Engage better with The Customer who is Controlling Your Brand.

Posted on July 1, 2013 Updated on October 24, 2013

Research suggests that 70% of customers don’t come back, until and unless you bring them back. Alarmingly, only 15% customers believe it pays to be loyal to a brand. 

Seasoned retailers understand that Loyalty program is not in its infancy. There is always a fixed number of time and dollar that your consumer will invest in. The Challenge is to make your customer invest that dollar in your brand.

• Between 2006 & 2012, the number of Loyalty members in US has gone up by 172%.
• The alarming figure is 1.161 B member in 2012 compared to 0.958 B in 2010.
• On the flip side 44% active members compared to 46% in 2010 and the percentage of active members are slipping every day.

Retailers are opting different methodologies to add sizzle to their loyalty programs retain customers by increasing benefits and opting to converse with their customers in multiple platforms.

The customer engagement model is majorly dependent on effective utilization of the 4 “I’s” i.e.

• Involvement
• Interaction
• Influence
• Intimacy

It is also equally important that this model is well planned, properly designed, well implemented and effectively managed, to meet the desired expectation. Here are a few key factors that that make this model more robust.

Ideal time for Engaging your customers:

The ideal time to engage with the customer is when they are present at the store – in fact research shows, the chances of in-store up-selling and cross-selling are up to 3 times higher – as opposed to at home or at work.

Start engaging with the customer while they are still in the store. Understanding customers’ purchase patterns and current basket data analysis to offer relevant and appealing choices.

Integrated storefront POS module capture store-level purchase information. Instantly integrate this information with existing CRM data to make the best offers

Empower store managers and cashiers to offer instant recommendations and issue the most relevant voucher/reward to customers within 3 seconds of billing.

Align your data:

Customer data is the richest resource for any Retail brand and every retailer is likely to have a substantial amount of customer data in their database. But with the size of data-sets growing every day, the process of Capture-Analyse-Action, is becoming more and complex. With the growing complexity, the platform to draw insights and derive returns is becoming more difficult for any structured marketing program.

Staying Nimble:

Knowing your Generation Y shoppers, between the ages of 18 and 35, is utmost important and they represents the future generation of shoppers.

Recent study explores the shopping preferences of Gen Y-ers and finds that this group associates shopping with socializing, places high value on living close to retail, and makes a majority of purchases in-store vs. online. Gen Y-ers use the Internet to research products, compare prices, envision how clothing or accessories might look on them, or respond to flash sales or coupon offers, as well as to purchase items; they are definitely multi-channel shoppers. These findings underscore the importance of multichannel communications for retailers. They need to evaluate and understand how the various channels interact and how the profile of their online Gen Y customer compares to the in-store shopper. A new approach for understanding this involves using retail analytics to understand the market and spatial relationships among today’s increasingly agile customer base.

Using data analytics and location intelligence technologies, retailers can get a better sense of what their brick and mortar Gen Y customer looks like as well as what their online customer looks like and determine if they are the same or if there are levels of intricacy that differentiates the two.

Please share your thoughts and ideas on effective engagement model.