At the onset of the holiday season, it is important for your business to be ready for the different types of shoppers that will walk through your store doors or browse through your e-commerce sites. Knowing your customers well is the key to retail success. Consumer behaviour is an important factor to consider when preparing your business, particularly your store for a festive opening and these steps will help you figure out the shopper personas with ease and plan your promotions for each one of them.
- Figure out your typical buyer personas
Buyer personas are pseudo representations of your ideal customers based on extensive research and data collection. They help you focus your retail marketing efforts on qualified target audiences and prospective customers. As a result, you’ll be able to attract high-value visitors, leads, and customers to your business who you’ll be more likely to retain over time. From your existing pool of buyers, figure out the most common personas to uncover trends about how certain leads or customers find and consume your content and/or respond to your promotions. How old are they, their gender, where do they live, which income group they belong to, and so on.
After identifying who these people are, the next step is to understand their typical buying behaviour in your store or on your website/marketplace.
- Find out what items do they typically buy, how much, and how often (Recency-Frequency-Monetary value or RFM Analysis)
Leading to the next point, look at their purchases and figure out the objective of their purchases. Are they buying for themselves or others? Especially during the holiday season, what type of gifts are they adding to their shopping carts, both online and offline? Are they buying for an office gift exchange, for friends, family, or their partners? How often do they buy products that you sell? What is their average basket/ticket size? And, so on. Different types of shoppers will exhibit varying budgets and different product purchases. This will help you see what inventory to stock up and how your staff is able to give sound recommendations.
Based on the research data for the above two points, you’d be able to create various buyer personas such as Decisive/Commanding, Collaborative, Outgoing, Sceptical, Analytical, and Easy going. Using the right kind of omni-channel retail software, you will be able to design your marketing promotions to suit each persona, build and manage your loyalty programs, and offer them a variety of speedy order fulfilment options to suit their needs.
Typically, shoppers like to browse/explore several products and take their time shopping. During the festive season, we all know that shoppers want to get their festive shopping done as soon as possible. But they also look for the best promotions and offers suitable to them. Stores are also in a rush to clear as many shoppers as possible so that they can clear their stock and hit the KPIs for the year. So how then do we go about speeding up the process?
- Personalize gift ideas, festive promotions, and discount offers
Make use of all the online and offline data you’ve collected throughout the year and send your existing customers a curated list of gift ideas, festive promotions, and offers. Not only does this show that your brand cares for its customers, but it also reduces the time they need to think about what to buy next. They can spend more time browsing and buying/adding to their wish list more items from your shop.
The personalized promotions pique the interest of the customers and the discounts/offers essentially encourage them to buy more!
With ETP’s Promotion Planning tool, ETP Accelerator, you can roll out promotions specific to buyer personas or customer segments as well as easily define the business rules based on merchandise, time, and location.
- Extend your digital-channel presence and increase customer engagement
81% of retail shoppers conduct online research before buying. The overwhelming majority of retail consumers start their journey with online research. The majority of these searches occur on mobile devices (nearly 77%), since retail shoppers frequently research competitor products and pricing in-store. App downloads increased greatly during the pandemic and a vast majority of the retailer fraternity has planned to prioritize a retail mobility or mPOS solution to transcend the omnichannel customer experience their brand offers and to be present where your customers are and when they are looking to purchase.
- Use loyalty marketing to boost holiday season profits
Many stores are looking at growing their customer base to generate more revenue this festive shopping season. More customers equals more revenue, right? Yes, in some sense that is the truth. However, if you are not retaining your customers and the outflow of customers is equal to, if not larger than the incoming new customers, not only will you not grow your revenue, you might even be losing revenue! So, what should you do to retain your customer base? Loyalty is the key; here are some ways you can work on your loyalty programs in the festive season.
- Reward all paying customers: During this festive season, it is important that stores pay attention to all customers and try to capture their value as much as possible. Instead of letting customers go through a lengthy sign-up process or have to download an app just to redeem rewards and potentially lose their interest in signing up for any loyalty programs, issue a Mobile POS (mPOS) in-store to equip store staff to be able to register the customers instantly and gain rewards for their purchases. This way, the customers might be incentivized to purchase more gifts from your store just to redeem the rewards!
- Understand how customers want to be rewarded: Some stores offer cash rebates as loyalty rewards, others offer a little gift or just a priority to an exclusive item. Rewards for loyalty programs can come in many shapes and types. However, a little research needs to go into how customers would like to be rewarded for their continued purchases from your store. Especially during the festive season, many customers may be looking for cash rebates for their gift purchases. As they are buying in large quantities for gift exchanges for family, colleagues, and friends, they might be looking to save so that they can stretch their dollars to buy more gifts. Act accordingly and offer them that!
- Develop personalized loyalty programs: Nothing beats having a personalized loyalty program that shows the customers that they are being valued and taken care of. Knowing your customers’ buying behaviour will inadvertently allow you to know what sort of rewards and programs they are looking for. No one program will be suitable for all customers. So dig out the data and start to tailor the loyalty system to individuals so that they will be more likely to think of your store when they want to make their next purchase. Especially now when they are shopping for themselves or for others, it is a great time to see their buying behaviours and figure out the customer buying journey.
- Allow real-time earning and burning of loyalty points: In today’s world of instant gratification, customers will not wait to earn and burn their loyalty points. Therefore, it is important to implement loyalty programs with features such as ETP’s In-POS Earn & Burn that allows your customers to instantly accumulate loyalty points through both their online as well as offline (in-store) purchases. They can then redeem these points in real-time (in the same purchase transaction) for shopping across all channels, thus enhancing their shopping experience.
