Treat your customers like royalty and reap great rewards

Feeling highly-valued makes up for a bad product or service. Pump up your sales with personalized experience to earn highly-loyal customers.

Marketing has taken on a different form in this digital age and it comes by way of monitoring the customers’ behaviours, spending priorities and preferences vis-à-vis their needs for what has been called in sales parlance as “personalized experience.”

Gone are the days when all a shopkeeper needed to do was put a mannequin on the vitrine, dress it up and place a cardboard saying, “New Arrival” and voila! The cash register starts cha-ching-ing. Play loud music, too and you got it made!

But the global digitalization has changed all that as it opened the door to getting up close with the customer and aftersales becoming equally as important to ensure they come back. There is also the advent of online shopping through e-Commerce which had seen a boom during this pandemic.

All these are ed on the customers’ willingness to be profiled, if you will, by sharing their personal information in exchange for personalized discounts, for instance.

Some quick numbers are in order:

Research suggests that approximately 57% of consumers are willing to share their personal data provided they get something in return like free delivery.
Some 44% customers are likely to be repeat-buyers following a personalized shopping experience.
Some 96% of marketers are unanimous in saying that their attempts to personalize their customers’ experience have resulted to increased interaction with them.
Some 88% of marketers reported “measurable improvement” after rolling out customer personalization schemes.
Some 71% of customers are unhappy when their shopping experience is not personalized.
Some 72% of customers say they only respond to personalized interactions.
63% of customers say they are more inclined to stop buying from brands that fails in personalization attempts.

So, how does personalized experience boost sales? It takes shopping to a whole new level as it enhances customer relationship and promotes brand loyalty.

And how do you do that? Think with Google recently did a survey and among salient findings was that 90% of marketers say personalization has “significantly contributed to business profitability.”

To get there, however, any well-meaning marketing team has to fully understand how to collect and analyse data, know what to look for, to guide them through.

Moreover, it pays to know who your customers are – demographics, income bracket, and so on.

Another must-have in your to-do list is sitting down with your sales team – the front liners who deal with the customers every day and who know them like the back of their hand. This will aid you in coming up with a real picture of your customer base.

Once that is done, the next order of business would be to promote a customer-focused shop culture where the employees undergo training on emotional intelligence to learn how to deal with customers on a more personalized way. Sometimes, a customer could feel lost in the cd and that’s exactly when the sales staff comes in, establish a connection and make her comfortably at ease in expressing what she wants. It’s not enough that customers are pointed to the direction where the clothes are for instance. They’d appreciate being walked to the aisle and be given details about the product of choice.

Perhaps the most vital of them all is the feedback system where the customer shares whether she or he had a great time shopping. Other shop owners go the extra mile a hire “mystery shoppers” to evaluate the staff and the store itself.

Feedback tells about strengths and weaknesses; and is a very important tool in trying to improve services and inventory.

You can go a notch higher and ask customer to do a review, as well.

Meanwhile, sending personalized emails, even WhatsApp messages, is also very effective primarily because it makes the customer feel valued and not treated like just another cash register receipt. Remember: a happy customer will always find time to come back.

The customer remains the proverbial centre of the universe. Treat any customer like a royalty and you’ll reap great rewards.