What did you think when you heard about Amazon Go? « Cool, this is really the future! »? So you would like to offer a seamless experience to your consumers and finally get rid of barriers to purchase and abandoned baskets? A while ago, THoMer Dirk had the opportunity to attend The Digital Marketing Conference « Adobe Summit 2016 » in London and these are exactly the kind of topics that he discovered there. 

Take a look at this inspiring and thrilling video from the Adobe Summit 2016 to discover how you can actually disrupt your own business:

This video is a perfect summary of what marketing should be all about today. Starting with a hilarious advertisement, this combination of short speaker moments gives us a good hint of what is often the reality in marketing departments today: back-and-forth discussions about hashtags, logo size and budget between stakeholders, leading quite often to delays in product or campaign launches. While within each company there is actually potential for so much more. 

Great experiences are all about delivering the right content to the right customer at the right time, which requires - just a bit of - technology. In that sense, Adobe picked really nice examples of omni-channel innovations in the retail industry, showcasing to what extent technologies can actually enable your business to make your consumers’ life easier and more enjoyable. Archos and Dunkin Donut, for instance, give an idea of what providing a seamless experience across channels really means. And here are a few takeaways:

A lot of customers search online and then purchase offline (ROPO), or the other way around. First thing you, as a marketer, can do is getting the basics right and connecting all your touchpoints, both online and offline. There is no need to multiply channels if you are not able to track your customer, and get to know who he is and what he truly wants. Just focus on a few but the right channels – could be a mobile-friendly website or an app - and make sure your path to purchase is efficient.

Furthermore, make sure to adjust and optimize your sales funnel constantly to reduce the uncertainty of your customers. We all know how annoying and repetitive filling out your credit card data can be. So how about pre-filling it, like Dunkin Donut did? Or how about allowing social sign-in, linking the data from a social media profile to your registration form, to avoid drop-off in the path to purchase?

And finally, like Amazon Go or Archos, just walk out the shop without the need to grab for your wallet (even giving your customers the impression they shop for free). Isn’t this a huge step forward in convenience?