5 Must-Know CRM Trends for Retail in 2023

What’s the future of retail? How is CRM going to take shape in 2023? What are customers expecting from brands this year?

Some common questions that every retail brand must be going through while chalking out their plan for 2023.

While there is abundance of research available online to answer all these questions for you, this blog is going to cover exactly what you need to hear.

Here are 5 trends that are going to take shape in 2023 that your brand most definitely cannot ignore to stay ahead of the competition:

CRM Trends that will rule the Retail Market in 2023:

1. eCommerce still  Remains the king

DTC eCommerce has gained a lot of popularity since 2020 so much so that now customers simply prefer the experience that DTC brands provide, including convenience, control, price, personalization, and quality. 

DTC sales have more than tripled since 2016, bringing in more than $128.33 billion in 2021. Insider Intelligence expects we’ll reach $212.9 billion by the end of 2024 accounting for a 22.3% share of total retail sales. 

What does that mean for retailers? eCommerce is clearly here to stay so retailers need to really up their game when it comes to committing to eCommerce & supplant the in-store experience. 

In order to provide the best eCommerce experience to your customers, you need to dig deep into understanding your customer journey. Understanding how a customer interacts with your brand, what attracts them, what distracts them, and what keeps them with your brand for a lifetime, and use this information to interact with them at each stage. 

Xeno Tip: Incorporate customer journeys into your eCommerce strategy such as Welcome Journey, Abandoned Cart Journey, Dormant customer journey, Feedback Journey, etc. Learn more about them here.

2. Not Personalisation, The Right Personalisation is a must-have 

It’s 2023 and the term ‘personalization’ has been a buzzword in the retail industry from the past 5 years. However, retail has had a complicated relationship with personalization. Even those who have implemented personalization in retail haven’t done it right.

Retail personalization is explained beautifully in this quote by Jeff Bezos.

If we have 4.5 million customers, we shouldn’t have one store. We should have 4.5 million stores.

Going forward in 2023, there’s a lot that you can do in terms of personalization.  

• Understand your customers deeply
• Run targetted offers for high-value customers to maximize revenue
• Target at-risk & lapsed customers to reduce churn 
• Send product based recommendations, etc. 

McKinsey groups these expectations into four main categories, shown below:

Xeno Tip: Leverage the power of AI & ML to study your customer data & run AI-predictive personalized campaigns. 

3. Customers focus on privacy more than before

With the risk of Cyber Attacks and the leaking of personal data in 2022, 60% of consumers are more concerned about their privacy now than a year ago. For customers, brands must make them feel safe about their data not being sold to third parties and to avoid cyber-attacks. 

A recent survey shows that 28% of consumers feel they have less control over their data than they did a year ago. People are increasingly concerned with who has their data and how they are using it.

Brands that want to get personalization right must respect their customers’ desire for privacy to not jeopardize customer trust. The key is to make it easy for customers to control their experiences. Ask them to opt-in to personalization campaigns and make sure they consent to their personal data being used by your company. 

Xeno Tip: Focus on collecting first-party data by digitalizing your ereceitps. This can be done by Positioning ‘Green Initiatives’ by sharing e-receipt on Whatsapp instead of physical bill and ensure accurate customer numbers are captured and open communication over Whatsapp.

4. The good-old Omnichannel Experience‍

Increasing e-commerce stats does mean brands should neglect in-store experience. Since customers are looking for more opportunities to shop across multiple channels. This means they often use a combination of in-store and online resources when making a purchasing decision. 

Nearly 80% of customers still prefer an omnichannel shopping experience due to seamless communication. 

To effectively reach shoppers in today's multi-channel environment, it is essential to have a marketing and communications strategy that encompasses both physical and digital channels, such as in-store, online, social media, and SMS. To provide a consistent brand experience across all touchpoints, it's recommended to use a robust marketing solution that allows for running campaigns from one platform. 

Xeno Tip: Integrating your marketing solution with your POS and retail management system  will help to better track efforts and ROI. On top of that, it would allow you to provide a omnichannel experience to your customers by to reaching out to your offline customers online, track each touch point of your customer at a singular place and take appropriate action on those.

5. Whatsapp to replace traditional marketing channels in 2023

As consumers place an increasing value on personalized engagement with brands, WhatsApp, a messaging platform owned by Meta, is becoming a popular channel for direct marketing by companies to connect with their customers

WhatsApp has an open rate of around 90%, as opposed to around 20% for emails. Forber, 2022

With Meta’s new feature for WhatsApp Business, it gives more leeway for marketers to reach their customers on their favorite messaging app.   With majority of your customer being present on the platform, brands cannot afford to ignore Whatsapp as a channel for their marketing activities. 

Xeno tip:  If customers deem your communication irrelevant, they have the option to mark it as spam and file a report on the platform. Repeated spam reports can lead to potential blocking on the platform. Therefore "text-bombing," to customers is not an effective strategy on this platform, make sure your communication is personalised and targetted based on the buying behaviour of your customer. 

Xeno: An AI-powered CRM for all things CRM

The approach toward Customer Relationship Management has changed. Brands have turned the pages of traditional ways & rather are more focused on building long, strong, profitable relationships with their customers using digital touchpoints  and new-age CRM is playing a great role to help brands achieve their vision. 

Xeno’s proprietary-tech allows retailers to achieve their CRM vision by enabling them to seamlessly restructure their data, build personas,  visualize customer's 360° profile, & run personalized campaigns to customers across SMS, email, Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, eCommerce, etc. 

Click here to book a demo with us and know more about how Xeno can help your brand.