Phygital Strategy: How will you get your business going? | LIME

The circumstances in which he put us COVID-19 have led us all to increase the use of technology. Companies and individuals alike are much more digital today than we were at the beginning of 2020, and this brings a new air to business, since they have a table set before them full of possibilities to capitalize on the momentum.

Last year could be classified as the one that laid the foundations for the Phygital era. On the one hand, although stores have been betting for a long time to integrate innovative technologies to create memorable experiences that attract new customers to their online platforms and allow them to increase the loyalty of already buyers, in 2020 that door was opened wide : sRegardless of ages or purchasing habits, we were all forced to stock our purchases or do paperwork online, and this brought down the prevailing fears.

The result, according to data from the Mexican Online Sales Association (AMVO) of 2020It was 81% more online sales in Mexico, reaching $ 316,000 million pesos; a figure never seen before.

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In addition, 56% of the people that the AMVO surveyed this January for its 2021 Online Sales Study had made purchases the previous month (that is, only in December 2020), and 16% of them were new to this type of transaction. , which shows that the trend is continuing.

On the other hand, customers have become much more demanding. Now that the pandemic emergency is being reduced somewhat by the advance in vaccination, people are looking for shopping experiences that combine the best of the physical and digital worlds.

For example, they want to transact from the store, but choose how the products will arrive home; they want to exchange a garment they bought in a store online, or vice versa; they expect the vendor on the premises to bring them the benefits they have online; They will appreciate that the call center operator recognized them and took into account their habits and tastes, and a long etcetera. The stage, then, is enabling the phygital era.

Culture and technology as phygital axes

Traditional e-commerce strategies do not reach the level of integration, orchestration and response that this new era demands, but the good news is that for businesses it is already possible to upgrade towards this trend; that is, to merge the advantages of the physical and digital environments to bring the interactions and experiences of customers to new levels, which will result in better positioning and more sales opportunities for them.

To achieve this, there are two elements at stake: the cultural and the technological. Regarding the first, companies must evolve their mentality towards new trends in consumer habits and digital marketing, focused on putting the focus on the customer experience (from senior management to the sales force and customer service staff).

It will be necessary, for example, to open positions as directors of Innovation and Omnichannel, among others, and that these have a strong weight in business decision-making. And regarding technology, at VTEX we consider that there are two priority ingredients to take into account:

• Omnichannel. Successfully implementing a phygital strategy implies going beyond having a physical and online store, being present in all social networks, doing digital Marketing and maintaining various customer service channels operating in a 7×24 environment. All this, and more, must be integrated and connected, that is, it is necessary to have an omnichannel strategy, because only in this way does each element communicate, share information and work together, putting the customer at the center of the strategy to deliver a uniform experience throughout the entire process, including approach, interaction, sale, logistics, payment methods, delivery and after-sales service.
• Constant innovation. The world of possibilities posed by the Phygital era is vast, so organizations need to keep innovating to continue meeting high customer expectations. In this sense, one of the strongest trends today is Live Shopping, which began to become popular in China, exceeding $ 153 billion in value in 2020, according to the Fitch agency.

According to the Digital 2020 Global Digital Overview study conducted by We are Social and Hootsuite, it revealed that Facebook had about 2.449 million active users, Instagram with more than 1 billion, LinkedIn with more than 663 million, Twitter with 339 million, YouTube with 2 billion, WhatsApp with 1.600 million and TikTok with 800 million.

Taking into account these figures, we must take into account social networks to position the product and / or service offered by brands and generate a successful sale. Thanks to the appearance of new tools such as Live Shopping, the role that this effective trend can play in sales stands out.

Trending: Live Shopping

Live shopping is an ecommerce modality that consists of generating personalized experiences and achieving interactions – and sales, just one click away – from live broadcasts via social networks, giving a feeling of closeness that other schemes do not have. Our clients, such as Xiaomi Mexico, have already tried this new possibility through the application integrated in our unified commerce solution, and his results are impressive: his sales rate increased 500% in just 40 minutes of transmission, in what was his best day of billing since he opened his digital channel.

Like this interesting trend, there are others in our sights on the digital commerce innovation map. The important thing is to keep pace for organizations to close the gap on what customers are ready to experience, and this is what VTEX works on every day.

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