The rate of hyperadoption in digital retail has accelerated in recent months: consumers are buying online more than ever before, and retailers selling non-essentials online saw a 65% uptick in online revenue from March 14 to April 17, according to Forbes. As consumers adapt to the necessity and convenience of discovering, researching and purchasing online, retailers must also harness this moment to bridge the online and offline shopping experiences.

Econsultancy reports that “47% percent of respondents from large enterprises say that in the past several weeks, they have observed product or service innovations at their organizations as a result of the outbreak, while 49% have observed innovation in marketing messaging or branding that they might use post-outbreak.” One such innovation that marketers are exploring is augmented reality (AR), specifically for industries in which meeting in-person was previously thought to be critical in making a purchasing decision—take luxury retailers, commercial and residential real estate, car buying and more.

AR Offers an Intuitive Digital Shopping Experience

Many consumers are already familiar with AR technology thanks to the ubiquity of AR filters in camera apps like Instagram or Facebook Camera. In fact, Facebook also offers AR-based advertisements within the newsfeed, allowing customers to “try out” products virtually—for example, testing lipstick shades using the front-facing camera.

AR technology links the convenience of shopping from home with the ability to inspect, explore and assess products on a store shelf. This offers a comfortable middle ground for consumers who want to bring the retail experience closer to home, either out of personal preference or due to a need for contactless shopping solutions.

A new normal requires new ways to engage.

Retailers are also primed to become the next big media platforms for brands to tell their stories, according to insights from the Forrester report, “Retailers: You’re The Next Media Moguls.” “Shopping is fragmented and the shopping journey isn’t linear, but consumers are nonetheless likely to discover and research high- and low-consideration products in retail stores and on retail websites,” writes Forrester VP, Principal Analyst Sucharita Kodali. “As sources of information, retailers like Amazon, Best Buy, Target, and Walmart know they are well positioned to tell brand stories to these shoppers on their and other websites.”

Big-box retailers and leading ecommerce platforms can transform the shopping experience and support the businesses they represent by offering such highly personalized digital experiences. By baking AR into its app, for example, Amazon enables brands to engage with customers while they’re already in the mindset to shop. But perhaps more important to the role that retail must play for consumers moving forward, these experiences build a personalized connection and emotional resonance.

In his talk “Extending Beyond the Horizon,” delivered to the In-House Agency Forum, MediaMonks Founder Wesley ter Haar discussed the impact that engaging with an object—physically or digitally—has on consumers. “Interacting with product in physical space makes you feel like you own it. Building that into the digital experience delivers on that user expectation for personalization that’s often missing.”

Streamline the In-Store or Showroom Experience

While the immediate benefits of AR are clear to at-home shoppers, the technology can enhance and streamline the brick-and-mortar retail experience as well. Examples include wayfinding toward specific products via a mobile camera or offering AR directories that may make it easier to find specific stores and departments. AR product demonstrations like those mentioned above serve a purpose in-store, too, offering a high-tech alternative to display products or expert-led demos, enabling an overall contactless shopping experience.

In this respect, retailers should approach AR with a sense of purpose, ensuring the space embraces a “camera-ready” approach. “Is your packaging ready for cameras, is your retail space ready for cameras?” asks ter Haar. “In building an overall AR infrastructure, consider: What do I want people to unlock when they scan something?”

Supporting these technologies also establishes a long-term strategy for real estate businesses to activate spaces and build a sense of placemaking for their retail tenants. Similarly, 3D content offers an engaging way for these businesses to entice new tenants: for example, offering an AR overlay that virtually furnishes the space, adds data visualizations or lets users see the effect that time of day has on lighting. In response to social distancing, for example, venues are building digital twins that let online users truly inhabit spaces digitally. Such features would also prove useful to both retail and residential real estate.

