The sudden shutdown of brick and mortar and uncertainty in consumer spending leaves the retail industry trying to figure out how to best drive business forward. 

In a recent webinar, we polled enterprise retail marketers on what they anticipate to be the biggest challenge post-pandemic: 54% were most concerned with in-store sales loss, followed by inventory management (15%) and staffing/re-opening their stores (15%). New customer acquisition and online customer retention were also concerns. 

While there isn’t a crystal ball to see how the industry will be fully impacted in the near or distant future, there are certain strategies retailers can employ now to successfully pivot their marketing to ecommerce-only, keep customer experiences as convenient as possible, and increase retention and loyalty long after this all settles. 

1. Make visitor identification & identity resolution a priority

As frequent in-store shoppers and both new and returning visitors are headed online, many retailers are seeing a spike in web sessions. To help recover any lost in-store revenue, it’s imperative to be able to identify as many visitors as possible during this time period.

This means identifying those who haven’t yet logged in or created an account, as well as those who have clicked through an email and haven’t entered their email address anywhere else on your site. 

Having a solution in place that can accurately identify each visitor, even anonymous ones, and resolve their behavior into a single customer profile is key to ensuring you can engage with each customer in the right way and personalize to them appropriately.

This will also help you down the road in better understanding how their behavior is changing and will change as the crisis continues. 

2. Use offline data to continue to engage previous in-store shoppers

As noted above, the majority of retail marketers are most concerned with the impact COVID-19 has on in-store sales. If you haven’t already, be sure to leverage your in-store customer data in your online marketing campaigns to specifically communicate with those who have been affected by store closings.

Introduce these customers to the convenience of your online experience and loyalty benefits, and educate them on the perks of connecting with you digitally. 

By combining offline with the rest of your cross-channel data, you can then cross-sell and recommend items to your brick and mortar customers via your website, email, app or even mobile push that are similar to or complement their in-store purchases.

Retailers can also engage in-store shoppers during this time by reminding these customers that the consumable products and perennial favorites they’ve previously bought in person can easily be repurchased or refilled online.