What is Interactive Shopping? 

When shoppers visit your online or offline store, they expect to have an interactive shopping experience. If you fail to provide that, the chances are, they’ll look elsewhere. Interactive shopping is all about personalizing your customers’ shopping experiences by enabling them to interact with, engage, learn about, and test your products and services before purchasing.  

As physical and online retail stores become more customer-centric, interactive shopping can help create a unique and attractive shopping experience that boosts sales. Providing your customers with an interactive shopping experience offers many benefits, including: 

Generating Qualified Leads 

As a retailer or marketer, generating qualified business leads should be a key priority. There’s no better way to do so than to make your customers’ shopping experience interactive. For instance, by sharing relevant content, it will be easier to qualify users, attract shoppers who are a good fit for your products, and create brand loyalty. Retail stores that provide detailed descriptions of their products using interactive elements have lower incomplete purchase rates. 

Gaining Customer and Market Insights 

Providing customers with interactive content stimulates responses and overall user participation, especially in online stores. When you make customers’ shopping experiences more interactive, you’ll also gain insightful data about their preferences, likes, and questions as they browse your inventory. The insights can help you optimize your processes and boost sales. 

Increases Average Time Spent in Your Store 

Interactive shopping translates into a better user experience. Shoppers will spend more time checking out your products. For online retail stores, this translates into more purchases. If you offer discounts, coupons, quizzes, and more, the shopping experience will be even more interactive.  

Builds Your Audience 

Providing an interactive retail experience means offering exciting content that’s relevant to whoever visits your website. Of course, everyone has different preferences, so it will take a while to achieve interactivity. However, once that happens, you’ll tap into more business opportunities, increased customer loyalty and retention, and greater market penetration.  

A business intelligence platform helps you know who your clients are and their preferences. By understanding your market, it will be easier to create targeted content that enable you to build your customer base.  

What Interactive Shopping Experiences Do Customers Want? 

If you’re wondering how to boost interactivity in your retail store, these ideas can help you get started: 

VR Headsets and Interactive Kiosks 

Virtual reality shopping has steadily gained popularity in recent years. It makes the shopping experience more interactive. As a retail business owner, it provides insightful data that you can use to improve customer experience and brand awareness. For instance, the in-built eye-tracking tech in mobile VR headsets can help you choose how shoppers choose items on the shelves.  

VR also makes shopping interactive for your customers by enabling them to review your products in detail. The headsets can invite them to explore specific product lines, provide further product information, and help them visualize a product. As a result, they’ll be more confident in their purchases, translating into higher conversion rates while decreasing returns.  

Product Personalization 

When a customer visits your store, they undoubtedly want to find relevant products within the shortest time possible. That can only work if you provide product personalization. For instance, if you run an online fashion store, you may want to allow shoppers to customize what they buy with logs, text, images, and photos. This helps them create an extension of themselves tied to your brand. 

For returning customers, you can highlight relevant products based on their previous shopping history. In doing so, it will be easier for them to find products that suit them. However, gaining insights about your customers is challenging. For this reason, you need a business intelligence tool for compiling customer data. 

Mobile Shopping Apps 

Most of the time, customers who visit physical stores use their smartphones to learn about different products, compare prices, earn and redeem awards, and read reviews. Failure to interact with customers who aren’t quite familiar with your products means you could be losing out on business. 

A surefire way to enhance interaction with such clients is by providing a mobile shopping app to help them find their way around your store, scan barcodes for additional product information, and even earn reward points. It will make shopping fun and more interactive, thus boosting sales. 

How Data Can Help You with Interactive Shopping 

For any modern retail business, garnering insights about the customer journey is vital to boosting sales. Here’s how data can help you with interactive shopping: 

Customer Segmentation 

You can only provide a personalized shopping experience to your customers if you segment them. Through retail data analytics, you can spot individual customer preferences, trends, and buying patterns. Over time, you’ll have a clear picture of each customer’s buying journey. You can then segment your customers based on various parameters and provide a personalized and interactive shopping experience. 

Customer data comes in handy when segmenting your customers into different categories. Through customer segmentation, it will be easier to understand who your customers are, where they are, and what they’re likely to purchase when they visit your store. Compiling your best customers’ traits helps you to create the ideal customer persona that you can use to streamline your product development and marketing efforts. 

Since digital marketing can target specific groups of people, understanding your model customer is critical to optimizing your marketing efforts and enhancing interactions with each customer group. When marketing your products, it will be easier to send relevant and personalized ads to each customer 

Helps in Forecasting Customer Behavior 

Data allows you to know your customers better and predict future behavior. You’ll analyze trends relating to customer behavior, purchase history, and other critical data points. A business intelligence tool enables you to analyze linkages and patterns discovered while tracking how customers interact with your store at different touchpoints. 

By using the insights, it will be easier to pinpoint the main factors that drive customers’ purchase decisions. You’ll also forecast future customer behavior more accurately. The forecasts can play a critical role in driving your product development and marketing efforts. 

Improving Pricing Decisions 

Price is a leading point of disconnect between retail businesses and clients. Customers are likely to interact with or overlook your products simply because of the price you set.  

Customers are likely to get more interested in your products and interact with your retail store if you get your pricing right. Thanks to the ease with which customers can price shop on the Internet, you need to leverage data when making pricing decisions. 

Choosing your prices entails more than undertaking an internal profit/loss analysis. In this regard, you should leverage BI tools to develop a pricing approach that enhances interactivity. For instance, pricing data can help you determine when to offer discounts and other promotions that enhance interactive retail shopping. 

It Enhances Product Display 

As you look to optimize interactive shopping, few things are as influential as product display. Whether you have a physical or online store, your products should be placed where customers can easily interact with them and be spurred to make the purchase decision. This is key to optimizing sales. However, you can only know how to place your products if you have relevant data to back your decisions. 

To enhance interactivity and sales potential, products likely to be bought on impulse often get positioned close to the checkout register. However, the challenge lies in identifying the products that should be placed on such counters. Data helps you to track the effectiveness of different product placement approaches in real-time and establish what works best for you. 

Enhancing the Customer Experience 

When shoppers visit your store, they create critical data points, which you can leverage to gain valuable insights into what works and what doesn’t work in the store. You can use key statistics such as conversion rate, average shopping time, and bounce rate to fine-tune the customer experience and increase interactivity with shoppers. 

The longer shoppers stay in your store, the higher your conversion rate. Nonetheless, you can only keep them lingering for longer if you provide an interactive shopping experience. Data provides insights about what you need to improve interactivity and conversion rates. 

Performing Sentiment Analysis 

What customers say about your brand plays a significant role in product interactivity. Positive reviews can do wonders for your sales, but the same cannot be said of negative reviews. Data analytics helps you to perform accurate sentiment analysis and gain quality and actionable insights about your brand and how customers interact with it. Ultimately, it will be easier to deliver personalized customer experiences that make shopping more interactive.