Reaching out to the right customers at the right time is very important in the retail industry. With the rising cost of real estate, manpower, transport etc, running retail stores have really become a challenge. Natural footfalls are not sufficient to make a store profitable anymore.

While most of the retail stores have ‘loyalty cards’, ‘reward points’ ‘promotional offers’ etc, few are able to use customer data intelligently. We know, Loyalty points aren’t too exciting and promotional offers are also too generalized.
I would share a personal experience. I had purchased some ‘dresses’ for a new born baby in December 2012 from a well known retail giant X. After that also, I have shopped for number of baby items like pram, dresses, feeder, rocker etc. but all from different retailers. The retail giant X could get all information about me and my purchase when I visited their store first. They could have sent me relevant offers based on this data. If I had received a tweet/ call from the retailer in March (that is when I bought a pram from a rival retail stores). “Howdy, how’s the baby doing? Now since the baby is 3 months old would you like to try some of the exclusive collection of prams we have in our stores? We offer you a 5% discount too”. I would have just loved this offer. Toys, books, walker, cycle, play mat, games the list is endless all offered at different stages as the baby grows.
Similarly, If someone comes to buy a ‘walking stick’ or ‘adult diapers’ chances are he would need other products too meant for the elderly. Idea is to draw valuable insights from data, to know the customer & his behavior better and then do a more targeted positioning of products. This is where Big Data, Traditional & Social CRM could really help the retail industry. Marketing augmented by data insights could add a lot of value.Want to know more? Give me a shout!

About the Author:
Sanjay Abraham is an Enterprise Social Consultant. He comments & blogs on the Enterprise Social Space on regular basis.

He also provides consulting & training to organizations in Social Media Marketing, Social Commerce, Social Business, Social Intelligence, Big Data, SoLoMo and other topics.
Sanjay holds a Bachelors in Engineering (Computer Science) and a PG Diploma in Business Management. He has worked with top names in the IT sector like Avaya GCL & Mahindra Satyam.  His client list includes top bracket names across Banking, Insurance, Retail, Public Services and other verticals. Consulting & Business Development through ‘Solutioning’ are his personal areas of passion.

Linkedin: in.linkedin.com/in/sanjayabraham. Twitter: @asanjay100