‘Big enough to cope, small enough to care’ Today, many business owners know they need to personalise their customers experiences in order to boost their sales and increase loyalty. Customers expect the same personalised customer experience offline that they get online. The hard part is doing that in an efficient and scalable way.
Yet, with bigger companies and ‘online giants’ successfully utilising the growth of technology and digital customer engagement platforms for the ultimate personalised customer experience, the statement is on the verge of becoming redundant.
Fortunately, these opportunities are not just for big business domains, the technologies and methods are completely scalable for businesses like yours. Here’s how:
1. Get to know your customers
Now, we’re not talking about striking up conversation and getting customer life stories at point of sale, we’re talking about their shopping habits with your product range;
You need to have a database that keeps track of key details about specific customers.
- What they buy (What they don’t buy)
- When they buy (When they don’t buy)
- What they spend
…and whatever else may be useful to your business.
This is not as big of a task as it seems. By creating a loyalty program for customers to sign up to, you can build this sort of database quite easily. Give customers an incentive to join (such as a welcome gift) and ask them to complete a tailored registration form to give your business the basic details needed to create a database with customer profiles.
Customisable customer service is here for your business;
Coffee Shops
Restaurants
Bars & Pubs
Fashion
Wholesale
Finally, for the data collection to be complete and automated, your customer engagement platform needs to be integrated with your EPOS so transactional information is gathered each time a customer makes a purchase.
2. Divide your customers into groups
Even with a strong body of customer information, most successful businesses can’t take the time to craft individual messages for specific customers on a large scale. Instead, you’ll want to divide your rewards program members into groups based on essential criteria, giving you the building blocks for targeted marketing.
The groups or segments you may build can include:
- Big spenders
- Low spenders
- Frequent spenders
- Product related spenders (coffee buyers, cake buyers)
- Demographics (students, professionals)
More advanced and bespoke segmentations could be based on demographics, shopping behaviour and factors specific to your business. Whilst seemingly complex, some customer engagement platforms will automatically build bespoke segments for you.
3. Send them personalised campaigns
Once you have gathered information about your loyalty program members and divided them into groups, you’ll be ready to communicate with them in a personalised yet scalable way. Here are some examples;
COFFEE SHOPS
Keep your regular customers regular.
‘We know you love a latte, you bought 4 last week. Here is your 5th on us!’
BAKERIES
Try to increase your customers’ frequency.
‘You love our lunch menu. Let us look after your breakfast, here’s a half-price bacon wrap!’
The options are limitless and can be specifically tailored to your business goals.
Send them a targeted push notification with an enticing and personalised benefit to redeem in-store to bring them back.
Personalisation is not limited to digital engagement. In conjunction with your customer engagement campaigns, good old fashioned over-the-counter camaraderie should be used too. By having your digital engagement solution integrated with your EPOS, cashiers then have the tools to provide the ultimate personalised check-out experience with maximum up-selling opportunities.
Get an insider’s view on how personalising your customer experience can maximise spend, watch the Natural Kitchen case study.
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