Using your retail solution to improve your marketing returns

I have a saying. “You can’t sell anything to anyone if they don’t know you exist”.

The role of marketing in the retail environment is critical as it is the link between your business strategy and target market. It tells people that you exist and you have something for them.

The effectiveness of your marketing efforts can be diminished if you are not targeting your messages to the right audience.

One of the great advantages of using a retail POS solution is they can help marketers maximise the effectiveness of their campaigns.

If you are tracking customers in your retail solution via a loyalty programme or simply having customers in a database, you are now able to track the behaviour of your customers.

You will be able to see what your customers are buying, when, how often and how much they are spending.

This basic level of information, sourced from simply assigning sales to customers, gives marketers a great level of information to ensure that the right messages, are hitting the right people.

Of course you can delve deeply into understanding your customer’s behaviour through mining the data you have collected but great benefit can be even gained from high-level data analysis.

Marketers will be able to target their communication pieces more precisely if they can effectively segment their databases. Whether the databases are segmented by sex, category of products purchased, location or dollar spend, marketers can ensure that they are communicating the right message to the right audience. Not only can this ensure greater effectiveness of the campaign but also reduce the costs of marketing by not wasting your budget on communicating to those that would not be interested.

So next time you are processing sales, ensure you are assigning the sale to the customer and in doing so giving your marketing teams more power, to be more effective.