Imagine that you own or operate a brick-and-mortar store that has a typical card based loyalty program in place that allows you to collect, view and make decisions based on customer’s purchasing history. For instance, you can reach out via SMS to the customers who had bought shorts from you last month and offer him a discount for the t-shirts this month.

In order to boost the sales you are looking into starting an online store, so why not use all that data online?

Here’s an idea — prepopulate customers’ favorites in the online store with the products he had previously bought in your B&M store using the loyalty card.

That would make your customers feel at ease in your new online store and allow you to better target your ads.

For starters, you can now place customer’s favorite products (as in previously bought) or complementary products on the main page of your online store even though he or she made no online purchases as of yet.

And then you could tailor the ads that would follow your potential online customer through the web (remarketing).