Focus on Simplicity and Efficiency in Building AR Experiences

For brands that are experimenting with AR for the first time—either as one-off campaigns or as a sustained feature in an ecommerce platform—it’s important to keep things simple. The most complex and feature-rich AR experiences require users to download and install a brand app, which many users may be unwilling to do. “One aspect that’s very critical is how seamlessly you can enter an AR experience,” says Marie-Céline Merret Wirström, Executive Producer at MediaMonks. “Downloading an app is a huge barrier of entry.” Instead, retailers may consider web-based AR experiences that plug in directly with an existing ecommerce platform with just a simple tap.

Social AR experiences, like those you can find on Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook Messenger, offer a simple way for brands and retailers to experiment with AR. “AR is really powerful in the funnel,” says ter Haar. “Lenses are often thought of just as something that is entertaining but a throwaway experience, buy you can build really impactful functionalities by connecting AR with platforms like Facebook Messenger.”

Build snackable AR experiences that inspire.

Web-based AR is another simple platform to get started on, with an added benefit: users can jump seamlessly into the experience through their web browser. It’s also a very easy platform for brands to develop for. “If you are, say, a luxury brand and have a product that people will want to examine for size and detail, you should be using WebAR,” says ter Haar. “It’s very easy to implement because you just need the 3D format, the model of the product.”

Merret Wirström notes that even the most simplistic AR experiences can be effective for driving digital engagement. “Being able to see a product in 3D in high resolution is all you need, and from there you can expand to include specific features or variations in product,” she says. “That’s just a bare minimum approach, but it’s already so much more effective than looking at a flat image or reading product specifications.”

The Purina One: 28 Day Challenge serves as a good example of how a simple web-based AR experience can inform users while also building an emotional connection. Once activated, users simulate feeding a pet dog or cat that appears within the space they’re in. As the pet eats the Purina blend, the web app highlights signs to look for (and when) to determine improvements in health.

As a means to become more equipped to offer AR experiences, ter Haar suggests that brands elevate the role of 3D content in the marketing mix. “Try to make the AR or 3D element part of your production workflow,” he says. “One of the biggest challenges we run into with AR is that brands don’t have the assets available.”

Volvo’s Polestar 1 Experience, developed for the Geneva Motor Show in 2018, offers a high-end product demonstration by overlaying the Volvo Polestar with AR assets that showcase internal features. While this showroom experience is much more complex than what a retailer might offer at home, it provides an example of how AR can uniquely demystify product attributes through intuitive, customer-led exploration using CAD assets.

Augmented reality remains an efficient and effective way for retailers and real estate businesses to, well, augment the digital experience by building personalized impact. By integrating AR features natively into an ecommerce platform or even in a store, businesses can bridge the gap between online and offline shopping, providing a middle ground that accommodates the shifting needs of consumers.

Shoppers are increasingly turning to their devices both before and while they shop: in “Building the Integrated Retail Commerce Business Case,” Forrester reports that 36.5% of physical retail sales are influenced by digital, indicating that the boundary between digital and brick-and-mortar has blurred. Retailers can use this to their advantage by embedding digital solutions directly within the in-store experience, providing convenience to shoppers while influencing key purchasing decisions.

How, and why, are shoppers using digital in stores already? For many, it’s bringing together the convenience of technology with the ways that consumers shop. According to a survey from eMarketer on the leading business challenges facing retailers today, 50% of US respondents noted that customers have become accustomed to serving themselves, and want more technology to facilitate that by making it easier to shop online and off simultaneously.

MediaMonks Founder and COO Wesley ter Haar calls this “having the brand at hand,” making it easy for consumers to engage with brands and retailers at a moment’s notice. This can be as simple as researching what’s in stock at a store before a visit, to checking product reviews right in front of store shelves. But retailers can go further in how they embed digital tools and content in the brick and mortar shopping experience.

How Bricks and Clicks Augment the In-Store Experience

The retailers that will last are those who embrace unifying the digital and physical retail experiences. According to the same report from Forrester quoted above, “Digital business pros in retail must include both physical stores and digital capabilities in their business case and ensure that they support and build on one another to create a holistic customer experience.”

