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Thomas Safford is the retail product manager of QL2. Safford has more than 25 years retailing experience ranging from store operations, merchandising, marketing and revenue management. Before joining QL2, Safford was most recently on Petsmart's management team for 14 years. He was responsible for leading the pricing and competitive intelligence efforts of the business, which had $3.5 billion dollars in sales and 700 stores when he left.

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Marketing Strategies From a Mystery Shopper

Written on
July 7th 2008
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by Thomas Safford  |
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transparency_small.jpgADOTAS EXCLUSIVE — If you were to follow an online mystery shopper, what would you learn about your company and your competitors? With the vast amount of information available on the Internet and the high price of gas, more people than ever are researching their purchasing decisions online — which could be a boon for tuned-in online advertisers and marketers.

Based on this trend, it’s critical to know how customers view your product and your competition so you can target your marketing efforts accordingly.

Thinking like a mystery shopper can provide you with some helpful tactics to keep in mind:

1.    Do a price check: At the most basic, a mystery shopper can tell you how your pricing compares to the competition. However, a price check is more than comparing only the advertised price. For example, shipping charges, discounts at “check-out,” etc. can make a difference. Do you know how your final price compares with your competitors? Marketing compliance is also important to make sure your list price and sale price match your check-out price.

2.    Check what’s in stock: A mystery shopper can tell you if your competition offers additional colors, styles and inventory or if you have the most diverse offering. Know where you stand so you can make sure you’re offering what the market is interested in and not losing out on prospective customers.

3.    Evaluate your customer service: A good mystery shopper will evaluate their customer service and Web site experience: how long it took to reach someone by phone, how long it took for an email response, how friendly and helpful representatives were. However, it’s equally important to monitor what’s being said about you and your service on popular consumer review sites, blog postings, social networks and online customer service forums. These conversations allow you to know exactly where you are doing a good job, where you need work and where you are at risk. With this information you can easily direct your marketing campaigns more effectively to win new customers and delight your returning customers.

4.    Compare promotions: A mystery shopper would look to see what promotions your competitors are offering, such as free shipping, two-for-one and other incentives. In addition, many sites are providing another level of discounts credited with codes at the checkout. These aren’t always easy to find, but it’s important to know what discounts are available and how complex these offers are for customers to use. Promotions can be a cost effective way to make customers feel like they’re getting more, make sure you’re offerings are attractive as others out there.

5.    Do localization: Localization is an important concept to be on the popular green band-wagon. Look to see if you and your competitors serve local offerings. This can range from local promotions to highlighting locally sourced foods or materials. By looking at mystery shopper’s “virtual cart” you can determine what national and “local” brands are in the product mix, and identify if you are devoting enough marketing effort to your own local brand. You can determine if the competition is zoning its prices and what markets are being used to drive margin vs. those that are driving sales.

6.    Count the clicks and categories: How many clicks does it take to get to your product? How many categories is your product in? Search for the product on your site and on your competitors’ sites to see how many results come up on each one, and count how many clicks it takes to get to the product. It’s crucial to ensure your categories are optimized for ease of use and browsing. If it takes longer to reach your product than your competitors, you may be losing customers to the clutter. The same goes for steps to checkout. Just as a long line in a brick and mortar store can deter customers, a long checkout process online can do the same.

7.    Monitor your brand: Does your brand position support your initiatives? Monitor the lifecycles of new items to understand how your own brand is positioned overall. Knowing what brands have new items and what brands are appearing in discount, luxury and impulse segments ensures that your brand isn’t being eroded by price or virtual shelf space.

8.    Look beyond online horizon: You may be focused on the online experience, but if you or your competitors have brick and mortar stores, you will want to take into account how the prices, promotions, customer service and inventory compare with the online offerings. The online marketplace tends to be the leader as to what gets rolled out to the brick and mortar, so knowing what your competitors are doing online can help you predict what their next steps might be in their stores.

9.    Audit aggregator promotions: Successful online marketing goes beyond your own site’s services. Over the past five years, retailers have moved advertising and promotion budgets aggressively to online mediums and in particular, to aggregator sites such as Shopzilla, PriceGrabber, Nextag and even Amazon.com. It’s important for marketers to know if they are getting what they pay for, their reputation (are you a 3 or 5 star seller?) and how their results show up in these searches.

10.    Monitor the whole segment: Knowing the depth and breadth of the site and monitoring the changes will allow you to identify the effort a site is devoting, or not devoting, to keeping and enticing customers.

It’s true that even the best mystery shopper would have their work cut out for them if they were to tackle all these items as well as provide real-time analysis and actionable data. Fortunately, there are a variety of market intelligence companies that offer these services and are faster and less expensive than a mystery shopper. If you decide to go with a market intelligence company, make sure they can collect both structured and unstructured data (such as in forums, charts, graphs and other Web formats) and offer the data in an easy-to-use format that doesn’t require an IT person to interpret it for action.

At the very least, thinking like a mystery shopper will help your marketing efforts. After all, the most effective marketing happens when you put yourself in the customers’ shoes. You’ll be glad that you did.



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