Magazine: Loyalty across channels (Part 2)

Customer loyalty specialist ICLP’s latest study makes it clear that having detailed knowledge on customers is priceless. Knowing their habits, expectations and preferences precisely creates the opportunity to influence basket value and to use targeted offers for making them put products with higher profit margins in their baskets. The most important question is: How can retailers get and process masses of consumer and shopper data?

They need to manage all of the data in a comprehensive strategy that involves all channels. A good example of this is the multichannel, location-based marketing approach. Lots of harmonisation work and technical requirements are necessary for making customised real-time offers like this, but it is doubtless that it brings short-term marketing and sales results. Retailers also have to examine whether their customers are active and influential in social media or not. It is needless to say that they also have to motivate and reward the customers they already have. Communication in social media, shopping data and behaviour patterns recognised from loyalty programmes can be combined to identify customers that represent the best selling opportunities. These days shoppers always have their mobiles with them and they use it too, which creates the opportunity to map the shopping journey and get a 360-degree picture of the whole process. Relying on this a shopper persona can be established – a mixture of attitude and factual profiles, and this makes it possible for retailers to offer them shopping experiences across channels. What do retailers get in return? A high level of consumer loyalty and repeated shopping – but this can’t be realised without an evolution in data management, with 360-degree observation, targeted messages and personalised offers. The strategy will have positive influence on shopper behaviour even if in the first stage this approach is only used in analysing and in planning strategic steps, and not as a real-time tool.