Remember when your favorite shopping experience was limited to a single touch?  If you weren’t in the store at the right time, you were sure to miss out on the announcements of an upcoming sale, not to mention the sale itself. Few things are as aggravating to the loyal shopper as keeping tabs on that one item you’ve entirely rationalized at any price less than full, only to find you’ve missed your window of opportunity to actually make it happen.

As a business owner, whether or not you realize it, those missed opportunities to communicate with your customers can be the difference between retention and attrition. With so much out there competing for your customers’ attention, it’s important to develop an understanding of who they are, what their shopping habits are, and what excites them. That’s why today’s businesses large and small should be deploying Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

Building relationships is key to establishing an ongoing engagement with your customers. True to its name, CRM takes those relationships you’ve built and helps you manage them by connecting each point of contact you’ve made with a customer. By gleaning more about your customers like their purchase history and preferences, you gain insights into what they like, what they love, and what they can’t get enough of.

A well-deployed CRM means customers no longer regret forgone opportunities, because you’ve elevated the relationship. When you have this kind of understanding of your customers, you can deliver better on the products you carry, and let them know when you get something special in, or when you put something great on sale.

Customized Engagement
Email marketing is a powerful tool, but it’s got a bad rap because so often it’s subject to abuse. You probably know this abuse as spam. It's the result of a disconnect between a business and its customers—usually the former doesn’t properly understand the latter, or misjudges their level of interest.

Well-executed email marketing on the other hand can drive engagement with your most valuable customers, and the best part is it costs a lot less than other forms of advertising. Having the power to target your most dedicated customers and communicate with them enables you to deliver messages that resonate at the most appropriate time.

Building A Better Basket
Do you really know how many items your customers are buying on average? What about how much they’re spending each time they shop? If you’re missing this insight, then you’re pretty much just guessing when it comes to building your brand. Understanding what your regular customers are spending—and what they’re buying—gives you the opportunity to increase that spending incrementally by bringing in the appropriately priced items, the right quantity of each, and complimentary items that will actually help build your basket size.

Increased Loyalty
Perhaps the most powerful part of CRM is the ability to integrate your rewards program. These types of programs help you identify what can drive your customers to spend more or make more frequent purchases. Loyalty programs also help reduce the friction created by collecting customer contact information as there is an apparent benefit for the customer to share their information. Find out more about how loyalty programs can keep your customers engaged here.

It’s no secret that acquiring new customers costs a lot more than retaining the ones you have. If you’re ready to take the guesswork out of understanding your customers, and you want to better deliver on their desires, check out all the features of Revel Systems’ advanced CRM tools and give your business a cutting edge in today’s competitive market.

 

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