Understanding How it Impacts Everything from Customer Acquisition to Back-office Operations
Industries are shifting, whether that’s a demand for goods and services, the way we deliver those goods and services, or new emergences in the way we do business. This is true for every business, including grocers.
Let’s take a look at some of the drivers shifting industry standards and how we can leverage one specific driver to create better opportunities for grocers.
Three Drivers of Retail
1. Shifts in Consumer Expectation
There’s perhaps nothing that changes more constantly than consumer expectation, and in the era of home delivery and subscription meal prep services, consumer demands are varied, and quite frankly, challenging.
Consumers expect the ability to buy anything, anytime, and from anywhere. Finding ways to cater to these new expectations is a major driver of business for grocers.
2. Stiff Competition and the Emergence of Ecosystems
An even more pronounced trend is the sheer level of competition that’s out there. Grocery chains are collapsing under the pressure of large-scale competition and the emergence of ecosystems. A great example is Amazon purchasing Whole Foods and using the Amazon infrastructure to fold Whole Foods operations into its business model.
3. Technology
The last driver for grocer-specific retail is technology. As technology advances, it opens doors to help grocers better compete for the attention of consumers. With the introduction of AI, advance analytics, and IoT, grocers have more capability than ever to analyze and connect with consumers.
Technology, more than any of the other three drivers above, can stand out as a primary factor in operational effectiveness with the ability to reduce overall cost in the value chain.
This is particularly true in the realms of customer acquisition, customer engagement, commercial effectiveness, and warehouse/back-office operations.
Customer Acquisition and Engagement
When it comes to technology’s role in customer acquisition and engagement, the benefits are obvious. Better analytics leads to better targeted messaging across multiple delivery vehicles, such as digital ads.
Technology is also crucial to creating highly targeted and hyper-personalized offerings, enabling grocers to connect with consumers on a more specific level, resulting in better customer acquisition, engagement, and loyalty.
Another area of advertising where technology plays a crucial role is in enhancing digital direct marketing properties, like the addition of promotional QR codes attached to emails or digital coupons.
Commercial Effectiveness
Technology can also help grocers maximize their commercial effectiveness by using advanced analytics to make better choices. These choices can include everything from the products grocers carry to the way they’re priced.
It can also help in making decisions related to promotional initiatives, helping to take the guesswork out of what promotional offers to run.
Operational Efficiency
One of the most appealing aspects of heavy technological integration within grocer systems is the potential for higher efficiency in day-to-day operations. Technology opens the door to automating warehouse functions, as well as in-store and back-office operations.
Why it Matters
If there’s nothing else to take away from this article, let it be this: technology allows you to compete for business in a market driven by choice, increasing existing customer loyalty, and driving customers to physical stores instead of online ordering sites.
These three benefits make it imperative that grocers embrace technological solutions for many of their day-to-day operations and needs. In an era so heavily dependent on technology for communication and promotion, without it, grocers will fall behind.
Interested in learning more about the role of technology in the value chain for grocers? We have the tools that can help ensure your tech is where it needs to be.
Whether that means operational efficiency with an MRM system or acquiring new customers with our SmartMove, new mover program, contact us to see what Strata can do for you.
How We Plan to Exceed Sustainable Business Standards
I spend a lot of time in the outdoors. I always have.
Whether it’s hiking, fishing, diving or something else, the outdoors has always been a defining presence in my life — a presence that has allowed me to see some of the best of what our natural world has to offer.
Unfortunately, I’ve also seen many ways in which we’re failing our environment. Regardless of one’s political and institutional beliefs, I think we all can agree that we only have one planet, and caring for it makes the same “sense” as caring for our homes or our children. In fact, for me, this is mostly about caring for our children.
I believe we’ve reached a tipping point, a crossroads — whatever you want to call it — where the choice is simple: take action to protect our planet now or accept a future of grave uncertainty and limited possibility.
Those of us in business are on the front lines of environmental impact, and now more than ever, we must act as leaders.
For too long, businesses have simply chalked up environmental activism to donations or the purchase of energy credits.
These are both fine things, but cutting a check and carrying on, “business as usual,” has become nothing short of insufficient.
Looking inward, sustainable business practices have always been somewhere on Strata’s agenda. We offer eco-friendly options, we’re careful with our byproduct disposal and make efforts to reduce waste wherever it’s created.
This too is not enough.
