The definition of an experiential event depends upon a brand’s budget and desired exposure:

• Mega Events: Some gatherings focus on attracting celebrities, industry influencers, potential partners, and media exposure. They feature speakers, VIP guests, demos, parties, prizes, and entertainment during events that can last for days or span several different locations. Venues, booths, tents, and tables can create events-within-events that add impactful fun.
• Guerilla Campaigns: Guerilla marketing, or street-level marketing, sends droves of brand ambassadors into the crowd on a mission—typically with free samples, flyers, or some other type of value proposition. These events can be organized in conjunction with a retail partner, a festival, at a park, outside a mass transit station, at a shopping mall, or in night clubs.
• Pop-Up Shops: Pop-ups are all the buzz these days, whether it’s a toy store outside the subway station, a perfume hut in the park, or a food stall erected in a previously vacant spot. Pop-ups allow merchants to demo, educate, “wow” with technology, and sell right on the premises.
• Exclusive Experiences: Rewarding loyal fans with exclusive “invitation only” VIP experiences is another way to express gratitude and stay at the forefront of shoppers’ minds. The gesture can create an incentive for others to reach new spending tiers, whether it’s to receive a few hours of early or late shopping; special hors d’oeuvres and cocktail hours in a VIP lounge; or entertainment at a popular restaurant, theater, or sporting event.

QR Codes

QR codes allow mobile users to interact with a brand seamlessly, without having to download an app or type an address into their web browser. With a quick camera scan interaction, shoppers are instantly redirected to a well-thought-out virtual brand experience. QR codes are ideal for late stages of the buying journey when shoppers may need just a little more information before buying. QR codes on product labels or point of purchase signage can direct users to comparisons with other brands, provide more information on pricing, or explain raw material sourcing.

Location-Based Marketing

Smartphone users are often on their phones frequently ending searches with the phrase “near me.” Linking an experiential campaign to location-based keywords is one way to integrate mobile into experiential marketing events and increase foot traffic. Location-based mobile marketing can also be used to send loyalty members special perks during events. For instance, attendees at Disney’s Coco Live event in LA received exclusive photos of stage performers for sharing on social media. At another event, baseball game participants made themselves into virtual baseball cards or bobbleheads and shared with friends.

Mobile Apps

Mobile apps have become the latest frontier in experiential marketing. Experiential retail doesn’t have to be extreme to be effective. Sometimes simply having the right products in the right place at the right time is enough to meet expectations, while the availability of an app provides the added stimulation needed to make a lasting impression. Brands needn’t have their own app to engage. Shopkick is a well-known shopping app that brands can partner with to create experiential campaigns in-store. Users interact with brands in exchange for rewards points they can redeem on gift cards.

Bomb Pop—the iconic red, white, and blue popsicle brand—partnered with Shopkick to take advantage of the power of mobile in experiential marketing. App users received in-app content encouraging them to add the brand to their grocery lists. Upon arrival at the store, shoppers were greeted with a branded message and received points for scanning and purchasing the product. Shopkick’s scavenger-hunt-link gamification model turned what would have been a mundane shopping trip into a memorable experience. Bomb Pop received over 23 million impressions in two months; 44% of shoppers first learned about the brand through Shopkick, and 68% of purchasers had not been planning to buy prior to engaging in a fun app experience. 

The many types of experiential marketing offer brands a wealth of possibilities. With Shopkick, brands have the opportunity to develop an experiential marketing campaign that makes the right impact in the right place at the right time with the right person. Shopkick is experiential—it creates a fun, unique, and memorable experience by leveraging technology that engages smartphone-wielding customers at home, in-store, and online. 

Text messages are one of the most popular channels for marketing communications due to their effectiveness. Consider this: 

• Text messages have over a 90% open-rate, compared to just 20% for email communications.
• Response rates to text marketing are 7.5x higher than email.
• Branded vanity links sent via text get 39% more clicks than generic short links.
• Seventy-five percent of shoppers say they don’t mind receiving texts from brands they like.
• More than 50% of customers prefer contacting support through text messaging.

By 2020, 45 million customers had opted into mobile text communications. It’s no surprise, considering Americans look at their phones an average of 80 times per day. Mobile marketing is the ideal way to reach prospects these days, as the messages get through, they’re read quickly, and they inspire action. Incentivizing consumers to opt-in to mobile messaging is an easy way to build your communications list.  

Interactive Emails

Interactive elements invite subscribers to actively engage with your marketing emails in some way. Audiences are surprised and delighted by these opportunities to engage. Examples include:

• surveys and polls
• rollover effects
• product carousels
• incentivized games
• video product demos

Rather than passively scanning email text, shoppers are clicking and engaging. 

User-Generated Content

Storytelling with user-generated content is a hot trend on social media, but can easily be incorporated into the email channel as well, since people look to email as a source for reviews. 

• Share fan images and videos.
• Create reviews-driven ads.
• Leverage polls to collect data.
• Add thumbs up/down buttons.
• Share the most popular items.

