Building Your Retail Customer Retention Strategy With Your POS

If you’re interested in retail growth, then you should be interested in customer retention. You can spend a lot of money and time on short-term marketing campaigns that provide pops of increased sales, but if you’re not trying to retain your customers you might as well say good-bye to long-term, sustainable growth.

Consider these statistics on customer retail retention:

• Bain & Company found that a 5% boost in customer retention could generate up to a 95% increase in profitability.
• An Adobe report found that the top 10% of your customer base is spending 3x more per order than your average customer, while the top 1% is spending 5x more per order.

Are you thinking that customer retention is important yet? Creating a framework or lifecycle of what retention looks like for your business can be challenging, but don’t forget about your power-packed point-of-sale (POS) system. Here are some points to consider when creating your retention retail strategy.

Investigate Your Metrics and Know Your Customers

Before you can start to create a retention strategy, you need to understand how customers are shopping at your store. This will help you set up a framework for your metrics. For example, should I be looking at daily, monthly, weekly, yearly retention? This will help you find your “critical” event, the action that want your customer to do that lines up with your goals. Use your POS to pull all your stats. Set up qualifiers that help you pull some hard numbers – like what number of customers shop once a week, month, year? What percentage of shoppers spend $100 on average each shopping trip?

Create/Build Your Loyalty Program

If you don’t already have a loyalty program set up, you might be struggling to find statistics about your customers. But if you do, do you have a good strategy that is building your program? These programs help to create brand loyalty by accommodating the needs and desires of your most valuable customers and rewarding them for their continued business. Your POS system can help segment your list and personalize the rewards. For example, maybe you want to incentivize customers who haven’t shopped in a while to come back and shop again by promoting a special sale that they would like (You would base it off their previous spending habits.) Another example would be to cater your rewards so that your low spenders and high spenders are both able to claim rewards that fit their spending habits. It’s pretty much a guaranteed move that will improve your customers’ overall lifetime value.

Provide Great Customer Service

All stages of the buying cycle are important, but don’t disregard great customer service. Make sure you include this aspect into your retention strategy. Start by making sure your staff is trained properly. Keep them up-to-date on sales/promotions, and make it easy for them to have access to info about store products. A good way to do that is to provide a few mobile POS tablets to employees working the sales floor. In this case, employees can meet customers in the aisles, and are ready to complete sales. Customers will be glad when they’ve received friendly, knowledgeable service, and even skipped waiting in long check out lines.

By now you are aware that retention should be a part of your growth strategy. How will you retain your customers? What suggestions mentioned above will you involve your POS in? Got other questions on how a POS can help you retain customers? Give Bepoz a call for a demo today.