As pointed out in this post’s accompanying infographic, retailers often struggle in regards to new customer acquisition compared to reselling to existing customers. The disparity is somewhat alarming, with a 5% to 20% of selling to a new customer compared to a 60% to 70% chance of selling to an existing one. This is a trend seen industry-wide, but more and more retail organizations continue to devout their marketing campaigns toward attracting new customers rather than appealing to existing ones.
This begs the question: can these retail organizations remain successful by continuously ignoring one of their largest segments of customers?
Any retail organization that has noticed some downward sloping trends in regards to revenue growth should consider new strategies tailored more toward existing customers rather than new customers. Most importantly, however, these retail organizations need to begin weaving online and in-store techniques throughout all shopping experiences. Through two premier techniques, cross-selling and upselling, these retail organizations can provide customers with the most personalized shopping experiences yet. This requires an integration of an omnichannel marketing strategy in order to achieve.
These omnichannel strategies integrate digital marketing into physical retail stores for more effective experiences. Here’s how this improves the customers’ interaction with any retail organization:
The first is likely the most obvious, but still worth mentioning. More and more customers are spending less time in physical retail locations compared to years prior. Whether that be a result of COVID-19 or a consumer trend, on average a customer will spend anywhere between 15 minutes to an hour in a physical retail location. Without any omnichannel presence, that’s the extent that a retail organization is capable of communicating with that customer. However, through these omnichannel strategies, when customers leave a retail location they can continue interacting with that retailer through digital means.
Returning to personalization, as more and more retail organizations develop strategies targeted toward their customers, personalization is priority number one. Customers prefer communication from retailers that seems genuine and tailored toward them rather than a generic message sent to every customer. This is much easier to accomplish online through e-mail or text notifications compared to forming genuine relationships with customers in-store and providing this same level of personalization.
Building off of these in-store relationships, many digital techniques have been integrated into physical retail locations with great success. Many digital displays have now been added into countless physical stores for the sake of directing customers and informing them of specific qualities, functionality or even reviews of a particular product. This sort of signaling is a key aspect of how these strategies benefit both online and in-store experiences. The same can be said for digital techniques that bring customers into physical retail stores, such as a buying online and picking up in-store option.
It can be difficult for organizations to make these upselling and cross-selling strategies work. For more information on how to ease the integration process, be sure to check out the accompanying infographic featured alongside this post. Courtesy of IDL Displays.
