In today’s competitive retail landscape, customer experience is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a necessity. A recent research by Statista (APAC Importance of Personalized Customer Experience by Country) say that le likelihood of quitting a Brand due to a poor customer experience vary between 51% and 90%. This experience, encompassing every touchpoint a customer has with your retail brand, is best understood as a journey – the customer’s journey.
Crafting a seamless and personalized customer journey is crucial for building brand loyalty and driving sales. Enter Retail CRM, a powerful tool that empowers retailers and brands to understand their customers, personalize their experience, and ultimately create the ultimate customer journey. Hypertrade Software Solutions offers a state-of-the-art Retail CRM solution specifically designed to achieve this goal.
Segmentation as a starting point: Tailoring the Journey for Different Customer Groups
Not all customers are created equal. The first level of understanding about customers is how to segment them. The segmentation can be strategic (i.e. the same segmentation will be used throughout the year to measure the evolution of each segment and the possible movement of individual shoppers from one segment to another one) or tactical (specific segments are built to understand the behaviors of specific customers groups throughout selected periods of time or sales channels.
Best practices recommend to:
- use a combination of both segmentation types.
- ensure that each segmentation incorporates shopping behavior metrics (basket size, category penetration, frequency…)
Flexibility in your customer segmentation will enable marketers to understand and differentiate customer groups with their differences in preferences and behaviors, and therefore tailor the journeys for each group.
Ulys CRM empowers you to create customer segments based on various criteria. Imagine segmenting customers who frequently buy running shoes. You can then craft targeted email campaigns showcasing new running shoe arrivals, exclusive discounts on running apparel, or training tips relevant to runners. This level of segmentation ensures your marketing efforts resonate with each customer group, leading to higher engagement and conversions.
Understanding Your Customers: The Power of Personalization
At the heart of the customer journey lies customer behavior. What products do they browse or buy? What motivates their purchases? How do they interact with your commercial offer across different channels? Retail CRM excels at gathering and analyzing this valuable data.
This data empowers retailers to personalize the customer journey. Imagine sending targeted ad based on a customer’s recent non-purchase behavior or offering personalized product recommendations on your website based on cross-merchandising or Next Best Offer algorithm. And solutions like LAGO are able to bring this Personalisation to a website or an app home page.
The benefits of personalization are undeniable. In addition to the impact on sales, it also boosts loyalty. Ulys CRM facilitates such personalization through features like customer segment profiles, comprehensive purchase tracking, and seamless integration with loyalty programs.
Building the Blocks: Tactical Strategies for Each Stage
A well-defined customer journey can be traditionally broken down into four key stages:
- Awareness: This is where potential customers first discover your brand.
- Consideration: Customers learn more about your products and consider making a purchase.
- Purchase: The conversion takes place – the customer makes the purchase.
- Post-purchase: Retain loyal customers and encourage advocacy.
At Hypertrade, we like articulating the journey around Loyal Customers Life Cycle, as for example:
- Onboarding: your customer just joined your loyalty program
- First Purchases: you customers are testing and experimenting their first purchases, online or offline.
- Life Cycles: from social events to commercial operations and targeted campaigns, your customers are benefiting from specific offers – either transactional or informational
- Lapsing: some customers are decreasing both their shopping frequency and spending, and its time to know why so corrective actions can be deployed
Ulys CRM offers a treasure trove of functionalities – that can be all automated – to enhance each stage:
- Onboarding: create automation to welcome the newcomers, gratify their first transactions and progressively share the benefits your Loyalty Program offers.
- First Purchases: Follow up the purchase activities and start understanding newcomers browsing and shopping preferences. Stimuli can be offered in case of a low activity.
- Life Cycles: With a growing purchase history, shopping patterns and preferences are becoming clearer. You can nurture customer relationships with personalized post-purchase emails requesting feedback, offering exclusive discounts for repeat purchases, and rewarding loyalty program members.
- Lapsing: You can save your customer relationships by automatically identifying lapsing customers and maintain the relationship with, here again, a variety of informational or transactional personalized contents.
Alignment with Promotion Plans: A Unified Customer Experience
A seamless customer journey requires alignment between your Retail CRM efforts and your overall promotion plan. Each retailer has its own communication and promotion plan, that will include a variety of events like seasonal sales, flash deals, or loyalty program point multipliers. Ulys CRM integrates with your marketing automation tools, allowing you to design targeted email campaigns and social media posts promoting these initiatives.
Imagine a simple scenario where you’re running a back-to-school promotion offering discounts on backpacks and notebooks. Ulys CRM can identify customers who have purchased these items in the past. You can then craft targeted email campaigns promoting the back-to-school sale, showcasing relevant products, and highlighting the exclusive discounts available. This ensures a unified customer experience where promotions are communicated effectively and resonate with the most relevant customer segments.
Vendor Management & Personalized Campaigns
Retailers’ loyalty programs collect valuable data on customer behavior, including what they buy and how often they get things shipped. Suppliers are eager to sponsor targeted and personalized ad campaigns using this shipping data.
This allows them to reach the right customers with the right message at the right time, significantly boosting the chances of a sale and driving up demand for their products.
Some of these campaigns can be integrated into each supplier’s yearling trading agreement as well as be used for tactical sales and market share boost.
Automating the Journey: Streamlining Customer Interactions
In today’s fast-paced world, automation plays a crucial role in streamlining customer interactions. Each of these customer touch points, each event, each change of behavior can be defined as a trigger for a specific campaign, for a specific customer segment, with a specific personalized offer.
Ulys CRM goes beyond manual outreach, offering a suite of automated features like, for example
- Abandoned Cart Reminders: Customers often abandon carts due to distractions. Hypertrade’s CRM can automatically send gentle reminders, prompting them to complete their purchase.
- Personalized Welcome Emails: Make a lasting first impression! Hypertrade’s CRM allows you to set up automated welcome emails for new customers, offering a personalized greeting and introducing them to your brand story.
- Birthday and Anniversary Offers: Personalized birthday or anniversary emails with special offers showcase that you care. Hypertrade’s CRM automates this process, fostering customer loyalty.
- Triggered Email Campaigns: Take personalization a step further with automated email campaigns based on purchase history or browsing behavior. Imagine sending emails showcasing complementary products to a customer’s recent purchase – Ulys CRM makes it effortless.
By leveraging the power of automation, Ulys CRM enable retailers to achieve 3 major business benefits:
- Increase efficiency and cost savings.
- Improve consistency and scalability.
- Continuous increase of Customer understanding.
Discover Ulys CRM, a retail CRM solution developed by Hypertrade.
Contact us to learn how we can help you improve your omnichannel Customer Journeys
- Africa & Middle East : Katie Trinh
- South East Asia : Peerapol Prakaisak
- Philippines : Annika Dadivas
