We wrote last month about how customer loyalty was critical to ensuring your retail stores could drive foot traffic. We touched briefly on a few ways to build customer loyalty, including using your POS system to build a brand connection and open new channels with customers.
Ensuring repeat business is a matter of providing a great experience for your customers. That means that your omnichannel strategy is about opening up new, unique channels and executing those channels well.
Offering generic, universally peddled incentives like points systems has worked for many retailers in the past. Such features are often bundled with many payment platforms as an essential feature in the Retail Renaissance.
However, this does not get into the full power of the modern POS system, which are now capable of powerful, personal targeted marketing. Here is how you can design a targeted marketing campaign and build customer loyalty.
Gathering and Applying Your Data
Knowing your audience is the first step to any successful marketing campaign. That doesn’t mean simply having their name and birthday in your CRM system. Your POS system is recording a lot deeper insights, including their average purchase size, their frequency of purchasing, and even their potential income.
Who you choose for your point-of-sale systems is important. What’s even more critical is having your system consistent across all of your locations. If you aren’t gathering data consistently, you cannot apply the data, as it will be incomplete. That’s why your networking system has to be sufficiently integrated across your locations.
After utilizing the native reporting tools in your POS system, you become more adept at marketing to them in the future. You first need to ask questions. What does the average customer spend? Can you categorize your customers into customer groups? Do you have a dominant demographic? What promotions receive the most use?
These questions and others are central insights in designing your targeted marketing.
Showing Commitment To Customers
Your customers want to see that your brand cares about them and that you notice how they interact with your touchpoints. For that reason, personal marketing is the ideal way to build rapport and drive engagement (and sales).
For example, if you want to encourage a customer to take advantage of a deal or to visit your store, a generic “Customers Who Purchased X Also Bought Y” email will seem disingenuous and automated. Even if it is an automated function of your payment system, targeted marketing demands more than just an email template.
Targeted marketing means knowing what demographics and groups your customers are in. That’s why you need to add more personal touches to your campaigns. An obvious example is offering deals on chips, soda, and alcohol during the playoffs. However, going the extra mile is utilizing your in-store touchpoints, like beacon technology, to create incentives in real-time.
A better use of your omnichannel technology would look like this: a male that your system knows is between 26 and 40 keeps passing through the soda aisle. You can send a buy-one-get-one-half-off deal to his phone, as he is probably indecisive on whether or not he should get more drinks.
Your system also may recognize that he is a host based on earlier purchases, like paper plates and party platters. In this instance, he may be responsive to a targeted email with an email saying, “Hosts: it’s better to have too much food than too little,” and giving recommended numbers of plates and drinks per person. Not only will the customer appreciate the email, but they are likely to come back in to stock up for game day.
The Difference At the Margin Makes the Difference
If you’ve found a POS system that takes care of all of these marketing features, you’re ready to begin deploying it to your retail locations. However, relying on your IT team alone may not be sufficient. Though your team can certainly handle upgrading your POS systems across your locations, this can use undue resources if your IT staff also manages aspects like security.
Worldlink Integration specializes in helping such IT departments upgrade existing locations or deploy tech to new ones. Contact us now to find out how we can work together and your team can #WinWithWorldlink.