As Tony Robbins would say, success leaves clues…
On that note, we studied successful retail businesses so we can identify how they use their Salesforce CRM to empower their success.
Here’s what we found!
They use personalization and segmentation as a positioning strategy
When you speak to everyone, you speak to no one
Seth Godin
If you’re trying to reach out to your audience with generic content, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to show them products they truly care about.
In order to deliver relevant and engaging messages, marketers use the power of personalization! But how powerful is personalization and why does it matter?
To give you a real-life example, 35% of Amazon sales come from the “Products you might like” section.
Personalization has also been shown to increase Average Order Value (AOV) by at least 15%.
Yes, it can get complex since there are so many different possibilities… So where should you start? The segment with the highest lifetime value should be the one you personalize your messages to the most!
So let’s say that you’re selling different products of equal importance, it’s hard to be positioned as experts in a specific field.
But what if you could be positioned differently for each of your market segments? This is what personalization and segmentation help you accomplish!
Once you’ve built your different buyer personas, you can position your selling proposition based on their interests and what matters to them.
This will allow you to position your brand in a unique way for each persona.
They are moving the needle towards one-to-one marketing
Retailers should continuously work toward having clean customer data so that they can reach the holy grail of retail marketing: one-to-one personalization.
Here are the different levels of personalization:
Personalized subject lines and email copy
Emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened.
Using your prospect’s first name in your email copy can make your message feel more personal.
But nowadays, every single business that collects customer data uses this…
Think about it, how many promotional emails do you receive each week?
How many of them use your first name in the subject line and in the copy?
Yes.. almost all of them. Relevant content is what will make your emails stand out!
Interest-based segmentation
Understanding your customers’ interests is a prerequisite to delivering personalized experiences that keep your customers engaged. To do this, you’ll need accurate customer data.
You can create different interest-based segments by:
- Asking your customers what interests them via a form on your website, or in an email, or even on your mobile app if you have one
- Taking a look at previous purchases (If a customer purchases tennis shoes, show them tennis-related content)
- By analyzing engagement history (What content do they engage with the most?)
Assumptions are a marketer’s worst enemy. This type of relevant information will help you drive cross-selling and upselling initiatives in a data-centric way.
One-to-one marketing
This is the top level of personalization, AKA the holy grail of marketing! At this stage, each user will live a different experience and will go through a different journey.
By using clean, accurate customer data, you can show relevant marketing messages at scale.
Amazon is the perfect example. The “You might also like” section has a one-to-one relationship with the user. It is unlikely that another customer will see the same exact suggestions.
What if you could do this with your business?
It’s more accessible than you think! Marketers who use Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud have seen an 80% increase in customer subscription and a 23% increase in marketing ROI.
Einstein Recommendation is a feature that you can integrate with your Marketing Cloud instance to recommend the next best content, the next best offer, or the next best product to your customers based on their actions and behavior when they visit your website.
One thing to keep in mind is that 1:1 marketing requires high data reliance. In other words, if your data isn’t clean, it’s nearly impossible to accomplish this level of content personalization.
They empower their teams to take decisions based on AI predictions
Predictive analytics allows users to make predictions about unknown future events and extends advanced analytics. But how can it benefit different departments?
Sales
A sales rep can get a comprehensive view of the pipeline that leads to smart selling.
As they handle the whole workflow from the new leads and the opportunities to the close, Salesforce Einstein Analytics can give a perfect sales prediction and forecast to develop winning approaches.
Marketing
The marketing team gets a clear, simple dashboard for your campaigns and more as Salesforce Einstein Analytics sweeps all outdated spreadsheets instantly.
Einstein analytics optimizes and customizes the outreach over the preferred channel of your customer device and content.
Finance
Salesforce Einstein integrates sales forecasting along with the revenue cash flow and ghost planning. Furthermore, by examining the current performance and comparing it with the past targets and the trends, Einstein analytics enhances data quality.
They place a special focus on customer loyalty
Giving customers a delightful experience from their first interaction to their last is what builds customer loyalty and revenue growth.
According to Retail Touchpoints, it is 6 to 7 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep one.
The most successful retailers analyze and measure the customer experience through surveys, interviewing customers, and gathering data that can be aggregated and measured for the long haul.
This is the best way to audit the customer experience in order to make it easy for shoppers to do business with you.
It’s no surprise that customers today, especially younger generations, are eager to engage with companies that make the purchase process easy.
Whether it’s researching products, seeing reviews, understanding options, submitting orders, reordering, processing returns, and seeing accurate shipping information, customers want a seamless experience.
Of course, that all leads to building loyalty!
This step, too, requires fully integrated business systems, from the CRM, to customer support, to POS, online account management, and more.
he only way to provide a seamless experience is to ensure the smooth flow of data across the business.
The Salesforce Customer 360 platform is becoming an increasingly popular choice among retailers, with an array of integration-ready and easy-to-customize technology products that store customer data, automate processes and facilitate a loyalty-driven experience.