While middle hair parts and non-skinny jeans may be in (for now), providing a great customer experience is something that will never go out of style.
Life as we knew it officially changed a year ago and online retailers have been one of the lucky industries that have been able to thrive and capitalize on the new way the world works…if they know how to maximize on the opportunity that so many shoppers going fully digital brings. So how do they do it?
Here are 3 key ways to be retail marketing ready in 2021.
#1 Delight your customers experience appetite
Want to knock it out the park every.single.time? Then you need to truly understand your audience through their data and use that understanding to drive standout experiences. Every piece of data you have on your customers is telling you something about what they want and quite frankly, what they expect from your brand – are you listening? (spoiler alert, if you aren’t, your competitors will).
#2 Define a super awesome strategy
Being able to truly delight your customers depends on knowing when to trigger said delightful experiences. You’ll want to identify which actions you anticipate your customer taking that will then trigger the real-time experience you will be providing. For example – did they look at a particular page? Do a search with no results? Visit the help page multiple times?
What data do you need to provide the experiences your customers are asking you to provide? Start there and work backwards to determine what your strategy needs to be from the start.
#3 Generate insights in the moment that you can actually use
This is oh-so important my friends. During high-volume retail seasons, the thing you won’t have a high volume of is time itself. (any retail marketer, or marketer in general knows this to be true).
So what does that mean for you? You need to automate as much as possible up front to guarantee your agility later. Plus (another spoiler alert) the world may change even more AGAIN…and in a crazier even more unpredictable way (but lets all hope for sanity’s sake this is definitely not true). This means you’ll need backup plans.
In addition – having the right martech stack in place that can accurately capture all of the important actions your audience is taking and the big moments they’re having so you can act on it will provide you with awesome intel to fuel even better experiences in the future. Heck yes!
Doing this means you’ll eventually get to a place where you can predict your customers future behavior which means you can create both standout experiences and buy yourself agility to optimize throughout the year. Say whaaat?! Yes it’s possible and boy oh boy is it pretty sweet.
Does all of this sound too good to be true? It’s not! Well it is really good, but it’s also really true!
We’ve put together 7 key retail use cases to make sure you thrive in 2021 AND a robust checklist to make sure you’re all rip, roaring and retail-ready to go this year.
2021 brings new energy and new customer expectations to meet and crush – so lets get you on the path to greatness to achieve success with both!
