How can your business increase sales using Click Away

You run a small business for which you never had the time or resources to create an eCommerce site or any website at all. The regulations and restrictions resulting from the necessary governmental measures to control the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak have your business cornered with bills and expenses keep incoming? No website? No problem. Keep calm and see how you can use Click Away to get back in the sales revenue game!

The Click Away model explained

Click Away, which goes by a few other names, such as “Click and Collect” or “Reserve and Collect” or “Buy online, Pickup in Store”, is an omnichannel retail strategy where customers remotely place their orders to a store (either online or through a telephone order) and pick up their products from the physical store or a drive-through collect hub, instead of having them delivered to a designated address.

The Click Away method is not new in the commerce landscape. Back at the beginning of this decade, in several countries across the globe, such as the UK, 40% of shoppers used some sort of click and collect service, especially over the Christmas period, to avoid the delays of courier deliveries due to the season’s increased demand in orders and deliveries.

Currently, the Click Away model is more prevalent and popular in European countries like France and the UK and has also recently started to spread across the US continent, with 49% of US consumers using Click and Collect for the first time in 2016. Millennials are already familiar with the Click Away model and prefer it more than delivery for groceries. Research shows that by 2025, 10% of all sales will be fulfilled by Click Away, whereas in-store purchases will decline to 60%.

Click Away and Covid-19

Within the framework of controlling the effects of the coronavirus outbreak in the business economy, Greece has very recently decided to put in action the Click Away model to allow retailers to catch a breath as their revenues have been severely hit during the general lockdown in effect. This model will also contribute to the decongestion of the overwhelmed courier services due to the incredible increase of e-orders in the country.

Most of the large retail chains in Greece have already swiftly responded to the new governmental regulations, as they have the infrastructure already in place and the in-house tech teams to fastly develop the needed procedures. So the challenge focuses mainly on the small business owners who are not tech-savvy, do not own an eCommerce site, do not even have any website at all, and have limited resources and funds to invest in an attempt to recover from the pandemic crisis.

Click Away with SMS

In an effort to quickly respond to this economic crisis, for the period that the extended lockdown in Greece will be in effect, business owners who do not have an e-shop can use a free online platform developed by the government to inform their customers through free-of-charge SMS about the time and date that they can pick up their orders in person. In essence, this platform will act as an intermediary for communication between consumers and traders.
Customers must send a message to the business with their order number, and the business has to respond with the date and time that customers can pick up their goods from the retailer’s physical store. The purpose of this pick-up model is to help retailers boost their revenues and to enable consumers to proceed with their purchases without crowding up stores and thus increasing the possibility of spreading the coronavirus.
Apart from the government’s SMS solution, businesses can leverage innovative SMS tools, such as Routee’s SMS Service, to easily create, personalize, and automate all of this transactional communication. The Routee platform builds on a user-friendly interface that is extremely easy and simple to use by any business, regardless of industry, size, and tech expertise. Not only businesses can easily create and send their SMS to their customers, but they can also keep track of their communication with every single customer and gain valuable insights about their customers’ feedback and easily create an entire multi-channel marketing campaign to promote their Click Away option via SMS, Email, Voice, and push notifications.

Click Away Best Practices For Your Business

We have put together a list of best practices for your business to help you act fast and efficiently and respond to this new reality as effectively as possible. Options that you can use as stand-alone or combined through a unified communication platform like Routee. Solutions that are feasible whether your business has a digital presence or not.

Online and Offline Promotion

Put in action all the communication channels you have available to let your customers know that you are back in the business and that your business now offers the click away option.

Even if you do not have a website or a social media profile page you can still create a simple SMS and send a text message to your customer list letting them know that you have activated the Click Away pick up process and prompt them to call you for more details.

You can also draft a simple brief informative email with details of how your store will put into action this pick-up process and send it to your subscribers’ list. Consider leveraging the power of an email platform to easily create an automated email flow like the following: post-purchase order confirmation, pickup ready, shipping updates, pickup reminders.

If you do have a social media presence, you may create an informative post about how your business will proceed with Click Away and pin it on top of your social media page for as long as this purchasing method will be in effect. Make sure you also activate your Facebook Messenger to automatically inform your social media audience.

Back up your communication efforts to inform your customers about your new Click Away option, with a Voice message that you can send to your customers via your Viber Business page or Voice Broadcasting.
In case you do not have a Viber Business page yet, now is the time to create one, most of your customers are most probably already using Viber so you have to be where they are to maximize your business performance. Check out how simple and effective Viber Business is for your business here.

On-website optimization

If you have an active eshop, make sure you facilitate the click away process for your customers. Implement a “fast reserved” button where customers can directly add products to their shopping carts to pick them up from their preferred local store (in case you have more than one physical address) with a single click.

Make items directly available for collection. If you have products in stock let customers collect them at the earliest possible opportunity.

Even if your website does not include an eshop, you can still easily implement a Click to Call service on your homepage to allow customers to select the time and date they prefer to communicate with you to place their orders and to arrange with you the pick up from your physical location.

On-mobile optimization

Make sure your click away option is optimized for mobile use. As shoppers use their smartphones for their online shopping now more than ever before, providing them with an optimized mobile customer experience adds loyalty points to your business.
Consumers do love fast and easy checkouts, so make your reserve and collection service appeal to mobile users to be able to reserve their favorite products on the move. If you have more than one physical address, take mobile optimization a step forward and add an interactive map for enabling your customers to choose the store they want to collect their order.

On-site optimization

Providing a seamless shopping experience for your customers means that you have also taken care of their in-store experience. For example, as the Covid-19 situation has currently developed in Greece, customers are not allowed to enter the store to pick up or pay for their order. Retailers have to improvise practical and creative ways to get the in-store experience right for click-and-collect customers, without creating queues outside their shops, as this is also not allowed by the government.
Leverage the power of an SMS automation tool that will allow your business to easily arrange the time schedule for your customers to come and pick up their orders at specific periods. Make sure you are staffed with the proper number of back-office employees to prepare the orders on time and keep smooth track of the packaging.

Take Action

Do have in mind that your business still has time to automate all of the above processes. You can easily create a process flow to put in action all of the above tips and strategies and implement them with ease, through Routee’s communication platform.
Click on the “Talk to Experts" button on our Routee website to get in touch with one of our communication experts who can help you design the best and most suitable solution for your business. See how simple, easy, and cost-effective it is to create and send transactional or promotional text messages to your audience, combine powers with Email marketing and spread the Click Away news to your audience, and even trigger your customers through personalized push notifications.

We at Routee believe that in unity there is strength, and we are dedicated to providing businesses -regardless of their industry and size- with the best communication tools possible, not only to overcome challenges like the one our world currently experiences but to boost business performance. We stand for a sustainable economy and for businesses to be able to thrive and prosper.