"Drive to store" activities are marketing strategies aimed at driving customer traffic to a company's physical stores or retail outlets. These activities seek to raise consumer awareness of a particular store or product and encourage them to make a purchase at the physical location.
The advent of GPS technology and mobile applications now allows businesses to send personalized notifications or messages to potential customers when they are in the vicinity of a physical store. This may include exclusive offers or information on current in-store events.
It is a real revolution that is retiring more traditional systems such as the old paper flyer, in favor of cheaper digital tools, with the possibility of monitoring the return on investments.
How does it work?
The fulcrum of a Drive to Store campaign using GPS technology is traceability: Footfall Analysis is its key element. Footfall Analysis means the analysis of the "walkability" at the point of sale, i.e. an analysis aimed at measuring the increase in physical visits, in a specific physical place, with the aim of monitoring the performance of a campaign.
The integration between offline and online, or omnichannel, is the first variable to take into consideration when planning a Drive to Store campaign: obtaining data associated with the customer is an essential key to understanding. Obtaining data and processing it in real time is an imperative that no retailer can ignore.
More and more digital and physical represent the two sides of the same coin and form a virtuous circle by collaborating and reinforcing each other. Investing in a Drive to Store campaign means strengthening and consolidating the customer experience.
What are the most used methods?
There are different operating methods for activating drive to store digital campaigns. Among the most used we point out the following:
- Based on the latitude and longitude of the points of sale, a maximum radius of X meters is determined in which I want to intercept users on the move, in real time, to bring them inside my point of sale through a call to action;
- I can also set the algorithm to work on all users who are going to competitor stores or with a similar target to attract them through an ad hoc offer in my stores always based on latitude and longitude;
- I can activate a retargeting action on users who in the past (up to max 6 months before) have gone to my stores or to competitor stores to bring them later or again to my store.
For the realization of an omnichannel strategy, rely on E-Business Consulting, an agency specialized in digital marketing, which is able to support you in developing a project, from online to offline, for your store.
