CRM marketers have an edge when it comes to customer-centricity. We not only have access to extensive customer data, but also possess a channel for direct communication with individuals. This allows us to continually enhance our understanding of customers and their preferences.
However, CRM teams also have a difficult mandate. CRM, and email specifically, is often seen as the workhorse of a marketing department. It’s perceived as less glamorous than other channels (here’s looking at you, social) but more dependable to drive revenue and help hit business targets. Sales are slow today? Send another email! An in-store activation needs support? You guessed it.
In the face of growth goals and business priorities, the reality is that CRM teams can easily lose their focus on the customer in favour of championing brand, campaign or channel priorities. It’s a fine line to tow and we all inevitably need to pivot more into customer- or channel-centricity at different times. Here are some ways I’ve seen leading programmes manage the challenge..
Your Customer Is Multi-Channel
How many times have you stood in a physical store, only to compare prices or read reviews on your phone? You’re not alone: 30% of UK shoppers begin their product search online to decide what they’re going to buy before heading to a physical store to make the purchase. And it goes both ways – shoppers are also using in-store retail locations to discover, try and touch a product before ultimately buying online. The reality is that if you’re a multi-channel retailer, your customers are likely interacting with your brand both online and offline, even if they mostly convert in one channel. The experiences are interwoven throughout your customer’s consideration journey so strive to mimic that within your marketing strategy.
In CRM channels, recognise this multi-threading by providing customers with the information they need for a seamless experience in whichever channel they chose to purchase. One way I’ve seen this done to great effect is by bringing in-store inventory into abandoned cart or browse emails. That way, the customer can choose to click and complete their order online or head to a physical location where they can be assured their item is in stock. For those retailers who aren’t in a position to track in-store inventory that closely (something I see often in fast-moving, high volume retailers), surfacing click-and-collect options and opening hours of the customer’s preferred store is an alternative way to be helpful to your shopper.
The importance of a comprehensive mobile strategy also can’t be overstated here: whether they’re purchasing or researching, it’s probably a mobile device that your customers are engaging on. Beyond the basics – designing mobile-first email campaigns, cutting down lengthy text and prioritising eye-catching images – CRM marketers should lean into mobile specific channels like push notifications and SMS to drive engagement. Take advantage of the fact that most of us have our phones in our hands all the time and use the mobile channel to deliver time-sensitive offer messaging and location-targeted, helpful communications when a customer is in your store.
More Than Just an Offline/Online Dichotomy
When we think about purchase channels, we often default to online or offline but this dichotomy is no longer how customers are engaging with brands. More and more consumers are discovering and purchasing products through social commerce and in fact over half of 18-to-24-year-olds say they discover products through TikTok. From beauty influencers with your favourite “As Seen on TikTok” beauty dupes or #BookTok making book-worms trendy, we can’t ignore the influence social media has over shopping behaviours & preferences. CRM channel owners can tap into the spirit of social, repurposing brand-created and user-generated Instagram or TikTok content in email campaigns. Brands like TALA and REFY both do great jobs of tapping into their robust social media presence in their CRM strategies. Also recognise that, more than just a new channel, the rise of social commerce marks a shift in customer mentality. It represents a compressed purchase funnel – inspiration, discovery and purchase all in one place.
It’s impulse buying for a digital world. It’s designed to move the shopper from being inspired to making a purchase in a matter of seconds and all on a single platform – and it’s that speed and seamlessness that retailers need to apply to all marketing channels. Once customers become accustomed to the ease of social commerce, all channels need to live up to that new bar. For CRM marketers, tactics like surfacing all of the information that you know your customers are searching for – information like customer reviews, colourway options, how to wear or style – directly into the email itself can help us tap into this new, shortened purchase funnel.
Go Beyond Purchase Channels and Break Down Silos in Marketing Channels
When you’re thinking about building a customer- rather than channel-centric strategy, it’s not just purchasing channels that you need to consider. Also think about the marketing channels in your remit and whether your team structure enables you to put the customer first. In my experience, CRM organisations, particularly in enterprise retailers, are often structured something like this; one team or one team member is in charge of trigger campaigns; someone else is responsible for push notifications and in-app messaging; and from a marketing campaign perspective, often different team members might own a certain campaign or day of the email calendar week. Whilst organising CRM teams in this way makes sense from an organisational perspective, for the customer it often means they’re receiving disjointed communications from your brand. A customer might, for instance, receive a sale email sent by one team member in the morning, take a look on your site, and then receive an abandoned browse trigger managed by another team later that day. More often than not, that trigger doesn’t include a reinforcement of that sale messaging that attracted the customer in the first place – and that sale campaign often doesn’t take into account the specific products, categories or brands that individual customer has shown interest in. Put simply, the way I like to think about this is that you want to make sure that your customers aren’t seeing a journey that is a reflection of your org charts. Ensure that they are not getting one experience from triggers vs. another in marketing emails vs. another in mobile – just because your teams operate separately.
Facilitating good communication across teams is an obvious and important step in preventing this. I’ve also seen many teams side-step this issue by adopting a modular approach to their CRM campaigns. Adopting set modules across campaign-types and channels allows for a more consistent experience for your customer. Many grocers do a great job of this – showing a loyalty points module or a ‘repurchase your favourites’ block as a consistent drumbeat in each campaign, regardless of whether that’s a marketing push or a trigger pull.
Ultimately, customer-centricity in CRM requires a fundamental shift in mindset. Instead of getting caught up in channel blinders and disjointed campaigns, brands need to zoom out and look at the full customer journey across all touchpoints. That means dropping the org chart silos and mismatched initiatives that fragment the experience for your audience.
It’s about unifying data, strategies and content so that every interaction reinforces a cohesive story tailored to each individual. While this cross-functional alignment can be challenging, leading brands are showing it’s not only possible but essential for meeting the elevated expectations of today’s consumers. For CRM marketers, that makes us lucky – we get to be the glue that binds those personalised, people-based experiences and builds real relationships with customers.
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