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Infographic: The value of returning customers

Infographic: The value of returning customers

CRM & Loyalty

This infographic illustrates the value of returning customers by summing-up key takeaways from recent articles on the subject. It highlights why investing in customer retention should be of equal importance to acquisition. This is even more prevalent in digital commerce as customer loyalty levels are lower for online retailers.

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Benefits of personas in multichannel commerce

CRM & Loyalty Customer experience Ecommerce

United Arab Emirates retailers deal with more than a hundred nationalities. This means different cultures and various shopping habits, sensitivities and aesthetics preferences. When designing an e-commerce website, an app or even an email blast, it is essential to know and understand your target user. Unfortunately, there is no “common user” and different customer groups must be addressed differently. It is even truer in the UAE, where it is unlikely the designer shares the same cultural background as his/her target audience.

This is where personas come into play: personas are fictional characters representing typical users or customers; they help shape profiles based on needs, motivations and desires. As we wrote in a previous blog on User Experience, creating personas can greatly facilitate decision-making, and also reduce errors and rework hours traditionally associated with design concept misinterpretations as part of multichannel projects.

In this article, we will not delve into what personas are, as there is plenty of literature on this topic, but focus more on their benefits for a multichannel business, in particular in the UAE.

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Can luxury brands play catch-up in an aggressive multichannel world?

CRM & Loyalty Ecommerce Omnichannel transformation

Luxury brands have been reluctant to adopt digital commerce

For years, prestige goods companies have looked down on online sales channels, which they have perceived as inappropriate for an industry which is all about high-quality and exclusivity.

“We think for luxury it’s not right. It’s good in countries that don’t have the shop nearby.”

Many preferred keeping luxury in the rarefied world of high-end boutiques and department store glossy storefronts. They have mostly been using the online channel to showcase the brand, through institutional websites with limited product content and information.

Whilst many retailers have hesitated to adopt e-commerce for fear of store sales cannibalization, the reluctance of premium brands seems to have been mainly driven by a somewhat conservative view of the luxury shopping experience. This view has been largely supported by the stereotype of e-commerce as a discount channel on which it is difficult to perceive and experience the product quality.

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How User Experience matters in multichannel commerce – Part I

CRM & Loyalty Customer experience Ecommerce

As customers are interacting with more and more channels and touchpoints, it becomes essential for brands to adapt to their context and deliver meaningful interactions in order to satisfy their growing expectations.

Following the relaunch of its ecommerce site at the end of 2013, Halfords online sales have risen 13.7% from the same time last year.

Whenever adding a new channel, improving an existing touchpoint or redesigning the entire omnichannel setup of a brand, User Experience expertise actively participates to increasing conversion rates, repeat purchase and ultimately market share.

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Multichannel Strategies for Malls

CRM & Loyalty Omnichannel transformation

By adopting multichannel strategies, malls can offer rewarding shopping experiences to the connected consumers. Digital technologies and customer oriented marketing provide mall operators with new means to increase footfall and become more relevant to their retailers.

Loyalty programs: creating returning mall traffic

A loyalty approach enables a mall to develop a valuable customer database and share marketing operation efforts among its brands. Mall operators such as Unibail worldwide and So Ouest or Qwartz in Paris created simple but very effective loyalty programs. Their objective is to bring more loyal traffic to their retail clients and mutualize digital efforts on the web and mobile.

In Europe, these loyalty programs mostly base their marketing promise on services and benefits such as free parking, private sales as well as coupons and discounts.

The objective is to create distinctive services and offers that make customers feel valued and incentivized to frequently engage with the mall and its brands. Even premium malls, such as Le Bon Marché, are introducing loyalty programs to enable personalized communication with their customers.

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Loyalty programs: recognizing customers before they even purchase

CRM & Loyalty Ecommerce Omnichannel transformation

Loyalty programs are structured social marketing efforts that reward, and therefore encourage, loyal visiting and buying behaviour. This targeted and incentivized behaviour should be beneficial to both customers and companies.

In terms of loyalty, understanding pre-purchase moments is more important than the purchase itself: customers want to be recognized and perceive their interactions with a brand are valued more than just for the purchase they make.

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Designing a mobile touchpoint: the single-purpose app

CRM & Loyalty Customer experience

When planning a new app, the current trend is to keep it simple and focus on its effectiveness to meet business objectives

Multi-purpose apps are progressively being abandoned as connected-consumers increasingly favour micro-interactions with specialised apps. One of the most eloquent illustration of this trend is Facebook’s “unbundling strategy”. The social media giant is moving away from multi-purpose apps (which they call “the portal syndrome”) and is now acquiring or developing a network of specialised apps, with very specific sets of functionalities: Paper, Instagram, Whatsapp to name a few.

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The new In-Store Experience

CRM & Loyalty Customer experience Omnichannel transformation

The role of the store is being reinvented to showcase, entertain and deliver a personalized experience through customer centricity and digital technology

The rise of the connected consumer and e-commerce is profoundly reshaping consumer expectations and behavior.
To remain relevant, retail and telecom are reinventing the role of their stores in the customer journey, turning them into entertaining shopping destinations.
New breeds of “flagship stores” and “stores of the future” have therefore emerged, making extensive use of digital technology to deliver unique brand experiences. Often articulated around lifestyle, they aim at reinventing the shopping experience by showcasing, entertaining and personalizing interactions.

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