Connecting your pharmacy and website
Digitisation is now indispensable to our society. As a pharmacist, you have no choice but to be part of it. A good first step is to create a website so that you can also be found online and share information. Alongside this, a webshop offers an additional sales channel and an extra form of service for your customers. It gives them the option to order online and also to check whether a product is in stock.
However, your pharmacy and website are not separate entities. They represent your company, brand, products and services. It is not only important to coordinate them, but also to ensure that they complement, support and enhance each other. Only when online and offline are truly interwoven can customers fully enjoy flexibility and even better experiences with your pharmacy. This is what we call unified commerce.
Unified commerce ensures connection and personalisation
Unified commerce means serving your customers from a single platform and creating meaningful experiences with your applications, social media, pharmacies and more.
It allows you to collect all the customer data at a single point and gain a huge amount of information. This kind of integrated ecosystem gives you priceless insights into who your customers are. You can use these insights to improve and personalise the purchasing experience, and also to accelerate internal processes. It makes the flywheel turn much faster.
How can you attract customers to your pharmacy via online communication?
There are various ways to make sure that your pharmacy is easy to locate. These include signs, such as the large illuminated cross outside the pharmacy (which also indicates whether you are open or not), but also digital communication, such as advertising on Waze. And don’t forget to include your details on your website and social media. You can find more information about this in the chapter entitled ‘Your website’.
How can you attract customers to your webshop through offline communication?
It is not yet obvious to everyone that a pharmacist will have a webshop. People need to know that you have one, and how this benefits them. You can communicate this in various different ways. Examples include a sticker on your display window or a flyer explaining your webshop and its benefits. Talk to customers about it in your pharmacy. Perhaps you could also place an advertisement in the local newspaper? Lochting has developed a campaign to help you with this, which you can find out more about in the next chapter.
