Delivering interactivity at the POS can be a tricky task. You’ve certainly heard a lot about the need to find innovative initiatives, but there are always some lingering questions on the subject. What’s best for my audience? How do I stand out from the competition? Chances are, these questions are on your mind right now.

But there’s no need to worry! With spot-on tips and planning grounded in a solid understanding of your product, creating impactful interactive experiences becomes much easier. The real differentiator lies in investing in a relationship of trust with your customers — people tend to seek out brands that feel close to them when it comes to engagement and loyalty.

Want to learn more about the subject? Below, we’ll show you how to innovate at the point of sale and surprise your customers. Read on!

The importance of the customer experience

In today’s retail landscape, buying a product needs to mean much more than simply meeting a need. Consumers, accustomed to the many conveniences that technology provides, expect a truly differentiated experience before they build a relationship with a brand.

That’s why it’s essential to know your target audience well when creating initiatives and a concept that conveys your business’s values. Just imagine: you’re torn between two products at the same price, but one of the brands is known for having a consistent proposition, one that cares about delighting the consumer at every step of the way.

Clearly, the choice will be the company that prioritizes its relationship with shoppers and has a well-regarded identity in the market. The big difference lies in earning customer loyalty through delight and excellent service in a highly competitive segment.

Planning should have a clear objective from the very start. To reach the right people and become a benchmark for quality, a company must know itself precisely. That makes it much easier to find the right positioning and achieve a real financial return. A strategy built through retail marketing tends to deliver long-term results, with meaningful positioning in the eyes of the public.

Think about it: we’re all consumers. Even at different levels of interest, the very people responsible for building customer relationships at your company are influenced by experiences designed to grab attention and earn trust through surprising initiatives.

Every company wants to stay present in shoppers’ lives. It’s crucial to show that the brand can be called upon as a point of reference when it’s time to make a purchase. With this need for transformation in the market, the routes to reaching the customer have become major undertakings.

Keep in mind that a successful POS initiative starts with plenty of research and proper direction across different stages of understanding the audience and positioning the brand. Experiential marketing needs to be built on a well-structured program that ensures real results and makes your service stand out from competitors.

Given the enormous role social media plays in the life of a business today, everything needs to be evaluated with strict criteria. It’s becoming increasingly clear that a good product or efficient service is no longer enough to build customer loyalty. People like to be treated in a personalized way, through technology platforms that fit both their cultural and consumption profiles.

The main changes in consumer behavior in recent years

Today’s society bases practically all of its decisions on searches done on smartphones. Before making a purchase, it’s very common to check reviews of the product. As a result, consumers have become far more demanding when it comes to service quality and interaction with brands.

After all, we have countless apps and electronic devices at our fingertips to make our daily lives easier and keep us entertained. With these new habits, it’s only natural that everyone expects more engaging experiences. The efficiency of online shopping is also a challenge, reducing interest in traditional points of sale.

If consumers can select a product with a single click from the comfort of their homes, what can you do to attract attention in a physical store? It’s precisely the investment in experiential marketing that will make the difference in the final outcome.

Beyond interactive experiences, your strategy should build anticipation among your target audience. For example, after a major push with discounts, support for social causes, or product launch campaigns, customers tend to be eager to find out what the company’s next move will be when they visit its store.

Another very important point is to assess the brand’s own needs. Today, building a closer relationship has to be a two-way effort. In addition to the consumer coming to identify with the company, the company also needs to get to know the customer better, making the contact feel less impersonal.

Building loyalty, combined with engagement, can be fueled by creative emotional connections. One of people’s main desires is to identify with the propositions and values of genuine services that understand what they want as consumers. The entire strategy should be geared toward what the brand means in the market and how shoppers perceive the product being offered.

Added value tends to be even more decisive in times of economic crisis. With little money available for purchases, research into the best brands and the efficiency of their services becomes even more rigorous. This critical eye extends to different parts of the buying process, also weighing the advantages of the environment, the friendliness of the staff and, above all, value for money.

Companies need to understand that what the public really wants is to feel valued — by receiving special service or attractive packaging, for example. The way a brand shows how much its customers matter is directly tied to the final purchase decision. Despite going through unstable periods, retail businesses must learn to identify opportunities to hook their segment’s audience.

What is an interactive experience at the point of sale?

Investing in innovative solutions for the POS shows how much a brand values the customer experience. The entire strategy needs to be built on an experiential marketing concept. The work consists of tapping into customers’ emotions to discover the best way to engage them over the long term.

Remember that the main purpose of the buying process is to generate stimuli that bring the brand closer to people. That’s why emotional responses should be associated with positive, challenging and impactful moments. Investing in interactivity in the physical retail environment means a genuine exchange of feelings between both parties.

