Most retailer's CRM programs are based on membership and loyalty reward programs. These little plastic cards allow retailers to geyt data from customers and hence have a more efficient commercial offer, to boost sales.
But there are three different timings when these programs trigger the purchase decision making of customers:
- Prior to have entered the outlet: thanks to advertising on brochures, mailings, internet websites, emails and more and more often cell phones.
- During grocery shopping thanks to end of the aisle display, special offer stoppers, and so on.
- After the sales process. At the cashier coupons are given based on the previous purchase to push some cross selling or upselling techniques. If someone gets a
Coffee machine, you could give them coupons for the appropriate coffee caps.
But soon, we'll have smart karts that will boost even more those programs. Auchan already proposes a self scanning method: they give you at the entrance of the store a scanner and let you scan your products along your shopping. Then you don't go through a cashier, but to a specific desk where you pay.
Thanks to these new scanner, it provides data during your shopping process. And hence instead of proposing a cross selling or an upsell when you are done with shopping, you could actually gets it during the process, in a way more efficient manner.
Now this technique must be taken into consideration with caution. Indeed, the shopping experience shouldn't be packed up with a lot of those type of interference, because that would result in an horrible threshold. But I believe this would allow retailer to be more reactive and interactive with their promotion techniques.
What do you think about it? Do you already have examples about these systems?
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