In the last decade or so the retail industry has undergone a massive transformation. Today’s retail customers require personalized messages and special offers catering to their needs. The retail industry must adapt to new technologies and realign its business for attaining a higher conversion rate. 

This conversion rate is achieved through personalized product recommendation backed up with solid metrics. The retail industry must gather the right kind of data for formulating the most effective marketing strategies which cater to the needs of the clients. 

The Salesforce Marketing Cloud ecosystem offers benefits for the retail industry. In this challenging environment of the retail business, Salesforce Marketing Cloud tools can attain success for your retail business with its analytics software. 

What are the Strategies for Salesforce Marketing Cloud for the Retail Industry?

Here are the strategies for the Salesforce Marketing Cloud for the retail industry are:

1.Use Email Studio for Customer Segmentation 

If you are a savvy marketer, then the best strategy to adopt for email marketing is email list segmentation since it is useless to send generic emails. The email list subscribers are segregated into segments. You can address the needs of the segments with shared attributes. 

Customer segmentation is critical for the retail industry. Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers segmentation resources for the retail industry. 

It can segment your audience in different ways. But, it is essential to understand the type of segmentation which is appropriate for the retail brand – behavioural, geographical, demographic and psychographic.

The next step is to model the data for analysis of the relationships between the subscribers. The email marketers can make data-driven decisions for providing a roadmap. The email marketing campaign of the retail brand is shaped by retail marketing strategies such as increasing customer retention rates by sending re-engagement emails. 

2. Create Journeys with Salesforce Journey Builder 

Salesforce’s Journey Builder provides customer journey mapping by creating journeys across different stages of the customer lifecycle. The retail customer’s journey has various stages across multiple touchpoints. The mapping strategy considers all these touchpoints. Journey Builder can improve customer engagement at each stage of the customer journey with onboarding of rewards program or re-engagement of an abandoned cart. 

The different departments of your organization share the customer data from the Salesforce retail solution for mapping the customer touchpoints and personas, identifying breaking points and gaps, understanding customer paths and identifying the gaps and deciding on the prescriptive actions.  

3. Use Retail Personalization to Connect with Customers 

The consumers always look for a personalized experience from the retail business. Online retail personalization is the most popular among the younger generation. As per a survey, 63 % of millennials and 58 %  of the GenX customers can willingly share data with companies in exchange with personalized discounts and offers.

The benefits of personalization of the retail industry are:

• Provide streamlined shopping experiences by sending the customers by sending personalized offers to customers. 
• Provide customer interactions that differentiate your business from the rest. 
• Take better business decisions with customer data. The marketers send the right offers to the right customers through the most effective channels by using advanced analytics capabilities.   
• Use Predictive Intelligence for accurate forecasting of trends, predicting customer actions and automatically provide the next steps. 
• Increase customer retention rate as consumers prefer to switch brands due to personalized offers. The retailers seek new customers 

         as the brands lookout for more personalized offers. 

It is important for your retail business to use retail personalization to provide an edge over the competitors with the right Salesforce Cloud software platform with the following:

• Choose a platform that integrates across the departments which provides a unified experience. 
• Make sure that customer satisfaction is the main goal. 
• Use the right tools to provide a unified customer experience. 
• Find the package that has some financial value with the priority of cost-effectiveness for your business.  

3. Use Salesforce Marketing Cloud Connector

• Salesforce Marketing Cloud Connector along with Salesforce Commerce Cloud enables customer journeys with dynamic triggers from commerce to marketing. 
• A customer who adds items to their shopping cart, while using a Commerce Cloud site and then eventually abandons the cart must be sent a follow-up mail from Salesforce Marketing Cloud with reminders or even luring the potential customers with incentives for deciding to make the purchases from your site. 
• Another area in which the Salesforce Marketing Cloud really contributes is enhancing consumer engagement with distributed marketing from Salesforce. The prebuild customer journeys with Salesforce Marketing Cloud when applied to the resellers and local stores to personalize the customer journeys for managing some of the activities such as onboarding of potential clients, building a loyal customer base by launching holiday promotions. 

4.   Leverage the Power of Salesforce for Smart   

      Customer Service. 

The Salesforce Marketing Cloud uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and smart analytics to allow the marketing teams to reach out to the customers in a better way,  Salesforce comes with Live Messages, a solution that consolidates the messages across a set of messaging apps and one that is natively integrated within the customer success platform of Salesforce. Salesforce uses the LiveMessages for rendering the next generation services to the clients. 

This enables the retailers to reach out to the customers with messaging apps of the likes of Facebook messenger or even the common SMS or Apple Business Chat. The functionalities will expand to Whatsapp or WeChat or automating the routine tasks with chatbots inside the SMS chats.  

The retailers get a holistic view of the shopper’s history by integrating the email marketing tools in Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Yet another powerful feature is that of the Einstein 

bots that allow your service agents to solve complex issues, by saving their valuable time. The pre-chat information from these bots is what saves 

time. Some of the complex issues resolved are initiating a return from a shopper or even tracking the order status. LiveMessages allow the retailers to provide outstanding customer experience and then convert these very customers into the most loyal customers. 

Conclusion 

Today’s retail customers require personalized messages and special offers as per their expectations. The retail shoppers decide to make a purchase only after visiting the various sites, reading some online review of products or even deciding to buy first with a shopping cart and then abandoning the cart. The needs of the customers can be addressed with carefully planned marketing strategies with Salesforce Cloud software such as Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud or even Service Cloud. 

Some of the key strategies for the Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform are adopting customer segmentation with Email Studio, mapping customer journeys through Journey Builders, using the powerful Salesforce Connector with Marketing Cloud, or even providing smart customer services with Salesforce LiveMessages.