Both shoppers and the company reap rewarding returns as the relationship grows stronger. When it comes to surprising customers, the teams responsible for marketing planning tend to think exclusively about technology platforms. However, it’s also necessary to explore other avenues to truly secure relevant positioning in a specialized market.

The most important thing is to work with targeted methods tailored to your audience’s profile and consumption habits. You know that feeling when you walk into a store and don’t want to leave? Behind that feeling lies a whole body of work tied to the main stimuli of the human body, which deliver excellent results in practice. Here are 4 possibilities to explore:

Senses

At the POS, building memories based on the five senses is a major differentiator. For example, who wouldn’t remember a store with a unique, delightful scent? Another interesting idea is to offer customers tastings of recipes related to the store’s products. Keep in mind that technological innovations can also be combined with experiences tied to smell, taste, sight, touch and hearing.

Feeling

Capturing customers’ attention involves, above all, strengthening an emotional bond. Interactivity should focus on showcasing functionality, quality, and an understanding of shoppers’ desires and pain points in general. With misguided campaigns, the outcome can be entirely unfavorable and damage the store’s reputation.

Thinking

Getting people to think differently is one of the goals of every brand in today’s market. To put this into practice, the first step is to reflect on your audience profile and use that deep knowledge when building your initiatives.

Identification

With constant self-affirmation on social media profiles, people increasingly seek to show off their ideals and lifestyle. When they come across a brand with a sustainable concept, for example, consumers aligned with that value identify with it automatically. In addition to buying the products and taking part in experiences at the point of sale, there’s a strong chance these customers will spread the word genuinely. Typically, people who like a service and connect emotionally with its proposition post positive content online and recommend the brand to friends and family.

It’s absolutely essential to understand that the POS goes far beyond selling more products. It serves as the key moment in the relationship between consumer and brand. More than securing the financial return from a purchase, what matters is winning that customer over to the business’s concept.

So don’t be afraid to bring something new to the table when building your marketing strategy. Aim to show something never before seen in your segment, with a simple, targeted message. Stay focused on stimulating the senses and showing technology as your ally in modernizing the shopping process.

Benefits of an interactive experience at the POS

The role of digital innovations in purchase decisions should be to prepare customers for a broad relationship with the brand. Nowadays, it’s no longer possible to label a consumer as exclusively a brick-and-mortar shopper or an online shopper. Identification with the company goes far beyond the bottom line of sales.

Practically everything is tied to building customer loyalty. The business’s concepts and its market positioning must be carefully considered because of this dynamic process that shapes the meaning of each purchase.

The strategy involved goes far beyond a person’s need for the service or product. Driving genuine engagement encompasses a range of other feelings that bring a brand’s proposition closer to everyday reality. The real highlight lies in earning trust and respect and staying top of mind with consumers in a positive way.

Once memories are created, emotional openness to new additions to the catalog will come about quite naturally. Since customers have known the quality on display from the very start of their relationship with the products, every launch becomes an immediate buying opportunity, as the chances of delivering on its promise are very high.

That’s the goal of the loyalty process: sparking interest in following everything related to the brand’s work. Another essential point for those organizing POS initiatives is to keep in mind that the business needs to provide a service to the shopper.

In some situations, there’s a risk of presenting information in an inaccurate or misaligned way. So keep an eye on the POS concept. The main goal is to eliminate the research the customer would otherwise do on Google, for example. Think about it: if all your questions on the subject were answered expertly in the physical store, you’d have no reason to look for other answers online.

This approach helps shape people’s opinions through consistent, impactful service, combined with an efficient service offering. Information is also an essential item on the list of what the physical store should deliver day to day.

How to implement an interactivity strategy at the POS

The sales plan needs to be built on special strategic planning. In addition to understanding your audience’s interests, as we’ve already mentioned, you need to find something that creates a positive impact through interactivity. This is where the big question comes up: how do you do that with so many other extremely creative brands on the market? The answer lies in retail innovation.

Before finding the ideal experience for your type of business, make bold plans. Without them, no company can stand out in its segment or in the eyes of the public. Another essential point is organizing the brand efficiently toward its goals. Work to make clear your desire to connect with the customer and convey an image that radiates modernity.

Planning in the communications area will be a deciding factor in finding the ideal way to present interactivity to the consumer. Every element must be seamlessly integrated to prevent any kind of noise when the final result is presented. If there’s a lack of consistency, the problem usually becomes obvious to the public, which is always paying attention at every stage of the relationship.

