6 Summer Retail Marketing Tips To Help Keep Your Customers Engaged

Is your summer retail marketing strategy ready to go?

Whether you’re working to attract more customers in-store or digitally (or both), having a seasonal strategy is key for making your summer a strong one. Summer is a notoriously slow time of year for many retailers, with many customers slowing down their pace and spending more time outdoors and less time filling up their shopping carts. If you want to make sure you continue to maximize customer engagement, it’s important that you put into place smart summer marketing campaign ideas that can help make it happen.

Here are some of our best retail marketing tips to get you started, with five ideas for making the most of the summer season.

How to Engage Customers in Retail This Summer

This summer, engage customer post-purchase and offer stand-out user experiences to keep people coming back and keep your inventory moving. Here’s how.

1. Dial Up Engagement with Digital Receipts

Digital receipts are the future of retail, and if you haven’t already started to offer them, there’s no better time than right now to start. Even if your customers are shopping in-store, offering e-receipts is a great way to collect first-party data and build loyalty. They can also help your business stay top of mind, providing a place for product recommendations, promotions, surveys, and more.

2. Run Summer-Exclusive Sales

As purchases slow down for the summer, it’s time to get creative with your incentives. Consider running summer-specific sales and loyalty specials that encourage spending and keep interests high. Limited time offers add urgency to the buying experience and can be quite effective at driving conversions. They also provide you with campaigns that you can structure your summer marketing around.

3. Collect First-Party Data and Put It To Use

Offering digital receipts is one way to collect valuable first-party data, but it’s not the only way. Engage customers post-purchase this summer by tailoring your marketing to their interests and recent behaviors, using tools like online user registration and in-store wifi to establish organic connections. The more you can learn about your customers, the better you’ll be able to provide them with shopping experiences that promote loyalty and repeat buys.

4. Rethink Navigation to Increase Customer Lifetime Value

A summer focused re-design of your website is probably in order. And the best way to examine website quality is to observe its navigation structure, ensuring it’s optimized to increase customer lifetime value. Your interface should be intuitive and easy to use, with as few obstacles as possible during the checkout process. Use A/B testing, heat maps, and other tools to figure out how visitors navigate your site, then do your best to provide an experience that aligns with this data.

5. Keep the Engagement Coming

We totally understand the tendency to put your own efforts on partial pause during the long and slow summer months, but it’s essential that you keep the push for engagement going. Fortunately, there are lots of ways to do this that don’t require a ton of extra work on your part, including built-in engagement boosters in everything from your email newsletters to your order tracking updates. If you can keep the conversation going, you’ll have a lot more interest throughout the summer—plus an easier time bouncing back in the fall.

6. Maintain Customer-Focused Services

There are a lot fewer COVID-related restrictions going into this summer; however, that doesn’t mean you should ditch the services that your customers liked during the pandemic. If you had success with things like “buy online pick up in store” (BOPIS) and curbside pick-ups, continue to include them in your regular offerings. It’s a great way to continue merging your digital and in-store marketing tactics, and it’s also a way to ensure that you keep meeting your customers’ high expectations.