From website banners to product labels, retail businesses are in constant communication with their customers.
To keep your revenues high you need to continually remind your target market who you are, what you do, and why they should choose you over the competition. Furthermore, in the age of digital media, this means going far beyond traditional print methods of engaging with prospective clientele.
However, retail communication is ever changing, and staying up to date with the latest trends is no mean feat. So, what options do we have?
- Social media
The likes of Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter have revolutionised the ways that customers and businesses interact with each other, and this is a trend that’s only going to become more prevalent as these platforms grow in sophistication.
Why use social media?
- Your customers expect you to
- It’s immediate
- It gives you an opportunity to listen
- You can build a community
- It’s a great introduction
- Branding and marketing
Even when you aren’t directly engaging with customers through social media, or in person on the shop floor, your branding and marketing efforts are out there speaking volumes about you as a business.
In essence, branding has five key functions it can perform for a business:
- Affirming your business’ credibility among its competitors
- Delivering a message about who you are
- Creating an emotional connection between potential consumers and your offering
- Building user loyalty
- Enticing the prospect into buying
- Tagging and labelling
The ultimate goal of your marketing and social media strategies is to increase conversions in your store, be it physical or online. You’ve worked hard to grab the attention of prospective customers, and hold onto them this far, so it’s vital that you continue to engage them at the closing stages of the sales funnel.
In a digital shopping forum this is straightforward – sale item call outs, promotional deals and journeys based on previous searching activity. In a physical setting it can be much harder to lead people in the directions you want to.
Simple and straightforward retail tagging and labelling is therefore a must. You want to make it easy for your customers to navigate your shop and locate products you want to highlight.
In these fast-paced environments, the emphasis for the printing hardware used to produce these labels is on efficiency, compatibility and space-saving. You want to be able to integrate printers into your exiting setup, and not need huge amounts of space to accommodate them.
Increasingly, retailers also want to produce labels and receipts on-the-go with WiFi and Bluetooth® connectivity a must to enable you to hook labelling devices up to iOS, Android™ and Windows® devices.
At Brother, we know that effective customer communication in retail is only possible if your internal channels are spot on. Our retail solutions make it easy for you.