Retail Marketing: The new era
In a retail store, be it online or physical, we deal thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people every day. To a retailer, it is almost impossible to note or remember every individual – their choices, preferences, likes & dislikes. But again with the changing market trends, it becomes essential for a retailer to reach to the customers personally and individually. The task is to invade the personal domain of the customers without making them annoyed. The question is – how to?
Traditional way – Email marketing:
As mentioned earlier, remembering every customer is an immense task and assumed as “humanly not possible”. However retailers are experienced enough to track the trend of the likings for a rather larger group. They are thus noted and promotional offers are sent to the customers as group mail, e-mails, mobile messages or push messages by other means. The trend based e-marketing has been possible only because the retailers are now cautious enough to keep a good database of not only their customers but their product & brand wise items also. This approach is definitely beyond the old policy of the random batch & blast promotion campaigns and has a sharp edge over the retail promotional market. The success rate hike of e-mail marketing over the random batch & blast has been ranging from 60% to 200%.
- i) Content relevance to all individual
- ii) Increase the count / percentage of loyal customer
- iii) Setting a new trend
- iv) In-store analytics
Keeping these challenges in mind, the direct marketing trend has entered to the new era of promotion known as Personalization or 1:1 Marketing aided by Omnichannel Marketing Analytics process.
1) Preference Management and Personalization
Half of US consumers actually spend more money when cross-channel personalization is in effect. To bring increased levels of personalization, they recommend capturing opt-in and offer choices for channel frequency, and then relying on these preferences during campaigns. Modifications and adjustments to these campaigns can then be made as the marketing campaigns progress.
2) Contact Center Customer Experience
This includes a range of best practices to build positive customer experiences for when consumers call into a brand’s call center after a marketing campaign. It also includes reviewing IVR experiences and closing the feedback loop.
3) Tailored Web and Mobile Experiences
Leveraging multi-channel customer experiences is now crucial . This not only includes websites, mobile sites, smartphone apps, but also in physical store locations and contact centers.
4) Mobile for Location and Care
89% of consumers that receive mobile location-based brand marketing are very likely to respond at some level. This means that mobile engaged customers are often the brand’s highest value customers. Therefore, it is imperative that brands use all available tactics to personalize marketing based on location by using services such as Push, Passbook, and Beacon. Orchestrating an effortless and seamlessly personalized customer journey across all channels should be the goal for brands today. This can create the great customer experiences that consumers now demand. And once brands deliver, this can ultimately result in improved sales conversions, increased customer loyalty, and more business for you.
Personalization:
Each customer is a separate identity. They have their own demographics, ethnicity, culture, taste & hobbies. Each one of these and many more things play a vital factor for the choice of every single purchase. To predict a customer’s choice is thus difficult for a retailer unless the customer is known to them personally which is a rare case. But all the same they feel it good when their choices are remembered by the retailers. Most people who are getting an offer just fitting to his or her own requirements and preferences are almost certain to response and thereby increase the loyalty index to a significant height. And here comes in Persona.
To personalize a promotion for an individual the promoter must have as many data of the person as possible. There had been standard practices of gathering data from the customers in different ways like offering a membership, involving in a survey, running area based door to door survey campaign etc. However the participation of maximum can never be guaranteed with all these means. To overcome this limitation the market has come out with a new era solution called the Omnichannel Marketing Analytics. In this process the data is gathered from all possible resources like a customer’s membership form, Survey outcomes, purchase history, social media footprints, Feedbacks, ethnicity, location & demography, cultural background etc. Thus the data collected in this way for every individual is huge and the software ensures that none of the data are wasted. The data is processed with advanced analytical engines like SQL, or SPARC. These engines enable the program to predict the customer’s buying choice at individual level with more than 90% precision hence enabling the retailer to rich his customers with an enhanced knowledge of their personal preferences. The resultant hike in loyalty base for the retailer is predicted up to a growth of 900% even.
The future lies here:
In today’s rapidly changing market scenario it is evident that 1:1 Marketing or Persona is the best possible weapon to make a difference. Retail is considered to be the final end of any business at the selling side and it is directly connected to customer’s choice – or customer’s individual choice rather. There is thus no doubt that a solution like personalized marketing is going to be the future for the retailers and the most powerful tool to gain advantage over the competitors. Hence welcome to the era of Omnichannel Marketing Analytics – the new market trend for retailing.
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