Compared to other industries, Customer Relationship Management CRM) for retail businesses is a lot different. More than handling customer’s accounts and contacts, as well as opportunity management, the best CRM for retail businesses focuses on a list of retail essentials such as consumer experience, loyalty programs, discounts and promotions. Moreover, CRM for retail also includes technology requirements such as Point of Sale software (POS) supply chain management (SCM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
How the Best CRM for Retail Businesses is Different
The best CRM for retail businesses is more about establishing long-term relationships in the buyer’s journey and curating effective campaigns based on consumer segments that are delivered in customers’ preferred platforms.
One of the most common mistakes most companies are committing when looking for the best CRM for retail businesses is focusing on technology features. While it is necessary to check out the system’s functions, the best approach is to identify your business objectives first and look for the best CRM that has the capabilities to address the list of goals you have in mind.
Here, we’ll identify the three essential CRM objectives for retail businesses.
1. CRM software to improve consumer acquisition
The best CRM for retail businesses can help improve customer acquisition through the use of essential capabilities such as consumer insights, consumer view, and consumer segmentation.
Consumer insights
To achieve business success, understanding who your potential buyers are as well as their needs is necessary. Without a clear view of consumer insights, businesses are likely to fail in their marketing and sales efforts. Inaccurate assumptions of consumers’ needs can result in a major business setback.
To support this requirement, businesses can opt for retail CRM software that features essential capabilities that include Voice of the Customer (VoC), digital footprints tracking and insights dashboard.
Consumer view
Gaining a 360-degree consumer view can help businesses understand the consumers’ behaviours far better than just knowing their demographics and purchase history. Although these data can be of great help, understanding their emotions through their social profiles and digital footprints can make a huge difference.
With 5 significant types of consumer data such as demographics, transactional, behavioral, environmental and social data, retail businesses can now achieve a 360-degree consumer view.
Consumer segmentation
An excellent CRM can create dynamic consumer segments based on both explicit (eg. demographics) and implicit traits (eg. behavioural data) that can help enhance segmentation allowing retailers to accurately predict potential buyers’ intent.
2. CRM software to grow consumer share
According to Adobe Digital Index, returning customers are 9 times more likely to convert than first-time buyers. Furthermore, several retail stores have said that more than half of their revenue comes from repeat customers.
One great reason for this is that CRM software for retail businesses offer capabilities that help increase consumer visits, repeat purchases and customer share.
Consumer Loyalty
Loyalty programs are designed to help transform browsers into buyers, buyers to repeat customers and repeat customers into advocates. With these loyalty programs, CRM software helps retail businesses grow consumer share by expanding customer intelligence, increasing customer lifetime value and shifting consumer loyalty from a product to the brand itself.
An excellent CRM software supports loyalty programs that feature loyalty tiers, point account management, voucher handling, performance metrics, POS integration, and digital commerce platform.
Omni-channel engagement
Having the ability to meet consumers on their chosen platforms as well as communicating with them to accommodate their purchase preferences is vital for retail companies. Fortunately, most reputable CRMs for retailers are capable of keeping the conversation going as data traverse into multiple channels. What’s more, the best CRM provides social listening tools that can help identify conversations about the product or the brand, and social engagement tools that make conversations on different social networks possible.
3. CRM software to increase consumer retention
Customer attrition, also known as customer churn refers to the percentage of customers that have stopped purchasing a brand’s product or service. When neglected, customer churn can make things worse for businesses.
Fortunately, the best CRM for retail businesses features tools to lessen consumer churn. These include customer self-service (portals, bots, virtual agents, communities) and business intelligence (BI) thet offer predictive views of business operations.
In Conclusion
At the end, the best CRM for your retail company depends on the needs of your business. As such, you need to look further and analyse the goals of your brand. Since there are tons of CRM for retail businesses available in the market, keep in mind to focus on what you want to accomplish rather than the capabilities of the system.