Omnichannel customer journeys are nuanced. Their shopping methods are made up of different forms of retail ecommerce, including: buy online/pick up in-store, research online/buy in-store, and look in-store/buy online. These consumers blend their physical and digital shopping experiences frequently, and they expect their favorite brands to follow suit.

This hybrid — “phygital” — approach puts new demands on consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands to support a customer experience that's seamless, dynamic, and consolidated.

According to Insider Intelligence, 71% of consumers worldwide switched brands at least once over the past year.

• 46% stated they switched for better product availability
• 44% stated they switched due to convenience 
• 34% stated they switched because of changing needs and expectations

Needless to say, customers won’t hesitate to jump to a competitor if their needs are not being anticipated and met. 

Are you set up to meet these hybrid customers wherever, whenever, and however they prefer to shop? Let’s get phygital:

1. Creating paths to purchase online and in store
   For CPG brands, creating accurate and shoppable paths to purchase requires one: knowing when and where products are in-stock with accurate, up-to-date inventory data, and two: enabling the digital pathways that bridge customers from the awareness and research phase over to the carts of all of those in-stock retailers. These pathways are especially important when it comes to regional retailers, considering 70% of consumers surveyed by Mint prefer to support local businesses online or with a combination of online and in-store. 
   
   The third factor in creating phygital paths to purchase is consolidation across the two channels. This largely involves leveraging a retail ecommerce platform that can support paths from all onsite where-to-buy experiences and offsite shoppable media to retailer.com. Doing so creates a consistent, connected customer journey, whether the final purchase occurs online or in-store.
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2. Understanding your hybrid shoppers with actionable insights
   Once you’ve created paths to purchase at retail, you can begin to gain a better understanding of how these phygital shoppers operate with full-funnel data and insights.
   
   The right retail ecommerce platform will return real-time insights from your shoppable experiences, broken down by: geo, retailer, product, ad platform, audience, copy, creative, and more to know what’s working (and what’s not).
   
   By gaining these actionable insights into which offers, products, and campaigns your customers respond to in which channels, your brand can better understand their patterns of behavior and preferences that influence buying decisions. This results in deeper customer connections and stronger brand loyalty - ultimately leading to more sales.
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3. Using custom audiences for personalized marketing
   If your retail ecommerce platform supports pixel firing, you can integrate with any existing ad platform to start building custom and lookalike audiences of shoppers at each step of the sales funnel, from page loads to purchase. 
   
   Building audiences of phygital shoppers gives your brand the ability to personalize the shopping experience across multiple channels and touchpoints. Using these audiences leads to optimized marketing campaigns, targeted product recommendations, tailored promotions, and relevant content, making the buyer’s journey more engaging and meaningful.
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Creating a great phygital shopping experience is ultimately about keeping the customer at the center. By supporting paths to purchase online and offline at retail, analyzing insights to understand shopper behavior, and using data to create more tailored and engaging marketing campaigns, brands can build strong relationships and loyalty with customers as they move fluidly between the physical and digital channels.

Pear Commerce: Retail ecommerce for phygital brands 
Pear is the retail ecommerce platform that connects CPGs to retailers, converting shoppable onsite and offsite experiences into actionable insights that fuel performance marketing. 

With Pear, proprietary inventory scanning at 3,000+ retailers across 165,000+ locations ensures shoppers never hit an out-of-stock link or location, creating seamless paths to purchase at all available retailers (in the fewest number of clicks). Real-time insights, data, and pixel firing across the entire retail commerce sales funnel - including transactions - unlock the ability to build custom audiences and run ecommerce performance marketing at retail. 

Embrace the phygital and schedule a demo with Pear to learn more. →

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