3 Expert Post-COVID-19 Retail Marketing Tips - GSP

With many stores either closed, operating during limited hours, or controlling the number of shoppers, customers have been forced to accept a new norm known as shopping during a pandemic. As the restrictions loosen up and the world reopens, retailers will have to adjust their marketing to adapt to the post-COVID-19 consumer.

Reconnect With Your Customers

COVID-19 stockouts, fear, and financial hardship has changed the way consumers shop. 89% of consumers said their shopping behavior had been impacted by coronavirus. Your customers are thinking ahead and may still be purchasing essential-only items as opposed to luxury items. Forbes suggests that businesses, “Connect with your audience by being authentic, relatable, vulnerable and compassionate as you empathize with how the crisis has and is affecting them personally – Mayfield and Mayfield’s empathetic language.” Use appropriate colors, graphics and words that reassure, welcome, and thank customers who maybe have returned to or perhaps never left your stores.

Dean Drobot/Shutterstock.com

Continue Enhancing Touchless & Self-Checkout

Studies show COVID-19 has motivated shoppers to tap into touchless and frictionless payment options. According to a recent consumer survey from Shekel, 87% of American shoppers prefer to shop in stores with “touchless or robust self-checkout options” while more than two-thirds are now using self-checkout, touchless self-checkout or frictionless micro-markets to pay for groceries. To help protect shoppers and employees, retailers such as Chick-fil-A, Publix and Sheetz have upped their app game. Continue to promote your app with signage and POP that features impactful graphics and easy-to-read messaging. Incentivize these shoppers with app-only offers and rewards for free beverages or baked goods.

Build and Instill Confidence

“Right now, there’s fear as customers move through a store,” Daniel Binder, a partner at Columbus Consulting who managed Asia-based supply chains during the SARS and H1N1 pandemics, told Retail Dive. “What retailers will have to figure out is how to bring a sense of structure and calm.” Stores should keep focusing on cleanliness as well as providing customers with hand sanitizer and wipes. “COVID-19 is shining a new spotlight on employee and customer safety. As a result, properties are exploring the addition of permanent sanitizing stations at shopping center and retail tenants’ entrances and in food court kitchens; lowering shopper capacities within properties and food courts, and deploying technology that can monitor customer temperatures,” reports Chain Store Age.

Looking for additional post pandemic in-store marketing ideas or signage? Talk to GSP’s retail experts today.