Going forward, effective immediately, Strata is implementing an aggressive eco-first strategy to not only meet widely recognized standards for sustainable business but exceed those criteria to the point of setting new industry benchmarks. We’re going to look carefully at the science and our environmental impact, and address each part of our operation to reach a goal of being carbon neutral by 2025 and environmentally neutral by 2030.
To start, we will develop, articulate and implement more responsible internal and external practices. We will allocate ten percent of company profits towards eliminating our footprint. We will participate through company-sponsored volunteerism in environmentally impactful ways, and together, see just how far these actions take us in attaining our goals. As these things come into being, we will re-evaluate and adjust.
We’re creating this blog series to lead by example, taking our readers along with us as we move towards new levels of sustainability. Throughout, we’ll be exploring what environmental responsibility means to our business and what kind of changes we’re making to see a real, measurable impact.
We are not certain where this journey will take us. Some of the concepts and technologies we will need to reach our ultimate goal are not even fully developed or available, yet. However, we have a chance to take adversity and channel it into opportunity. It is a challenge that we meet with optimism.
We’re excited to share our journey with you, and hope you’ll follow along, both as readers and business people committed to sustainability. We look forward to seeing what one small, for-profit business can accomplish.
Understanding the Importance of Sustainable and Scalable Processes
Do more with less – it’s a phrase every marketing leader has heard. You’re constantly being challenged to grow customer engagement, provide meaningful experiences, and consistently fill pipelines, all while decreasing expenses and resources. It’s a tall task – especially as marketing teams continue to get leaner and the day-to-day grind becomes more fast-paced and time-sensitive. But it’s a task that can be accomplished with a combination of the right tools, smart choices, and repeatable processes.
The Power of Marketing Automation
While you may never be able to eliminate all of the rework in your marketing strategy, leveraging tools like marketing automation can help eliminate repetitive steps that negatively impact performance. Rather than creating and recreating emails and campaigns from scratch, marketing automation allows anyone on your team the ability to clone user-friendly email templates and then make brand-approved adjustments.
Just think about what your creative services team might be able to do with all of that extra free time each week.
But when it comes to marketing automation, it’s not just about making your emails and campaigns scalable. Think bigger. It can help automate and elevate your social media, lead generation, landing pages, segmentation rules, and more. It’s a tool that can save you time across the board by creating repeatable processes and automated efficiencies, and has resulted in 1 in 3 marketing executives proclaiming it’s improved their department’s productivity and ROI.
Figure Out What Works and Repeat
The marketing teams that do the most with limited resources are the ones that understand what works and then replicates it. This goes beyond simple email campaigns and what marketing automation can do. This advanced tactic lets your team take entire programs – like an event or direct mail campaign for example – and replicate all of the content, workflows, materials, etc. It’s a great way to implement best practices and maximize your team’s time.
As the old saying goes “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
Image this example. Each month, your company onboards several new accounts and part of the onboarding process involves them receiving a personalized welcome box with some company swag. It’s an easy way to say thank you and enhance the customer journey but it can be time consuming. Think about the effort and resources it would take each month to gather information for each new client, compile a mailing list, design each custom box, order the swag, print the boxes, assemble the boxes, ship them, and then finally track the results. If you’re not exhausted after reading that, I’m impressed.
Now consider this – if your team develops a process that can be cloned each month, the process becomes a well-oiled machine. They can use a CRM to house the contact information and lists, include personalized variable fields on the creative, and standardize processes for printing, shipping and tracking engagement. Or better yet, they can find a tool that can take care of the creative, fulfilment and shipping – further freeing up their time.
Reaping the Benefits
At the end of the day, if you’re like most, your marketing budget isn’t getting any bigger and sustainable and scalable processes and programs are going to become more important than ever before.
While it’s nice to relieve your marketing team from performing repetitive tasks, on a larger scale, the right tools and smart choices can do so much more. You’ll be able to regain hours, lower your operational costs, reach a larger audience, and measure concrete success. You’ll truly be able to reach the marketing holy grail – doing more with less.
Are you interested in learning about how Strata can help you scale your marketing efforts? Contact us today and see what we can do for you.
From Long Sales Cycles to Fostering Loyalty, Dimensional Mail Often Works Best
There is a large number of incredible digital opportunities— automated emails, direct correspondence, pop-up ads, video ads. Yet, there’s a challenge in the overabundance of digital competition.
What do you do when the hottest marketing platform the world has ever known — the internet — presents such a substantial challenge?
