1. Embrace the data – Quality Data Will Replace Big Data , Have your POS data start working to provide you with information on lagging lines and to start matching product to customers more effectively.

2. Embrace the tech – The discussion has been resolved; Consumers do prefer shopping via mobile in store and out of the store. The POS has extended to the customer phone, and it’s easy for SMB to respond.

3. Embrace your online presence – Digital shopping can be a destination, and with the dropping cost of ecommerce, online insight to product and inventory is a must have.   

4. Embrace customer engagement – Reset your customer service culture, train associates to provide quality in-store engagement and use your customer preferences and inventory data to provide relevant engagement through social media.    

5. Don’t fear the unknown – It’s about a seamless customer journey. In store experiences and loyalty will get more relevant, the brick and mortar experience will become the secret weapon against big online.

6. Don’t fear payment providers – Payment solutions are becoming more competitive and innovative, the entry barriers to provide multiple payment options are being lowered as consumers demand more options.

7. Embrace Retail as a Service – It’s more than just carrying inventory and selling the product – customers expect more and suppliers want to do more. Endless aisle, pop-up stores within stores and customer preference data will all lead to a more curated retail experience for the consumer.

forrester

Is mobile an effective sales channel for retail?

Given that Forrester states consumers have spent $60 billion from mobile phones in 2016 alone and have influenced over $1 trillion dollars in brick and mortar sales, that question may have to be marked “Answered and Resolved!”

No doubt you have seen the various posts on the demise of bricks and mortar retail over the past few months; however, there are some conflicting stats.  Accenture surveyed nearly 10,000 consumers and found that while social media is the most preferred method of purchasing for millennials and post millennials, for 77% of them, bricks and mortar were preferred.

This being a generation that has spent their entire life depending on smartphones, its inevitable that devices play a key role in finding product, comparing prices, looking for reviews and promotions; so let’s look at the top things they are doing on their devices

Where brick and mortar retail excels is in its ability to provide superior brand engagement to consumers – there is a personal authentic experience that cannot be replicated in online sales; however, giving consumers transparency to the inventory and experience from their mobile devices is a key component of this process.

Gen Z consumers are typically looking to start the shopping experience before they even walk into the store, they want a high level of engagement on the store floor but a frictionless easy checkout process. Ideally, surveys show most of them would prefer checkout directly from the devices (Amazon & Walmart are already making inroads in this capability).

While online will continue to grow, I believe that traditional brick and mortars refusal to provide their consumers a mobile interaction channel is really what will ultimately be more of a detriment than the online boom. What their customers want is the ability to provide a high engagement experience that incorporates the online and offline experience in one seamless process. Mobile will continue to be the key in enabling that process

retailcrm

The fact that retail is no longer just about product is not a secret, that it is all about engagement is not a surprise, that customers expect a unified experience is natural; but how retailers should pivot and aggregate all this data into one view remains a mystery and keeps many small and mid sized operators up at night.  This has created a pressure on businesses to revisit their online strategies even those whose primary focus is their local market.

“It’s like watching an accident in slow motion, you know you got to do something but the question is what and how and for how much”

There are many sources of data to consider but let’s focus on a few simple yet meaningful places to start with. Before we get started, let’s talk a little bit about tracking or customer preferences; while no doubt most consumers do not want their every activity tracked and stored, they do not mind doing so if they can receive something of benefit and the data is stored securely. Think about how willingly we allow the cell providers to track our every movement so long as they know exactly where we are when we need directions.

To begin aggregating this data you need to start with a reliable CRM software. Ideally this is will be built into your POS application as that will solve the instore piece of it, assuming that it has the functionality of a CRM software.

In Store POS Activity

In Store POS sales activity is the easiest and simplest to do; does your POS provide robust segmentation so you can classify your products into departments and categories, as well as flexibility in creating item attributes (in apparel for example size, color, style, season, brand) and does it provide you with flexibility in creating customer groupings across all channels, so you can group customers based on initial channel of the relationship or other groupings. Remember that there has to be some benefit for a customer to provide you this detail and loyalty programs are the most common, however perhaps more effective has been club pricing (like in grocery stores) or access to premium experiences (like with airlines or hotels). As you design this pick the one that works best for you.  

Get our free “How to design your Loyalty program” ebook

Other benefits can be more lenient refund policy to know customers or  a more restrictive return policy to anonymous transactions.