User-generated content engages fellow shoppers using authentic and trustworthy supporting voices.

Personalized Segmentation

Simply personalizing the subject line can increase email-generated revenue by 760% compared to one-size-fits-all. Creating targeted lists upon signup lets you connect with audiences in a more relevant way. You can segment based on:

• age, gender, location, profession
• type of benefit sought
• occasion for shopping
• brand loyalty status
• buyer readiness stage

Personalization in marketing grabs consumer attention and can lead to loyalty.

If you’re looking for a unique mobile marketing channel to promote customer engagement, consider Shopkick. Shopkick users (“Shopkickers”) begin engaging with a partner brand by viewing in-app content and checking offers during the consideration phase of a shopping trip, whether at home or on the go. Once in-store, Shopkick utilizes a gamification strategy to drive shoppers to products on the shelf, encouraging physical product interaction in exchange for reward points (“kicks”). Shopkickers redeem their kicks for gift cards of their choosing, which creates positive brand affinity. Shopkick makes a great addition to your marketing mix, in addition to your text campaigns, email communications, and retargeting ads. 

The most successful retailers: 

• Identify customer desires and pain points. 
• Find the right technology partners.
• Track data across digital and in-store channels. 
• Personalize recommendations to the individual.
• Define success and how to measure ROI.
• Deploy, measure, and optimize personalized campaigns.

What Does Seamless Personalization Look Like?

Shoppers don’t want distracting or irrelevant interruptions that detract from their experiences. Interruptive experiences may include:

• pop-up ads, sticky info-bars, or interstitials that block the screen while browsing websites
• mobile push notifications when smartphone users have not allowed or expected them
• unsolicited marketing emails trying to sell products outside of a consumer’s interest

By contrast, seamless personalized experiences include:

• online ads that appear as “sponsored posts” on social media
• opt-in, transactional, and ongoing emails that serve as lead nurturing 
• inline code that adds sections of content to a page based on the visitor who is reading 
• A/B testing to determine which landing page or ad copy to display

Through seamless personalization, you collect information and use it in a helpful way, without shoppers feeling like you are being intrusive. Shoppers want transparent communications on their terms and easy opt-out notices.

Whether marketing offline, online, or via mobile, you’ll want to have a cohesive look and feel from your homepage and social media channels to your in-store displays and ads. Use the same colors, typography, imagery, and message tone across all channels for a seamless omnichannel experience that makes consumers comfortable with your brand.

Seamless In-Store

Despite the convenience of online shopping, most customers still prefer bricks over clicks. They like seeing, touching, and interacting with products before they buy. They like personalized attention from sales associates and the whole store ambiance. Location-based technology is one of the ways brands and retailers are creating a more seamless shopping experience. They are using beacons to know when specific customers arrive at the store, how long they stay, what parts of the store they visit, and how long they linger in a particular aisle. Mobile POS solutions are valuable in-store tools that yield a more seamless experience. Store associates can look up a customer’s shopping history to find product information tailored to their interests.

Seamless Social Media & Web

Online shopping may only represent eight percent of direct purchases, but the internet remains a vital part of a seamless customer experience with 81% of shoppers researching online before buying. Furthermore, half of shoppers use social channels to research purchases they’re considering, and a third use social as a channel to discover new items. Tracking customer behavior across the web and running email drip campaigns, paid targeted ads on social media, special web offers based on purchase/browsing history, and integrated rewards programs for online shoppers is key to seamless and personalized marketing online. Not only must retailers ensure they have a seamless user experience across all channels, but they’ll need to make the online/offline transition smoother as well. BOPIS (Buy Online Pickup In-Store) is one of the latest innovations gaining traction with busy shoppers.

Seamless Mobile

Over half of shoppers use mobile apps while in-store to inform their purchases. They use their phones to find and redeem coupons, to find items, and to learn more about items they’re intending to buy. In-app video is a fast-growing way to connect with customers, whether they are using your native app or a third-party mobile shopping platform. In 2019, click-through rates for in-app video were two times that of native ads and over ten times greater than banner ads. Shopkick, a popular mobile shopping platform, invites users to earn rewards points for watching in-app videos. These points can eventually be redeemed for gift cards to use with partnering brands or retailers. By incentivizing video, one Shopkick partner’s campaign received over 16M impressions and was highly successful in educating consumers before their trip to the store, boasting a 99% branded video completion rate.

When considering ways to make a customer’s experience seamless, begin by addressing customer pain points and bottlenecks. Asking for customer feedback is one way to get a pulse on the type of shopping experience you currently offer if you’re unsure where to begin. Once you’ve discovered the issues, move on to expanding your capabilities to be more in line with customer expectations. Technology makes a seamless engagement strategy possible. Options include intuitive web design, customer relationship management software, better back-end inventory control, location-based advertising, beacons, A/B testing, mobile checkout tools, and mobile app partnerships like Shopkick. Lastly, be sure your staff members are trained to put people first, whether it’s in-store, over the phone, on social channels, or via chat.