A smart and savvy solution is to invest more heavily in physical direct marketing and pair it with your digital efforts. Despite the decades-long digital obsession of the marketing world, tactile and experience-rich direct marketing is continuing to succeed where its purely digital counterpart falters.
There’s a reason most industries — from global technology companies and Ivy League Universities to retail stores and your local pizza shop — run direct mail campaigns as crucial parts of their marketing initiatives.
Here are four reasons why:
Digital Overload
Some people refer to it as e-fatigue. Some people have labeled it digital burnout.
While the Internet is an ultra-valuable asset to every flourishing business, it can also be a significant challenge, like when we see too many digital ads. This competition can tire us, resulting in us paying less attention.
In fact, our attention span had dropped from to an average of 8 seconds.
The challenge with digital isn’t just digital; it’s digital distraction — there are simply too many options immediately available to your audience to compete with.
We can use the idea of a teacher and tutor as an analogy for digital vs physical marketing.
Mass-scale digital marketing is like a teacher trying to educate a large, loud, distracted classroom — he or she may get a few words to especially attentive ears, but most of the students are so distracted by their environment, they’ll likely walk away with nothing.
Physical direct marketing, on the other hand, is more like a tutor that comes to your home, spends one-on-one time with you in an environment with far fewer distractions, and gets you acquainted with the material on a deep and lasting level.
The analogy extends: you don’t only use a tutor, you use a tutor to supplement the teacher — use both digital and physical for best results.
Long Sales Cycles
A place where high-impact physical direct marketing thrives, particularly when digital marketing is used as supplementary technique, is within long sales cycles.
Where digital may be a great way to begin creating brand awareness and invaluable in the consumer learning experience, it can be difficult to close the deal via digital platforms alone.
There are a few contributing factors here. For one, even personalized digital campaigns can lack the personal touch required to build trust and consumer confidence. Rarely does digital alone suffice to propel your audience into the final stages of the sales cycle. Another shortcoming of a purely digital strategy lies in the aforementioned competition for attention online, particularly in the case of social media.
Powerful tactile experiences, especially those delivered in the form of high-value direct mail such as dimensional mailers, can get you over these hurdles by conveying personal interest in your audience. They also keep your product at the forefront of consumer consciousness by entering avenues that competing products may sometimes neglect, i.e. entering their physical realm via the mailbox.
In a long sales cycle, these traits specific to physical direct marketing are invaluable.
Brand Loyalty
Brand loyalty is one of the most challenging aspects of modern-day business. With so much competition, it’s important not only to build a connection with your consumer, but to foster the development of that relationship in unique and thoughtful ways.
One of the best ways to build brand loyalty is through physical direct marketing efforts. This is particularly true when it comes to promotional items delivered via dimensional direct mail. We’ve touched on this before: a dimensional mailer consists of direct marketing materials that come in a box or another, 3-dimensional vehicle.
Not only do these tactile direct marketing experiences – through their dimensional presence – have the power to cut through the static, but they also have the ability to offer unique gifts or other promotional items. For instance, a “thank you” campaign sent out to valued customers can include everything from key chains and water bottles all the way to tablets and other high-end electronic accessories.
This kind of thoughtfulness and unique mailer does something that digital struggles to — it builds a real connection between brand and consumer. It speaks to a brand who truly values a customer and their business.
Influencing Silent Decision Makers
With virtually limitless information so readily available on the internet, more and more buyers have become silent decision makers. This means that most buyers aren’t reaching out to businesses to learn more about their products, instead relying on user reviews and independent research to form their opinions.
Physical direct marketing once again shines here, giving your brand the opportunity to stand apart and reach silent decision makers via a less competitive channel. If you can separate yourselves via physical direct marketing and convert that into an additional opportunity to make your case, you stand a good chance of making a lasting impression.
When it’s time for the silent buyer to pull the trigger, that impression you made with physical direct marketing may make all the difference.
An Invaluable Tool
With physical, experience-rich direct marketing’s ability to bypass digital channel overload, it’s no wonder why marketers consider it an invaluable tool. It possesses a unique ability to retain consumer focus through long sales cycles, building brand loyalty and influencing silent decision makers.
Are you working on a new product launch, looking to close a stalled deal, or simply want to strengthen existing customer relationships? Contact us to learn about our innovative approach to capturing mindshare, enhancing loyalty, and driving more high-qualified leads to the pipeline.