cast commercials. Due to the ubiquity of the web and mobile phone, consumers have more retail choices than ever and are highly educated as to their options. Furthermore, they are listening to other consumers and paying close attention to word of mouth marketing. Consumers do not want marketing, they want interactive engagement. So how can retailers successfully reach, maintain and nurture customer relationships to drive sales, increase loyalty and support the business processes necessary to thrive in today’s competitive marketplace? Know your customer As with any traditional marketing campaign, understanding customer wants and needs is crucial to developing your customer engagement strategy. To this end, customer relationship management (CRM) software can be of great assistance to uncover complete and consolidated views of your retail patrons, supporting the development of more targeted efforts to influence shopping behaviour and impact the bottom line. To hit the mark, you must know where to aim. Gone are the days when businesses could simply segment customers by post code and draw them into stores with a general mailer. Today’s customer is social, mobile and ever evolving. Centralised CRM systems allow retailers to capture, sort, and assemble pertinent customer information to reveal more diverse, fine tuned data sets across all shopping channels. Using data segmentation technology, businesses can boost return on investment by identifying new and lucrative customer targets and developing campaigns specific to each one. After reanalysing and resegmenting its customer base, one international softgoods retailer dramatically increased its response rate and ROI on an annual back to school campaign. Make marketing efforts interactive Mobile marketing offers a cost effective yet highly interactive approach to improve customer engagement, provide an interactive and experiential way to explore product offerings, easily share products with friends, and enable retailers to benefit from capturing customer insight related to the overall experience. For consumers, receiving customised messages and coupons delivered directly to their phone is a big motivator to drive dollars into stores. According to analyst firm, Yankee Group, in the US, nearly 70 million mobile coupons worth $2.4 billion are expected to be redeemed in 2013, up from 200,000 coupons in 2009. Coupons and ads are just a click away via mobile devices, making them easy for shoppers to attain and use with a low effort exchange for store associates. Delivering campaigns using SMS (short message service) is beneficial, because of the high open rate compared to other forms of direct marketing. Yesterday, a picture was “worth a thousand words”; today’s adage is “say it with audio, show it with video”. MMS (multimedia messaging service) allows retailers to better engage and inspire a consumer to want to shop with them. An SMS message will capture your attention for a few seconds, but an MMS message much longer, and it is sharable – thanks to the power of digital word of mouth. Cater to loyal customers According to a research consultant with the Australian Centre for Retail Studies, it is commonly accepted that it costs retailers 10 times as much to attract new customers than to retain existing ones. The key to long term success is an expanding customer base – repeat buyers of your goods or services. It is easier in many cases to influence existing customers to increase the frequency and amount of purchases than to acquire new customers. Loyalty programs strive to build relationships with customers to encourage continued brand loyalty and more consistent and/or larger purchases. According to retail association statistics, 40 per cent of retailers surveyed earlier this year said loyalty programs will be a key part of their strategy for 2012. Rewards provide incentive for shoppers to purchase instore or on your website versus wandering to another outlet for the buy.   CRM helps retailers achieve this goal by integrating all sales channel data, streamlining the rewards process based on customer analysis around purchase behaviour and profitability, and structuring a customised program that influences positive changes in shopping habits. Proven CRM programs enable retailers to design and run loyalty programs with flexibility and security – adapting to trends as they come and go. Given today’s proliferation of mobile devices, many retailers are moving away from physical loyalty cards and instead are hitching their programs to mobile numbers, mobile applications or even payment accounts. This sea change empowers the customer to easily track, manage, and leverage points and programs from their mobile device, and benefits the retailer by arming the consumer with immediate access to view the rewards that will drive them back to purchase. Great customer service Of course, great customer service is key in supporting continued brand loyalty and customer engagement – and especially in a down economy.  According to research from Harvard Business Review, fully engaged customers deliver a 23 per cent premium over the average customer in terms of wallet share, profitability, revenue and relationship growth. Disengaged customers represent a 13 per cent discount on the same measures. Within companies, business units with customer engagement levels in the top 25 per cent tend to outperform all other units on measures of profit contribution, sales and growth by a factor of two to one. One of the greatest customer service tools that retailers have at their disposal is mobility – key to improving operations from the store perspective, as well as enhancing the overall shopping experience for patrons. Clienteling – the ability to provide critical client insight from a centralised CRM database to retail associates anywhere in the store or enterprise – is the latest mobile trend impacting the industry. This technology helps enrich client interactions and drives sales by providing a personal shopper type of experience as retailers can access key data from the CRM system directly from an iPad or Windows mobile device to obtain details about the shopper’s past purchases, providing virtual closet-aided styling.  Associates can also access on hand inventory or quickly find out of stock items on the fly, as well as create and complete transactions from the sales floor, dressing room, kiosk, or special event, without having to leave the customer.  New technologies and channels bring new challenges, but also new opportunities to engage with customers on a level never experienced before. The data inside CRM systems can now be leveraged for maximum ROI, to enrich client interactions, drive sales, and improve the in-store shopping experience to successfully engage with today’s crosschannel, savvy shoppers. * Dave Burton is CRM Product Director for Epicor Software. Burton will be in Australia in late August, and is available to discuss CRM issues. For more information, phone Epicor Retail on (03) 8625 1100, or email here. This feature first appeared in the August/September 2012 edition of Inside Retail Magazine. For more stories like this, subscribe to Inside Retail Magazine’s bi-monthly print edition here.