I might never have been a wedding planner! Those nerves that were recognizable emerged as we waited patiently to arrive at our workshop: would a bacon roll’s promise be sufficient to find some older marketers from bed on the morning of a winter?
Luckily, even the guarantee of visiting yours actually deliver some cracking Pancake Day puns, or either those breakfast baguettes, saw us combined by CRM and advertisements experts.
The best way to sell a culture
We kicked off the event using Paul Currie, the chief executive of Foyles. Paul’s had a diverse (and illustrious) profession in retail, with brands from M&S to Hamleys, so it was fascinating to hear his take on how he’s competing with Amazon.
The data that Foyles capture and analyse has a substantial portion of the, allowing them to zero-in on real client behaviors, and the ideal objective to get for every one of the customers.
His advice to all retailers with a bricks & mortar component was supposed to realise they’re not selling their merchandise. Or if they see it simply that way, they will get eaten alive by the internet retailers.
His guidance was to think of how to sell a lifestyle, or perhaps even a culture.
Learning to prioritise business needs
This theme was continued as we moved to the session with our attendees. We tried to do something a little different from the standard ‘setup, sit down, listen, go’ occasion, so each participant was issued using their own “Client Marketing Playbook”, a set of cards linked to different areas of customer marketing.
We were inspired in designing these cards by a combo of Top Trumps, different private development models, and Bruce’s Play Your Cards Right.
The ‘suits’ of these cards were marketing’s tracks that could be influenced by better understanding customers:
- Acquisition: Using knowledge of existing customers to obtain more, better customers
- Upsell: Building a customer’s invest in their favourite classes, buying more, more frequently
- Cross-sell: Developing a customer into new classes and departments, even new stations
- Smart trading: Earning present trading activities like disregarding more precise and targeted
- Retention: Recognising when a client is ‘at risk’, and taking actions to keep them buying
- Win-back: Honestly assessing when a client has defected, and actively pursuing them back
We requested our attendees to prioritise these cards, according to their business objectives. This was directed from a analysis we had performed on what our clients see drives the yield, but we invited our participants to prioritise what felt significant for them. It was fascinating to see the results! Definitely, our apparent winning ‘lawsuit’ was retention — with particular emphasis on ‘Triggered Retention’ and ‘Second Order’.
It had been clear that there are two issues today that retailers have in keeping clients, when we asked people why they had picked these cards.
Two main customer retention issues
Primarily, many customers disappear as fast as they look. Be somebody getting caught brief and popping up into Liberty to use the loo, clients into a more luxurious price bracket, or it vacationers, retailers report that up to 70 percent of the customers shop once. Ever.
The economics of this are bonkers, however, the question these entrepreneurs shared with us was to use an extremely limited set of information about a client in retaining them off the bat, to make decisions. The promising approaches shared at the event revolve around encouraging clients, and discovering buying-linkages between those initial purchasers and much more valuable groups.
In the opposite end of a customer travel, retailers are struggling to come up with a method when a customer has strayed for assessing.
My career began in subscription businesses, where this ‘churn’ stage is much clearer — it seems obvious, but you want to have an intelligent guess as to if you’ve lost a client before you can do anything about it!
Many of the companies in the area are employing rules such as ‘six month recency’, but it sounded like some retailers are seeing better results in creating client lifecycles.
This said, a problem shared is a problem halved — and it’s apparent that there are some attempts going on to deliver up retail .
There appear to be two flavours of strategy: retailers such as Shop Direct are currently investing and creating a massive, costly, capability to bring data to bear on any challenge.
The majority nevertheless are having to be more concentrated, and concentrate their budgets on solving the most significant customer question — which clients are they losing, and what is the offer? What batter on topic?
