Retailers, town centre managers and BIDs (Business Improvement Districts) have been urged to embrace the opportunities presented by digital technology to reverse the downward trend in high street footfall, following figures published by the British Retail Consortium.
The BRC-Springboard Footfall Monitor showed that footfall in January fell 0.8% on the previous year, with overall footfall in January down 1.3% year on year, the largest fall recorded since June 2016.
One town addressing the issue is Sutton Coldfield, whose Business Improvement District (BID), which runs the local “Sutton Card”, has become the first in the UK to introduce a network of digital Touchpoints for local retailers to run local advertising and interactive promotional offers. The Touchpoints have been developed by retail technology company Rewarding Visits, which also provides the cloud system operating the scheme’s locally branded card and mobile app.
Touchpoints display digital advertising and use interactive touchscreens to display offers and enable users to print vouchers, when using their card or app. everal popular businesses in the BID area have volunteered to be host locations, these include the shopping mall, a pub, the cinema and the local college.
Five months after launch, over seventy retail businesses are now able to run digital advertisements on the BID’s Touchpoints with the result that over eleven thousand promotional offers have been viewed and five thousand vouchers printed off. Dwell time at Touchpoints has averaged three minutes, with users enjoying browsing through offers.
Retailers in the town have rapidly taken to opportunities presented by the new system. Running promotions in the build up to Christmas has built up some significant database quantities for some savvy businesses.They are now able to use their dashboards to select and target their customers, with incentives to return in the more challenging months of January and February, and measure the response.
Mike Bushell, BID manager for Sutton Coldfield Town Centre says: “The Touchpoints are excellent, they catch the eye and everyone can use them, as they work with both the Sutton Card and app. We want as many people as possible to discover local offers in all our stores.”
Guy Chatburn, director, Rewarding Visits, says: “The challenge facing town centres around the country and the retailers that occupy them is how to meet the challenge from online and create their own form of digital high street in their own location. We know that shoppers want to support their local high streets, that they like being able to access special deals from multiple local retailers, both planned in advance of a visit but increasingly as a spontaneous decision when they arrive, and they like to feel that in so doing they are supporting their local town and its economy.”
The company’s platform and interactive touchscreens can be used to run bespoke town, mall, multi-site retailer schemes offering promotions and deals to customers, all of which can be branded according to the town, locality or retailer. Following the success of its first scheme in Sutton Coldfield, the company is currently working with Mansfield BID and Marketing Gloucester on similar locally-branded town centre schemes to be rolled out over the next two months. The cost-effective, rental nature of the scheme also allows it to be delivered well below figures that would otherwise required capital expenditure investment.