While we know now according to eMarketer, 67% will browse digitally before making a purchase, MediaMonks Lead Strategist Michael Litman reminds retailers of the value of a consumer “showrooming” and embracing this growing trend. He reminds us that “Many shoppers are using mobile devices to shop online while in the store,” he says. “Either retailers lean in to this and make sure they are providing the best experience for the best price, or showrooming will continue to hinder them and prompt consumers to shop elsewhere.”

Retailers are starting to mix personalization and contextual shopping—mainstays of the online experience—at brick and mortar locations. Take, for example, Canadian supermarket Sobeys, who recently announced a recent pilot of a smart shopping cart that offers recommendations, promotions and the ability to pay at the cart. In the quick-service food space, McDonald’s aims to provide a more personalized drive-thru experience via digital displays that react to triggers like weather, trending menu items and more.

Both of these developments aim to boost profits, increase customer satisfaction and service more guests. The Sobeys shopping carts, for instance, don’t aim to replace the retailer’s staff but rather give them the opportunity to make more meaningful connections with consumers on the floor, like answering questions about products or even recommending recipes. This direct connection is a strength of brick and mortar retail, which is why you see so many digital-native, direct-to-consumer brands opening up stores in cosmopolitan cities—and embracing digital tools can help retailers expand their focus and care for the consumer.

Digital Offers New Opportunities for Storytelling

One of the clearest ways that digital can augment the in-store experience is by providing additional context to consumers about the products they discover on the shelf. For example, Amazon’s famous Amazon 4-Star shops integrate digital shopping data (its namesake stems from the fact that all products on display have average review scores of four stars and above) with the in-store experience.

But digital also offers retailers new storytelling opportunities as a means to educate shoppers about a product. For Tommy Hilfiger, we developed a series of behind-the-scenes mobile content that gives its Spring 2018 collection a bit more color by enabling shoppers to not only admire the clothing on display, but establish a stronger connection with the brand and its creative process.

Here’s how it works: users encounter clothing items on the shelf, which feature scannable QR codes on their tags. After scanning a code, shoppers become immersed in the world of Tommy Hilfiger via a media-rich mobile site offering catwalk footage, designer interviews, outfit breakdowns and even design mood boards. Users can explore by simply moving their phone, providing an added layer of immersion and whimsey to the experience.

Of course, the content is shoppable; the microsite lets users seamlessly purchase looks (and related items) via their phone. This makes it easy for users to purchase items that might be out of stock in the store, offering more convenience and making a best-of-both-worlds approach to retail shopping online and off.

Add to that the digital experience’s ease to implement—retail locations need only scannable posters and the tags themselves—and you’ve got content that’s easy to scale across stores and your consumer base. Such an embrace of digital and its inherent value in the retail experience has earned Tommy Hilfiger the #3 spot in Fast Company’s most innovative companies in style.

Use Location to Your Advantage

Another strategy to mix the brick and mortar experience with digital is to ensure the shopping experience extends outside the typical constraints of brick-and-mortar shopping, like shelf space or hours of operation. Digital shoppers are used to having any item with just a few clicks—and sometimes delivered within the day or even hour. Thus, digital tools can accommodate toward shoppers’ expectation for easy access and instant gratification.

When apparel brand MadeWorn released their clothing collection at a pop-up within the Fred Segal flagship store, we worked with Mastercard to create a digital experience that gives “window shopping” a new meaning by installing interactive window displays that invited passersby to browse and purchase without entering the store—extending the shopping experience outside the walls of the store, but also outside standard operating hours.

In addition to the function of making a purchase, we also developed exclusive, location-based Snapchat lenses that celebrate the local music scene, just like the collection itself. The lenses take the experience even further by giving shoppers something to share while they’re physically present at the pop-up.

What this all boils down to is that digital and brick and mortar are not mutually exclusive. By closely integrating the two and adopting a holistic “bricks and clicks” mindset, brands can achieve a more cohesive shopping ecosystem that builds on consumer expectations while moving the needle on business outcomes.