Clienteling is the art of building relationships with customers that lead to profitable and efficient retailing. Today’s customers are looking for a unique and personalized experience. Customer relationship management (CRM) and Loyalty programs are key areas where technology and innovation can be combined to deliver personalized experiences.
Effective clienteling requires the right tools to facilitate this relationship-building process. When you find those tools, you’ll discover that building solid and long-lasting customer relationships is as easy to do as it is to say. Personalization is key to providing the best shopping experience. To create meaningful relationships with customers, retailers can follow these ten personalization best practices.
10 Ways to Personalize Your Store for Today’s Consumers
Follow these tips to understand your customers as individual shoppers.
1. Know your customer in real-time
True clienteling begins with knowing up-to-the-minute details about your customer. If a customer stops you on aisle 9 to ask you a question, your sales rep should be able to verify on the spot that they purchased a product 5 minutes ago on their cell phone. That’s real-time customer information.
2. Ask for Data Authentically
Collecting customer data gives retailers information about what customers like and dislike. If asked directly, customers can express how much personalization they prefer and what they are willing to provide.
However, requests for personal information must be authentic to the brand. Retailers should offer interactive quizzes on social media for younger audiences. They can also send an email with personalization information and a discount offer for older audiences.
3. Avoid Siloed Experiences
A single team can’t create and offer personalization alone. There must be collaboration across departments to get buy-in for personalization strategies. Otherwise, there are fractures in the process.
Retailers need customer data, pricing information, site development, merchandising, and management buy-in. Accessible and actionable data must be provided to create a consistent shopping journey.
4. Capture data across multiple channels
Whether your customer is shopping in-store, on your website, through a mobile app, or any other technology that will dominate in a decade, you need to be able to capture customer data and view it on any interface. You can see every touch point between your brand and your customer across all channels.
5. Leveraging insights at the Store Level
Personalizing the online experience is a big challenge. But seamlessly providing this deep customer insight to store-level associates so they can tailor the in-store experience is often a monumental undertaking. In-store personalization requires identifying customers as they shop and associating them with a rich database of shopper profiles, and engaging them with digital marketing messages or interactions via sales associates. However, this requires the implementation of a multitude of new technologies and training for associates and making the in-store transaction process the same as online.
6. Generate customer profiles
With the complete information about your customers, you should be able to profile them based on a number of criteria. Review your customer profiles to learn about their demographics, geography, buying habits, and other details that are critical to your retail business.
7. Create custom marketing campaigns
Customer marketing can be based on generated profiles or individual characteristics. You may want to send a mailer to all your customers who have purchased a specific product in the last six months. You can do this when your customer base is at its peak. Provide your staff with a customer overview, which allows them to make personalized recommendations and increase sales. You can offer deals and promotions based on who the customer is and what they’ve purchased before.
8. Promote customer loyalty
You should be able to use any channel to implement customer loyalty programs. Store associates need to have a clear view of the customer. Store associates should have a nearly 360-degree view of the customer’s purchase and contact history and be able to resolve the issue quickly. Put the customer at the center of the experience. Create personalized programs for customers to make them feel special and unique. You can make these programs channel-specific or roll them out across multiple channels. By implementing a loyalty program, retailers can collect customer preferences and use that data to implement targeted personalization in shopping carts or emails. CRM tools enable retailers to make decisions that will enhance customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.
9. Perform customer analysis
Analyzing your customer database should be easy and effective. With the right customer analytics tools, it will be. Clienteling is all about knowing your customer. If you collect the data, you can analyze and organize it for your retail needs. Make it easy on yourself and make your customer happy.
10. Measure Consistently and Broadly
Conversion rates aren’t the only way to measure personalization. Based on the goals set in step one, retailers can identify the right metrics to track success. Since personalization is primarily targeted at returning customers, retention rates and add-to-cart rates for returning customers are good starting KPIs for assessing business impact.
The Importance of a Personalized Shopping Experience
There are many reasons why you should personalize your retail store. Here are a few:
- Today’s shoppers expect personalization. It’s no longer a benefit but a requirement.
- A personalized shopping experience makes customers feel special and appreciated, which improves their overall shopping experience.
- Customers who feel special are loyal, which translates into higher conversion rates for your retail store.
- Personalization helps increase brand awareness and trust.
- With personalized marketing techniques, re-engage users who would otherwise never return to your site.
Personalize The Customer Experience for Retail Success
Today’s customers expect a greater level of personalization, and retailers who want to compete with online shopping must take this into account. Modern sensors and analytics tools allow more data to be collected and analyzed than ever before, but understanding how to use that data is critical. By integrating multiple data streams and using the power of retail analytics to engage in prescriptive and predictive analysis, stores can now generate the actionable insights needed to improve customer experience and overall operations. This makes personalization drive better business, more revenue, and more success.
ChainDrive CRM software enables your store associates to create a personalized shopping experience by providing them with a 360-degree view of the customer, which increases revenue and improves retail operations.
ChainDrive CRM tools enable retailers to create world-class shopping experiences for their customers and help them seamlessly integrate with omnichannel platforms to deliver exceptional shopping experiences in-store and online. If you’re ready to see what ChainDrive can do for your retail stores, request a demo today!