Beyond attracting new prospects, the POS also needs to focus on how it treats customers who already know your work. The process of engaging a shopper works as a true growth engine. That’s why defining your sales goals when presenting a new proposition with each innovative initiative becomes a differentiator.

Having an experienced team to put ideas into practice is often decisive for financial return. Look for professionals who know the product and every stage of its production, and who focus on aligning the strategy. How employees are managed also reflects on the brand’s identity.

Most importantly, everyone involved in the creative process should roll up their sleeves. Having people who know the service from different angles adds a great deal of value when it comes to surprising the customer.

Best ways to create interactivity at the point of sale

When designing the customer experience at the POS, you need to pay close attention to the stage of the sale. Not everyone who walks in is ready to buy the product at that moment. And that’s exactly why the brand’s impact should also strive to be powerful among those who are having their first contact with the service. Define broad, inclusive strategies — don’t limit yourself to people who have already made a purchase!

The main goal should be to reach customers at different stages with the same level of impact. Coach your brick-and-mortar store staff never to push too hard and to let interactivity be the centerpiece of the visit. With a coherent plan, it becomes much easier to close a sale, even in the long run.

What matters most is the impression the person forms of the brand. There’s no point in getting someone to buy a product if they leave with a bad impression of the space or the company. That customer certainly won’t come back and may even share the negatives on social media or with friends.

That’s why, in an increasingly professional market, all attention needs to go toward building a smart organization that is sensitive to shoppers’ emotions. Investment in setting your company apart from the competition should focus on delivering new, personalized experiences.

Brands that know how to make the most of an interactive video or gaming platform, for example, automatically pull ahead when it comes to catching the customer’s eye. One of the main reasons to build an attractive, high-impact POS is that, depending on the type of experience, people may visit the store even when they have nothing to buy at the moment.

That’s how the relationship becomes firmly established. Delighting consumers often means revealing desires they didn’t know they had. Even if your business was designed to serve a specific group of customers, positive initiatives become an opportunity for personalized connection with people from different segments.

Check out some ways to create interactivity at the POS below!

Holographic assistant

This technology presents a POS assistant in the form of a hologram to attract the public’s attention and answer their main questions. For example, in a cosmetics store, the figure could be a specialist in makeup and different skin types. The range of characters is usually very broad, and the choice should follow a theme consistent with the service.

Virtual reality

Simulating changes to a space or the benefits of a product through virtual reality can transform the customer experience. In addition to showcasing a range of possibilities, the feature also shortens the purchase time. Realism combined with functionality ensures a significant impact on sales results and makes the company a favorite with the public.

Augmented reality

More than just creating informational apps, augmented reality is a surefire way for a company to position itself in the market. Key examples include initiatives with 3D solutions, product locators, and showcases of new trends.

The feature works especially well in businesses such as beauty salons, where customers can simulate a haircut before deciding on a change.

Scenography

The POS setting is an extremely influential factor at the moment of purchase. It’s through the physical environment that the brand concept can be accurately presented to the customer. This world should be designed to attract attention, reinforce the product’s values, and encourage a relationship with the potential buyer.

Games

The point of sale should be designed with elements that challenge the customer. Betting on games as an interactivity strategy delivers an unforgettable experience. Since most people tend to be quite competitive, encouraging engagement and discovery of new products can turn the physical store into a place of fun.

Top experiential marketing cases at the POS

Building an interactive shopping experience also tends to drive innovation in retail. Today, major brands have already understood the need to step out of their comfort zone and pursue bold, surprising strategies to make experiential marketing work effectively. Take a look at some cases that delivered positive results:

Fanta Guaraná Hologram

​This project prioritized technology and innovation with plenty of creativity. For the launch of the Fanta Guaraná label, we developed a platform with voice-overs and animations in which the soda can is seen floating at the POS, along with information about the brand.

Tegra Corporate

The company’s story was told in an innovative, high-impact way. An interactive digital sculpture is installed at sales booths and special events. The visual effect and distinctive design are sure to spark curiosity without losing that sense of enchantment.

Interactive game + vending machine

The campaign’s winning combination focused on finding a way to share in the middle of the daily rush. With a vending machine placed in a high-traffic area, Cookie Day was celebrated in a truly delicious way. People were encouraged to play a game with strangers to win a special pack of cookies.

There you go! Now you know how interactivity at the POS can create experiences that sell more. Remember that positive financial results are the outcome of all the research-based planning work. The relationship with the consumer needs to reflect the concept you’ve created. From there, audience engagement becomes a natural process that proves the quality of the services and products you offer.

Did you like the suggestions in this article? Then contact AliceWonders and discover innovative projects to boost your sales.