Melissa Offers Tips to Help Online Retailers Hold on to Shoppers Earned During COVID
Melissa, a leading provider of global data quality and address management solutions, shared its insight on smart customer retention activities for online retailers, helping them build long-term relationships with customers earned during the time of COVID. To ensure loyalty to the online brands that gained ground while brick and mortar options were unavailable, online retailers must be proactive and strategic in offering the support and services that continue to distinguish the customer experience.
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“Shopper behavior is a direct reflection of a person’s life, and landmark events such as marriage, parenthood, moving, or COVID have impact. For retailers rounding the bend toward normalcy, it is an opportunity to demonstrate a higher level of customer care and service that invites continued shopper loyalty,” said Greg Brown, vice president of global marketing, Melissa.
With the vaccine rollout and the reopening of the economy serving as catalysts to an even more lucrative year, the National Retail Federation (NRF) estimates 2021 retail sales to total between $4.33 trillion and $4.4 trillion; of that, online sales are expected to grow between 18 percent and 23 percent to between $1.14 trillion and $1.19 trillion.
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To capitalize on this upward trend, ecommerce providers should consider segmenting customers according to their engagement behavior, centering on a recency, frequency, and monetary (RFM) value model. By assigning an RFM score to individual customers, retailers can then define more unique behaviors which may distinguish additional customer value, such as social media influence or brand advocacy. These factors form the basis for a six-step strategy that focuses customer retention activities that add the most value for shoppers:
- Reshape your organization to put the spotlight on shopper needs; empower service employees at all levels to solve customer problems on the spot.
- Foster emotional attachments with smart and informative content marketing such as useful or entertaining articles or videos; customers will appreciate and inherently want to reciprocate the attachment to your brand.
- Establish automatic customer communications that build over time; engagement improves with repetition rather than relying on a single welcome message.
- Be strategic with activities based on RFM scores, balancing resources with loyal but low dollar customers.
- Plan for some manual handling based on actions triggered by specific RFM scores, for example, special handling to high spending shoppers.
- Make exceptions and be proactive when warranted, for example, offering personal contact after a bad review.
