items, giving users an easy path to purchase. But the retailers need to ensure that they have a presence on image-based platforms. With image search becoming more sophisticated, retailers can also use it alongside marketing AI to create product innovations. With the help of this technology, customers could link their social media profile to their customer profile, allowing the retailer to analyze the photos within. Retailers could curate a list of recommended items that suit a shopper’s existing outfits or a general sense of style with this reference.