Going the Lastmile

A Changed Playing Field

Sales is the Lastmile, or the moment of truth for any company.  However, even the greatest products and services cannot sell themselves, so companies have to be great at acquiring and retaining customers.  The issue is how to most effectively do so considering that product life cycles have collapsed, buyers are more informed, customer experiences matter more and 24/7 access to online commerce continues to disrupt buying models.  

More importantly, how customers browse and buy has dramatically changed the playing field:

• 90% of purchases take place in store, but over 80% of shoppers start their research online first
• 6/10 internet users check availability before visiting
• 85% want local sales & promotions (#1 most requested retail web feature in store inventory browsing)
• 67% of shoppers have ordered or reserved online for in-store pick up

Convert the Buzz to Buying

Today, most demand-generation strategies create bottlenecks for the last mile of the sales process.  Traditionally, these strategies are characterized by needing big resource investments in campaign-focused marketing tactics.  However, these same tactics are seldom localized appropriately to where customers are and where they shop to create lower funnel engagement and ultimately sales.  Traditional tactics alone can’t effectively translate the buzz to buying.  Simply put, the scalable technology needed to do so effectively has just not been available until the last few years.  

This is why Lastmile Retail was built and the results show that our new approach is needed and effective:

• Thousands of transactional microsites launched internationally across a myriad of industry verticals
• Millions of daily stock items under our management finding their way to “high intent” shoppers
• Over 20% of all visits to our transactional microsites convert to leads and sales
• Consistently delivering a 5-10x conversion rate boost to E-commerce and BOPIS sales
  

Moving Always-on Marketing to Sales

Today, organizations suffer when they treat demand as episodic events, such as product launches, rather than as a perpetual (i.e., always on) engine whose sole purpose is to engage around the clock to capture demand and drive revenue. Unfortunately, once the marketing department has initiated a costly “spray and pray” approach it has few options and budget left for generating incremental demand.  

Does any of the following sound familiar?

1. Blanketing the market with heavy brand-oriented messaging and one-size fits all promotions
2. Exhausting internal databases in search of new customers
3. Targeting through traditional channels to drip messaging, resulting in mediocre sales
4. Increasing budget for tactics no longer the obvious hero and requiring much more finesse to remain effective, like PPC

In the end, these traditional methods are just not enough to create localized and customer-first sales models.  Even having ample inventory, offering the latest products thought to be in demand, cannot be solely counted on to create sustainable competitive advantages.  As a result, consumers are firing retailers and turning to those that make it easier for them to browse and buy what they need, anywhere and anytime.

Today, brands and multi-location retailers alike must meet customers where they want to buy, so the best products and services are offered at the right micro-moment in a seamless and frictionless manner.  Only then can you increase sales systematically.

M4 Powers Your Local Marketing

This is where Lastmile shines, enabling our clients to leverage our patent-pending, always on localization engine to bridge the online-to-offline (O2O) and drive more sales.  Leveraging our M4 methodology, marketers can plan, execute, and measure multi-faceted marketing campaigns on a single technology platform. Whether it’s through our Next Generation Store Locators, Transactional Microsites or advanced Local Marketing and Advertising, no other partner is better equipped to intercept “high-intent” shoppers and bring them into your sales funnel so you can finally own the local path to purchase.

Our microsites not just allow for shoppers to browse real-time inventory, services and promotions, at any store of their choosing, but to transact through rich engagement features.  No one else in the presence management industry today has the technology or capabilities to drive shoppers from browse to buy against real-time inventory near them.  No one.

Stop Paying Premium for Dated Tech

In the end, while measuring year-over-year growth performance, executive decisions are simple to improve revenue and profitability: sell more (top line) and cut costs (bottom line).  That said, what if you could do both?  Our next generation enterprise solutions cost about the same or slightly less than what you pay today for basic listings and reviews management, a store locator and static pages products.  Therefore, why pay premium for commoditized and dated tech from traditional providers and newly emerged shops, who offshore everything but a sales force, and offer more marketing than product?

In the end, obtaining quality online presence management isn’t complicated and it’s become commoditized with incumbents and new players that have done little in almost two decades to advance the whole point of gaining visibility for your business: To directly sell more!

So long as your provider is making sure that customers can find the right information about your business online through correct and consistent listings across directories, review sites and social networks – you’re good, but then what happens when they land on a dead page that’s not integrated with real-time inventory and promotions?

Simple: You’ve just left a sale on the table.

Having Presence Isn’t Enough

Today, having an online presence for your business (i.e., directory listings and reviews) just isn’t enough so don’t be fooled by how traditional presence management providers market their offerings.  Rather, your business deserves a partner who’s relentlessly focused on local transactional marketing that’s proven to boost sales.

Only Lastmile offers cost-conscious models to fit multi-location retailers of all sizes, whether you have twenty locations or several thousand like some of our Fortune 500 clients.  We also work directly with brands who sell through retail partners, tying into inventory held through retail chains so they can become better partners while enabling direct-to-consumer contact that drives more sales both on and offline.

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Are you now ready to go the Lastmile and drive more sales? Contact us today for a live demo!

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1. Deloitte 2016 – The future of digital influence in retail – https://www2.deloitte.com/insights/us/en/industry/retail-distribution/digital-divide-changing-consumer-behavior.html
2. Google 2014 – How Digital Connects Shoppers to Local Stores – https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/consumer-insights/how-digital-connects-shoppers-to-local-stores/
3. Deloitte New digital Divide 2014 – https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/consumer-business/articles/the-new-digital-divide-retail-sales-influence.html
4. Google – 3 Key Shopping Micro-Moments for a Mobile World – https://think.storage.googleapis.com/docs/shopping-micro-moments-mobile-trends-b.pdf
5. Total Retail 2015: Retailers and the Age of Disruption- https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/retail-consumer/retail-consumer-publications/global-multi-channel-consumer-survey/assets/pdf/total-retail-2015.pdf
6. ForeSee 2016 – How JCPenney Uses VOC to Create a Win-Win Same-Day Pick-Up Experience – https://learn.foresee.com/hubfs/JCPWebinar_ForeSeeBOPIS.pdf
7. https://www.accenture.com/t20160728T162656__w__/us-en/_acnmedia/Accenture/Conversion-Assets/DotCom/Documents/Global/PDF/Operations_1/Accenture-Adaptive-Retail-Research-Infographic-PDF.pdf#zoom=50
8. Search Engine Journal – Top 10 Must-Try PPC Tactics for 2020 https://www.searchenginejournal.com/top-10-must-try-ppc-tactics/344137/
9. PYMNTS.com – Why Consumers Are Firing Traditional Retailers https://www.pymnts.com/news/retail/2020/why-consumers-are-firing-traditional-retailers/
10. CMS Wire – Micro Moments – Are They Really a Thing? https://www.cmswire.com/content-marketing/micro-moments-are-they-really-a-thing/