Shoppers today are better and more informed than ever before. Whether you are catering to baby boomers, gen X, millennials, or gen Z, they all have one thing in common, they want to be heard and are looking for an exceptional experience while shopping at your store. An experience that keep them coming back.
As a business owner, we understand you’re busy managing inventory, training and mentoring employees, and generally keeping the lights on. With all of this going on, it’s no wonder why most business owners have little time to devote to speaking with their customers in a personalized, 1:1 way.
This is where an AI-powered rewards and personalized marketing platform can help. Here are some goals to set for 2018 to get your on your way to achieving 1:1 marketing communications with shoppers…
- Start/Revamp your POS-based loyalty and rewards program: We’re FIRM believers in this being your first step. It’s critical to identify customers during checkout and tying their purchase history to their profile. With a POS-based loyalty program, customer identities are then tied to SKU-level purchases, giving you deep insight into individual customers. The rewards program itself is a way of engaging customers, but the program alone does not create loyal customers. The value in a rewards program is the data, and using that data to know your customers and create personalized experiences.
- Consolidate marketing databases: We see this one all the time. Business owners sometimes have up to 3 different CRM databases (POS, loyalty programs, email marketing tools, text marketing tools, and the list can go on). It’s a lot to manage, and makes it impossible to close the loop on your marketing efforts or quantify success. By consolidating your marketing databases, for example, you can get a clear picture of which email campaigns are driving actual in-store sales.
- Create a data-driven marketing calendar: Take a look at your customer purchasing trends to come up with some achievable goals that you’d like to address with your marketing strategy.
- If you’d like to reduce customer churn, consider focusing on your top shoppers with surprise and delight incentives.
- If you’d like to increase your average ticket value, take a look at items frequently purchased together and put together some upsell strategies.
- If you’d like to speed up slow times, focus your marketing on diverting traffic to the slower times.
- Automate your marketing: Think about this as set-it-and-forget-it marketing campaigns. Setting up your marketing program to delivering messages based on when a customer visits or what they purchase not only saves you a ton of time, but these campaigns also have really high conversion rates since the messages are super relevant to the customer.
- Remind customers about refills on items purchased at a regular interval
- Recommend similar items to upsell based on a recent purchase
- Send a special birthday message and discount
- Each month/quarter/year, send top 100 shoppers a special discount
- Evolve your marketing: This takes #4 a step further. Don’t just react to your customers, but predict their next move and proactively deliver messages that they will love. This is where AI and machine learning come in. AI can do cool things like:
- Identify risky shoppers and prevent churn with a precisely timed message based on that individual’s shopping cadence
- Identify new shoppers who look like potential top shoppers, and deliver messages to nurture them to the top tier
- Deliver upsell recommendations based on basket analysis
- Measure marketing ROI: Make sure that you have a way to attribute revenue realized from your marketing efforts, and dive into that data after each campaign. Schedule a debriefing session with your team to review aspects of the campaign that worked and didn’t from a tactical perspective, review customer feedback from store reps, and also discuss things like the conversion rate and lift to evaluate whether the campaign was successful.
If any of these resolutions make it to your to-do list for 2018, AppCard can help.Whether you are exploring loyalty options for your business or looking to replace and upgrade your current loyalty system, there is no better time than 2018 and no better direction to take than AppCard. Take the first step and schedule a demo learn more >>
Why AppCard?
- Works with any Point of Sale (POS) and captures SKU level Transaction Data on each customer
- Automated Points, Punches or Cash Back Awards after each transaction (No Manual Entry)
- Artificially Intelligent marketing communication based on customer purchasing behavior and future intent
- SMS, Email, and Push Notifications through the mobile app
- Painless transition from existing loyalty programs
- Cloud Based Reporting Dashboards that track 100% of your revenue (not just loyalty transactions)
- Dedicated Success Manager and access to graphic designers and data scientists to make sure your program is engaging and achieves your growth goals
