This Is No Time To Mind The Digital Gap, Get On Board Retail The Train’s About To Depart

You sell what’s now regarded as “non-essential” retail. Bad luck, your misfortune for backing the wrong horse. Should have stuck with grocery, or hardware, or practically anything else other than artisan, authentic art and craft. Because you’ve been shut now for nearly three months.

And frankly that spells disaster. Zero sales but costs practically at pre-pandemic levels. It’s not sustainable, unless the end game is bankruptcy. Which, unsurprisingly, is not the outcome most are seeking from this frankly, awful scenario.

Pre-pandemic, if you were a small independent retailer, most likely you were engaging with your customers, social media attracting them into your store, keen to browse, check out the latest offers and the latest stock. But what’s the point when the store is closed? Might as well just mothball the business until allowed to reopen.

Well, that’s one way to approach the coronavirus pandemic but others do exist. Others which mean continuing that ongoing dialogue with customers, keeping them engaged and keeping them interested. But the majority seem oblivious to where their customers have been for the past three months.

Get On Board

Because even though they haven’t been able to physically visit the stores, stuck indoors during lockdown, they’ve been very active somewhere else; online. And I’m not necessarily referring to online shopping, this is about online engagement – and that means every form of social media you can imagine.

But while there’s never been a more critical time for retailers to be connecting with their customers, many have become mute.

Maybe* specialises in providing social media engagement and insights, providing in depth analysis of tracking customer sentiment across 1,300 U.K. towns and cities and one million businesses.

This graph shows the results across a sample of U.K. high streets however Maybe* have identified the same trend across the country.

Pre-COVID-19 they had detected a worrying trend in the lack of social engagement, 78% of all high street businesses not being active on social media on a daily basis.

However, once the pandemic hit, this became even worse. Of independent businesses, pre-COVID-19, 43% were active on social media on a daily basis, but during the pandemic, this had dropped to just 5%.

“During COVID-19, use of social media by consumers increased by 40%”, said Polly Barnfield, chief executive officer, Maybe*.

So just when retailers needed to increase their investment in engaging with their customers, they did exactly the opposite.

Barnfield continued, “It underlines the need for each high street to ensure they put in place the digital infrastructure, skills training and measurements to ensure they can adapt fast to consumers’ increasingly high digital expectations”.

On the evidence, the digital gap is widening just when it needs to close. Physical retail won’t be the same again for a long time, if ever, socially distanced shopping will be a new and for many, slightly underwhelming experience. Now, more than ever, retailers needs to turn to different channels in order to connect with their customers.