Who are Empowered Consumers and how do they shop? What are the best ways to engage them to drive loyalty for your brand?
Today more than ever, there is more flexibility for consumers to shop how and when they they choose. Your customers own multiple digital devices that they use to engage with you — on their own terms — throughout the shopping journey.
Empowered Consumers use technology throughout their shopping journey and are increasingly more self reliant and less dependent on the retailer. The often use self service opportunities when they are available and engage less with the retailers staff. These Consumers navigate both the online and physical store channels in their shopping journey. They expect a seamless experience across channels and a deep level of personalization from the retailer.
At the same time, it is critical for retailers to differentiate themselves and establish meaningful relationships with their customers. These relationships help to build loyalty with your customers and provide a way to stand out from your competition.
However, it is becoming ever more challenging to foster these relationships with the increase of online shopping and the reduction of personal contact during the in-store shopping experience.
With this in mind, how do retailers engage their customers and build relationships in the age of empowered customers?
Success retailers are using loyalty programs combined with digital marketing tools to establish a dialog and engage with Consumers in order to build relationships and personalize their shopping experience.
The key to success is to integrate the loyalty and digital marketing solutions together with your POS and ecommerce platforms for a comprehensive customer engagement solution.
Initially, it is critical to establish a loyalty program so that you can identify your customers. You can then use the insights obtained from the loyalty program to create personalized engagement through digital marketing activities. Finally, it is important to capture the digital marketing activities so that you can learn, adapt and refine your future engagement with your customers.
Accuvia Software Group hosted a webinar to explore this topic in more detail. We have engaged George Lawrie from Forrester Research to be our featured speaker. George will share research and insights about the value of engaging customers throughout their path to purchase and the challenges retail leaders must overcome in order to boost customer loyalty.
