Home Depot’s own effort includes a brand new mobile checkout procedure.
Mobile marketing is not only an effort to help to spread awareness about a brand or a product, but it often also has to do with taking part in the shopping experience itself.
Many smartphone owners use their devices at many different points throughout the shopping process.
By catering to that behavior, businesses and brands can take much more effective steps toward incorporating purchases into the natural daily habits of the smartphone consumer. One of the more common examples is the QR code. These barcodes are being worked into product packaging and advertisements so that the interaction between the brand and the consumer doesn’t end at a single glance. It encourages a much higher amount of engagement, such as viewing a video, visiting a mobile site, or downloading an app.
Any of those can then provide the opportunity to actually purchase that product online.
Equally, Home Depot has taken a much more direct approach by arming its sales associates with scaled down, second generation versions of the Motorola smartphone, called the First Phone Junior, which gives employees better access to tools for inventory management, customer assistance features, and even to help shorten the lines at the checkout counters.
CIO of the company, Matt Carey explained that the roll-out will include 25,000 devices and is meant to help the employees within stores to become better able to help customers to find the items that they want and to provide information about the specific products, even when those products aren’t within the specific area of expertise of the associate.
This is also an effort by Home Depot to help to use mobile marketing technology to boost the amount of spending by customers each time they visit a store location, as well as to begin making sales with new customers, which has become an important effort for the chain, as it is slowing its opening of new store locations and is focusing more on building the customer base and sales at existing locations.
According to Carey, each store should be receiving about 15 of the gadgets, and another 12 may be added to each store later on over time.
