Retailers can benefit from unique marketing solutions

With heightened competition in the marketplace, it has become critical for retailers to connect more frequently and relevantly with their customers, and they are managing to achieve this through gearing their technology infrastructure to support marketing automation solutions.

“Retailers have to remain competitive to stay alive, and that means they need to understand the buying patterns and lifestyle demands of their customers,” says Derek Dreyer, retail industry executive at SAS Institute. “One of the most effective ways a retailer can achieve this is through ensuring that it has the reporting and campaign management technology in place to support automation and analytics.”

Customer intelligence needs to be a quintessential component of an organisation's marketing portfolio, as it enables a company to not only better understand the customer, but predict patterns that influence the various components of the supply chain. Namely demand versus supply, customer needs, market influencers, and even fashion or fashionable trends among purchasers, to name a few.

Effective marketing automation applications are designed to provide you with flexible and proactive marketing and reporting tools that will support campaign management from conception to execution. They should be vendor agnostic, and be able to work with your existing systems without you needing to “replace all” in order to implement.

According to Dreyer, a marketing automation system should immediately start showing returns by simplifying the process of developing multi-channel campaigns, enabling the process of defining target market segments, prioritising selection rules, defining preferred communication channels, scheduling and execution of campaigns, as well as ultimately perform advanced analyses to predict and evaluate success with customers.

“Make sure that when you select technology to support these aims, that you select something that is automated, intuitive, secure and easy to maintain. The last thing you want to do is get bogged down in running the system, the system needs to support the business, so you need to implement and forget it. Knowing that you are still reaping what you need to from the technology,” adds Dreyer.

Why do retailers need to automate marketing? Dreyer says the basic needs are to improve the speed of campaign delivery, become more proactive, become more effective, to remain relevant to differing customers, and improve communication. The end goal of which are the magic words to any retailer, namely to increase customer retention, acquisition and market share.