Personalization strategy: 6 must-haves for revenue-driving engagement
Discover how today’s most successful brands build an omnichannel personalization strategy that drives growth and revenue.
From brand-new shoppers to lifelong brand advocates, customers are the life force for any retail business. Monitoring retail customers in different stages of their journey is a great way to check the overall health of your business and marketing activity (both before and after purchase) and see if, as a brand, you’re doing enough to generate trust and loyalty.
Earning and keeping customers’ loyalty has never been easy, and with so many online options today, it’s even more challenging. Customers have more choices than ever and are often convinced to try new brands.
In 2022, 71% of consumers worldwide switched to a different brand at least once as they searched for better deals or better products. This highlights how fickle consumers can be and how important it is to keep close ties with your customers.There are three main levels of retail customer engagement. By getting these right, businesses can strengthen their relationships with customers:
- Understanding anonymous customers
- Getting to know omnichannel shoppers
- Building lasting loyalty with ongoing engagement
1. How to engage anonymous retail shoppers
Shopping anonymously is the earliest stage of retail customer engagement and where most consumers will remain.
Anonymous shopping means that purchases are made without a clear identity attached. People often prefer anonymity, valuing their privacy and avoiding sharing personal details for reasons ranging from security concerns to time constraints.
Despite this anonymity, you can still gain insights from their behavior. Every silent purchase offers data to the retailer – even if you’re unsure who’s behind it:- Are they regular buyers of baby essentials? They could be new parents.
- Do they often buy gym leggings? Perhaps they enjoy running.
These insights are invaluable; however, many businesses find collating this data challenging, particularly in brick-and-mortar stores.
To turn these anonymous shoppers into more engaged customers, offer some time-sensitive discounts or loyalty rewards prompting registration. There’s also the chance to capture additional data with exclusive in-store events for members. Showcasing the perks of sharing a little more about themselves can tempt shoppers, especially if a prize or reward is involved.
This approach also is a great way to capture data to build personalization. One example of how anonymous users can still be targeted in a meaningful way was when Swedish outdoor brand Fjällräven used location-based data and weather reports to tailor homepage hero banners on their website.
Tailoring their content to multiple weather patterns and seasonal trends resulted in a reported 79% uplift in clickthrough rates compared to a generic banner.
2. Omnichannel shoppers: Connecting the dots
Once the customer has provided their name or contact details, you can start to build a more detailed picture. At this point, you can begin to reconcile the shopper’s in-store and digital shopping behaviors.
This is the chance to uncover even more insights and learn more about their preferences and habits. This is also a signal of their trust towards the business – a clear sign that they’ll repurchase, but also potentially recommend a brand.
According to statistics, 88% of customers make three purchases from a retailer before they become brand loyal.
Shoppers today seamlessly switch between online and brick-and-mortar stores. Having any level of data for this allows retailers to customize their offerings more effectively, anticipating audience needs.
Informed by more detailed profiling, businesses can fine-tune their strategies and plan longer term based on qualified, quantitative data. This could be something as simple as a customer always opting for organic products, suggesting that sustainability is very important to them. Or maybe they only tend to shop during sale periods.
3. Retail customer engagement: Building lasting loyalty
When a customer opts in, it signals further trust and interest in your brand. The higher percentage of customers that opt in, the better your offering, customer service, and ethos are working.
It’s not the end of the story, however. Having opted-in doesn’t guarantee that a customer will be loyal. In a world where new brands and offers are constantly pulling the attention of shoppers, it’s important to leverage this buy-in of trust carefully. This is where having more information and data about your customer, their purchases and preferences allows a higher refinement of personalization.
Here’s when the focus shifts from acquiring data to enriching relationships. By opting-in, the customer has opened up dialogue with you as a brand. You can then carefully send them information and personalized recommendations based on their past purchase history, browsing data and location. Monthly newsletters can keep them updated, but include parameters to make them more suitable for segments of the opted-in audience.
Another effective tactic is asking for information from them. Sending out polls, using data from offers redeemed, and seeing how different marketing actions impact their behavior also can help build a long-term plan.
It’s this data that helps a product-centric retailer become customer centric. Your relationship with them will allow you to see when they’ve developed new interests, have a problem that may need solving, or are just browsing for fun.
By continuously interacting, businesses not only serve current needs, but also anticipate future ones.
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Cultivating customer relationships in retail
At whatever level a customer is, the main goal is to craft and build on those relationships. Each level of customer insight presents an opportunity for retailers to display care and interest in the customer’s needs.
In the past, this was typically in physical stores, where people would build relationships with staff and the brand. Now, there are even more opportunities in the intersection of online and in-store experiences.
By choosing the route of consistent interaction and genuine understanding and marketing to customers when it’s relevant and suitable rather than taking a scattergun approach, retailers can build brand loyalty and appreciation.
Make sure to spend time and resources to analyze customer engagement, not just on purchases but returns, customer service, and complaints, and use this information to drive actions to move people on the customer journey.
Brand loyalty may be harder to achieve nowadays, but quality and understanding are timeless.