Customer Loyalty in Retail

Build a Powerful Customer Loyalty for Your Retail Store

Today, when competition is highly aggressive, one of the primary goals of all Brick-and-Mortar Retailers is building customer loyalty. That’s because it is easier to retain your existing customers than obtaining new ones. What is customer loyalty? How retailers can build it? In the ever-evolving competitive world of retail, the importance of evaluating in-store performance has now become mandatory.

In such a scenario, retailers are taking in-store analytics very seriously and it is vital for all retailers – big or small – to have clear business goals, i.e. what they want to achieve by analyzing store analytics. Loads and load of data can confuse you. However, if you are following a targeted approach, it is sure to provide clear and useful intelligence, which you can absorb and implement to build sound customer loyalty.

So, before we delve deeper into this post, let us understand what it is.

Customer Loyalty – The Two Kinds When it comes to comes to customer loyalty, there are two kinds. They are:  

Behavioral Loyalty Perceptual Loyalty

What marketers do is that they concentrate more on improving perceptual loyalty. This means the degree to which prospects identify with your brand. Again, research has revealed that behavioral and perceptual loyalty, articulated in purchasing behavior, don’t always go together.

Consider the Following Example Most shoppers love luxury Brands and they may even share positive review about the same, but may not purchase from that brand. The reason for not buying can be the following:  

The brand is very expensive The store is not located in a convenient place or not near to the customers

As far as switching costs are concerned, they are high. It is needless to say that changing brands is inconvenient. The moment it becomes convenient, a Retailer may be in a vulnerable position. For instance, if a competitor opens another store selling almost the same products and that too in the same area, there are possibilities that your customers may shift. This happens because these customers do not connect with your brand on an emotional level. This is where the importance of Retail Store Analytics comes into play; using which you can tap into customer behavior and connect with them emotionally.

Building Customer Loyalty In order to build loyalty, you need to take perceptual and behavioral loyalty very seriously. The key to successful customer loyalty is having a brick-and-mortar store with shopability. This means that you need to have outstanding staff and product assortments to exceed customer expectations.

Achieving Shopability

To ensure that your store is shopable, your store, staff and assortment needs to team up impeccably. Then, retailers must know how to improve their store. This is when new, advanced technologies and retail analytics will help you to a considerable extent. Analytics will would give you a better insight as to how your shoppers response or behave when choosing products from the shelves.

This means you will able to identify precisely what to improve on.

Example: To explain the point better, here is an example to make you understand easily: Imagine that you are monitoring the behavior of your shoppers using your store analytics. With insightful data, you can track:     

How many minutes your buyers spend in your store How much time they spend when looking for products How much time they spend in each aisle Which products they like the most Where exactly there is a misalignment

With in-store analytics, you would be able to know exactly what is happening in your store, in real time. You will come to know customers’ shopping behavior. If you find your shoppers are spending a lot of time in your store, yet the conversion is very low, then there are some problems with your store’s staff. Through analytics, if you find that the store dwell time is high, it means that your store is interesting for the shoppers. However, if sales figures are not promising, you need store analytics to tap into customer behavior and understand what they like or dislike. With retail store analytics, you will get to know if customers like to get instant alerts on their mobile phones concerning special deals when shopping.

Even today, your brick-and-mortar store is the most significant purchase channel.

Modern-day shoppers need a customized shopping experience and a revolution in shopability and customer loyalty is possible through advanced in-store analytics.

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