(Hint: A next-gen retail CRM is your path to the retention marketing each retail CRM marketer has always dreamed of)
But before we get to the power of a next-gen retail CRM, let’s first walk through the loyalty/ CRM journey every retailer goes through.
😍 A loyalty program starts with dreams: At some point in a brand’s timeline, the CMO/CEO of the company decides to launch a loyalty program to build a direct relationship with its customers. The launch of a loyalty program by a brand is like the arrival of a baby in a family. Everyone is looking forward to the new customer insights and are hopeful for the program’s success.
📈 The loyalty program is successful & starts scaling: And as expected the program becomes successful, the team does an RFM analysis, starts sending marketing campaigns to customers during festivals and sales. And it works great! Customers start coming back to stores, resulting in repeat sales, and over time the loyalty customer base scales to 100,000’s customers & beyond.
🙀 Confusion about what’s next: As that loyal customer base becomes larger, our expectations from that customer base grow. We want to better understand our customer’s behavior, we want to run more relevant campaigns, we want to maximize the revenue from that customer base. This is where the frustration starts to kick in and we start trying out different solutions to solve this. We hire an analytics person. We try doing CRM with our loyalty agency. But even after trying out these different avenues, we are unable to understand our customers and run campaigns as we intended to!
Every retailer that scales their loyalty customer base gets stuck here.As per research by Forrester & The State of the Retail CRM Survey, mostly all marketers today are stuck at this point & it’s not even surprising.
Luckily there is now a way to solve this. But to do that you have to change the way you look at CRM to actually maximize value from the loyalty customer base.
“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” – WAYNE DYER.
And to understand your customers better, to send more relevant campaigns & to maximize the value from your loyalty customer base you need to look at CRM differently. CRM has evolved from a one size fits all blanket marketing (1st gen) to segment driven marketing (2nd gen) to now an individual customer 1 to 1 approach (next-gen).
To move to doing 1 to 1 marketing from segment driven marketing, we need different technology. A next gen CRM is that technology and it enables you to clean your data, create your personas in minutes vs. months spent doing the same thing in a 2nd gen CRM.
Here are all of the differences between a 2nd gen & a next gen retail CRM.
If you’re serious about building a deeper consumer understanding & running more relevant campaigns, you need to judge the CRM you’re using or thinking of buying based on their next-gen CRM capabilities. If they have all of the above, you’re good to go, because a next-gen CRM will do everything you need to take you from your frustrations to your promised land where you’ll be able to maximize the value of your loyalty customer base.
If that wasn’t enough, another change is underway in the world too. Pre-COVID, customers were moving to digital. Post-COVID, customers are moving to digital, FASTER…
In fact, customers are now spending up to 9 hrs a day on their mobile devices today and every single customer is flocking to these apps.
That means, the CRM channels have changed from SMS to digital. The new CRM channels are Facebook, Hotstar, Youtube, etc. So the next gen retail CRM needs to be great at running digital campaigns too.
Xeno is the next-gen CRM for retailers looking to run digital communications built on 3 pillars:
Brands like Forest Essentials, Forever New, Taco Bell, GAP have already been using Xeno’s next-gen retail CRM to maximize value from their loyalty customer base.
Xeno delivers value to these brands using our proprietary 3 step next-gen CRM process that enables retailers to prepare their data, understand the customers & act on those insights in real-time.
Every brand wants to send the next best recommendation to customers but it’s not possible if your product data looks like this.
Unfortunately, this is how the data is stored for 99% of retailers in their POS, ERP systems which are meant more for operations purposes than being marketing ready. Now you can’t send a customer a campaign, Come buy your favorite pair of LL-SHOES or KA or PMS or customers like you also like our PMT1, can you?
So we need to clean this data & cleaning this data typically takes weeks & months as it has to be done over & over again. That’s such a painful & expensive process that we don’t do it only & our journey of creating those personalized campaigns stops here itself.
But we’ve made this possible for you with Xeno’s data cleaning technology that enables you to reorganize, re-name & re-create your product hierarchy in a marketing ready format in minutes vs. months. Plus you do it once & it’s done forever.
Once you’ve cleaned your data, you want to understand each consumer better. You want to visualize their 360* view. To make that happen you need to share this data with a data scientist who’ll then analyze the data & revert with an excel file in a few weeks.
That’s why we built persona creation without a data scientist, empowering marketers to create & configure ML personas like favorite products, favorite time of day, next best recommendations,etc. from an interface.
You can visualize the personas for each & every individual customer too & use those insights to better understand customer behavior too.
Xeno goes beyond technology too. We have data science, marketing strategy & customer success teams that work along with each retailer to make sure that we’re together able to understand your customers in the best possible manner.
Creating the most relevant digital channels is all about reaching out to the right customers with the right offer/ product on the right channel at the right time & continuously improving the effectiveness of our campaigns.
Identify the right audience with Xeno’s AI Audience Suggestions
“Having the ability to figure out the right segment for a campaign in just 1 click is just very efficient & it’s very flexible for me to take quick decisions.” – Nikhil, CRM Manager, GAP
If you want to run a promotion to sell denim, you’d spend a day or 2 currently to guesstimate the best possible segment for that campaign. With Xeno’s AI Audience suggestions, you can identify the best audience for that campaign in 3 clicks.
Whether you want to promote a product, a category, or increase sales for a particular store or online, Xeno’s AI audience algorithms suggest an audience that delivers a 20% higher conversion.
Imagine if you want to create 16 different next best recommendation campaigns. Today you’d have to create 16 different segments, write 16 different pieces of content & then schedule 16 different campaigns, that too separately for SMS, email & Facebook.
Not anymore, with Xeno’s multi-channel variation driven campaigns, you can create those 16 different next best recommendation campaigns in one singular flow. Just determine the persona around which you want to create different campaigns & that’s it.
Prepare one piece of content & then just preview all of the 16 different pieces of content on each channel.
When you run a marketing campaign you only get to see the no. of customers returned. But that doesn’t give you any signal on how to improve the campaign. With Xeno’s persona level campaign analytics the marketer can understand if the campaign performed better for customers who like dresses or tops, or for customers who prefer shopping on weekdays or weekends. These detailed insights let the marketer improve their marketing campaigns over time leading to better campaign results over the long run. Seeing insights like this, allows us to understand what types of customers react better to what kind of content and that leads us to create higher performing campaigns over time.
At Xeno, we believe that just building the next gen retail CRM technology isn’t enough. To move from a 2nd gen CRM to a next gen retail CRM brands need a partner who can guide them along their journey.
That’s why at Xeno, we offer performance-based pricing so that we completely align ourselves along with the retailer’s business. Whether it’s ROI, incremental revenue, or repeat sales, at Xeno we align ourselves with our payout with the KPI your CRM program is currently driving. So if you make money, we make money
The power of alignment is magical. It leads to Xeno’s team working together with the brand as their own. It leads to more proactive service & it leads to higher levels of energy from the Xeno team that’s working along with our partners.But don’t take my word for it. Here’s how Xeno’s partners visualize it’s working with Xeno vs. other vendors:
