iPad and Android tablets are transforming your opportunities to effectively and memorably engage with your customers. They’re beautiful, cost-effective and mesmerizing–retail engagement study after study has shown that a potential buyer will make a beeline right for a beautifully designed tablet kiosk. There’s something about the advanced, tactile technology of a tablet that makes a customer’s fingers itch to play with it. The gestures are intuitive–pinching, swiping, dragging and tapping, and they’re inherently personal. It’s the physicality of the tablet that immediately draws attention and interest.
So it’s true that just slapping a tablet in a kiosk immediately draws attention. But how do you truly engage a customer beyond the initial “shiny!” impulse? How do you change the nature of the relationship between user and content, and pull them into deeper engagement with your brand?
Personalized Kiosk Solutions
Creating a memorable customer encounter has always come down to one thing: personalization. To engage and satisfy a customer, you need to create a directed, information-rich experience, from the moment a shopper walks through the door until they leave with exactly the knowledge or products they need.
And tablet technology is essentially a revolution in personalization. They provide development and content creation flexibility that dramatically shortens the time-to-kiosk for creating and delivering your content. They also make it possible to create an actual experience for your customer–an encounter they wouldn’t have in any other store.
This perfect storm of engagement, cost and flexibility creates an ideal opportunity for businesses to put tablets to work forging new relationships and better serving their customers.
Kiosk Marketing
At home, customers are using their tablets to find information, get answers, watch videos and look at photos, track down the latest news, get organized, play games, and express themselves. You can harness these familiar tablet uses and funnel them into brand- and business-specific moments. And that will help boost your customer’s perception of you and your business, and at a fraction of the cost of outbound marketing.
Here are just some of the ways those uses can translate beautifully for your business:
Information: When it comes right down to it, most shopping is a personal experience, and customers prefer to get answers themselves. The opportunity to take advantage of customer self-service is a tremendous bonus to most shoppers, who don’t want to be bothered by helpful sales staff. Simple things can be handled right on the kiosk, from checking if a size is in stock to updating customer information or finding out store hours. Plus, interactive and informational signage, such as interactive store maps, helps customers direct themselves exactly where they need to be, in a satisfying visual and tactile way.
Answers: How do you convert European sizing to American sizing? How many cups of milk is in a gallon? What size battery does my car need? An interactive knowledge database of the answers that your customers are looking for can create deep satisfaction with and trust in your brand and expertise.
Videos: Videos are a tremendously useful way to help customers visualize how your products will work for them, from displaying how a color might look on their walls to how simple it is to set up and install a child’s car seat. Tap into the tremendously engaging power of demonstrative product videos to help pique customer interest, create desire for products they didn’t know they needed and answer questions they didn’t even know they had.
News: Customers want to know what you’ve got going on, from new and updated products to company initiatives like going green to personalized sales and promotional information.
Organization: Let your customers make and email shopping lists and to-dos to themselves, to keep them organized–and to keep your products and services top-of-mind.
Games: It’s pretty much guaranteed that every customer of yours who owns a smartphone or tablet also owns at least a handful of Flash games that keep them busy while they’re waiting in line or on the bus. Could you leverage consumer interest in these small, engaging games by branding a divertive, fun and silly app that will keep them amused–and aware of your business?
Self-expression: Your customers want to tell you what they think. So give them the opportunity right at their fingertips. A customer will almost always take advantage of an immediate chance to leave feedback.
These are just some basic ideas–but apps are being developed every second of every day. Be bold, be creative, be experimental when it comes to developing ways to grab your customers’ attention and not letting go. As tablet technology advances, customer interest in new experiences will continue to grow. Your focus should be harnessing that inherent interest and creating moments that have word-of-mouth power.
Mobile Device Management for Kiosks
The most brilliant thing about tablet kiosks and marketing? The flexibility. With the right mobile tools and platform, you can push new and updated content to your kiosk on the fly, from wherever you are, to wherever your fleet of tablets lives. As you develop it, you can deliver it everywhere.
It’s also incredibly easy to stay on top of your marketing efforts, with the kind of visibility into metrics the right mobile operations platform can provide. When you monitor and track metrics in real-time, you stay agile and reactive to customer interest and feedback.
Tablets are inherently attention-grabbing and engaging–especially when compared to a mouse and keyboard. Take advantage of the fact that your customers love to touch tablets, engage with your content you provide and take advantage of the opportunity to explore the technology and information. Inexpensive, readily available, and beautiful, tablets will transform how shoppers interact with your brand, and turn browsers into loyal customers.