Getting your store online with insight to up to date product availability will provide you with a trove of data;  encouraging customer to quickly register and login to get special pricing also rewards and encourages  customers for sharing their data with you.

Online Sales

Customer expect to connect with their favorite retailers on their terms; when they are available and from the devices of their choice. As a result retailers are experiencing a lot of pressure to deploy online stores; unfortunately too many do this as a reactionary move and not part of a strategic move.  

It is commonplace for customers to go to sites and get real time access to products and their availabilities from any device. Just think about the increase in “some product” stores near me searches in Google. Does your store appear with images that accurately represent the product and the quantities; as inventory is added or depleted from your POS system is your online store reflecting it.  Does your Retail CRM  aggregate customer and transactional data  no matter where it happens? Does it make it available to online and offline stores easily.

Sounds complicated but it’s not, in fact any POS, Cart and CRM solution that you are using should be able to do this as a matter of fact, without much work on your end.

Forecasting and Purchasing

It’s true that most small and mid-sized operators are not doing future planning beyond the next order; however your retail CRM should be able to generate reports based on classification and attributes to not just determine what to buy buy for whom to buy it for.

In retailcloud for example our Grow and Pro users can filter product to 3 classifications and 5 attributes to determine with a fair amount of accuracy who is likely to buy new product; or to include a discount modeling to see who is likely to buy overstocked product. Your retail crm should help you minimize your investment in inventory at a product level which should free up investment in complementary inventory to increase units per transactions. Having a CRM that just stores the data is pointless, how can you utilize the crm to create personalized offers to customers, and to plan stock levels to meet your customer needs.

Retail CRM is a must have for retailers today, it does more than just give you a historical perspective of your transactional data; it should establish the relationships between the variables that affect sales and revenue; such as product mix, availability, trends etc.

Ideally it should provide tools to drive revenue growth, such as identifying tailored upsell opportunities or other methods to increase units per transaction, while helping identifying ideal product mix using overstocked and understocked algorithms.  

Most crucially it should serve you all the information in a clear easy to digest and use manner , so all your operators have to do is act.

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Sending Targeted Email Campaigns with Mailchimp

Engaging consumers through email Marketing

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Some interesting statistics:

More than 80% of U.S. retail sales will still happen within the four walls of a store (McKinsey & Company)

44% of email recipients made at least one purchase last year based on a promotional email.  (Convince and Convert)

80% of email subscribers are added at the Point of Sale (Paradise Pen)

Digital interactions influence 50% of in-store sales (Deloitte Digital)

91% of consumers have gone into a store based on an online experience. (Dimensional Research)

These are amazing stats and show the importance of building and use your customer mailing lists. Here is a step by step process of how to import your existing lists, some tips about growing your lists and how to activate and launch an email campaign.

Importing your existing customer list

Lets begin by gathering all your various customer lists you have and put them in an excel file, ideally you will want to have the following fields:

Once your list has been gathered you are now ready to organize and import the list using the Advanced User Import. You may review your list and say it’s not large enough or perfect enough, but don’t let that dissuade you from doing your first campaign (Remember the statistics above; 44% of email recipients make at least one purchase based on a promotional email).

Building a list

So whats the best way to build a list?  Ask at the point of sale!

This method is particularly effective when combined with incentives like discounts and offers.  Activate CRM Builder to start prompting your cashiers to ask customers if they would like to be added to your list to receive special offers. Paradise Pen Co. actually collect 80% of their customer emails in-store. Combine this with incentives using gift cards or loyalty and start not only building your list, but also tracking SKU level and transactional data about your customers. Remember to  set up static and frequency groups to get even more insight on your customer habits; do they respond to discounts or certain product mixes? When you create these special offers use the club pricing feature to automatically have eligible customer groups automatically receive that offer once they are linked to a transaction.

Offers and discounts are not the only motivation for consumers to get added to a mailing list, many retailers use early access to new products as an incentive to successfully build their list. As you get to know more about your customers, you can tailor campaigns specifically based on their shopping habits or even by using the New For You capability on the TabPOS. For those using the recommended items prompt, these recommendations also get more targeted the more you know about the customer.

Activating Mailchimp and Launching a Campaign

You can begin by activating mailchimp under the Integrations tab in the Configuration Menu when signed in as the system administrator. If you do not see it, please contact us via chat or by sending an email to support@retailcloud.com to have it activated for you.

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