Retail customer engagement comes in many forms. Loyalty programs, marketing emails, SMS, events. Many brands run several at once, but have no systemized practice behind them. Building one from the ground up doesn’t mean setting aside the customer engagement methods you already have. It means turning what you already have into the foundation of your clienteling program.
Clienteling starts with customer engagement you already do
Clienteling turns siloed customer engagement into an ongoing connection. At its core, clienteling uses relationship selling strategies to build ongoing and deeply personal relationships with customers. If clienteling is new to you, our complete guide to clienteling describes how it works and where it fits in the growth strategy of today’s retailers.
For retailers just starting out, you’re ready to begin your clienteling program if:
- You capture unique customer details at the point of sale or through your loyalty program.
- Customer outreach is already informed by transaction data and loyalty tiers.
- You already use milestones like birthdays as a reason to reach out.
- You’re ready for someone to own 1:1 follow-up with customers, whether that’s an individual associate or a store team.
Customer details at the point of sale become a shared customer record
Every purchase, loyalty sign-up, and email address captured at the register is customer data your retail customer engagement program is using. A clienteling platform brings it into one record for each customer, then adds what only a conversation reveals, such as sizes, preferences, or a special occasion coming up.
Transaction data and loyalty tiers become lists of who to contact
The data that decides who gets a marketing email can also decide which customers receive personalized outreach. Recent buyers, top loyalty tiers, and customers who haven’t been in store for a while become a short list, for each store or each associate, of who to contact. Corporate may be the one to provide that list, but store leadership decides the best way to work the list, and who gets 1:1 outreach.
The milestones you already mark become reasons to reach out
If your brand already sends a birthday email or a post-purchase thank-you, you’re already a step closer to clienteling. In a clienteling program, those messages stop being sent as corporate marketing and start coming from someone the customer actually knows.
1:1 follow-up can be owned by an associate or by a store team
Retailers getting started with clienteling often ask for 1:1 outreach, and 1:1 doesn’t have to mean one associate’s book. It can also mean a message a store team member puts their name on. In associate-based clienteling, each associate keeps their own customers and follows up personally. In team-based clienteling, the store team shares that work: routine messages go out on the store’s behalf, and whoever is on shift picks up the reply with the customer’s history in view. Either way, someone owns the follow-up, and neither model requires commissioned associates or a device for every person on the floor.
Tulip Clienteling brings these pieces together, with customer capture, targeted lists, and follow-up tasks that tell associates who to contact and when.
Three fundamental steps for a new clienteling program
In our Clienteling Benchmark Report, clienteled customers made repeat purchases 29% faster over a six-month period than customers who received no clienteling communications. With the foundational pieces above in place, these three steps set your clienteling program up for success:
- Name an owner: Choose one person to run the program, with authority over store operations and a direct line to an executive sponsor.
- Pilot in about 10% of stores: In a small fleet, this amounts to two or three stores. Mix flagships with average performers so the results tell you something about the whole fleet, and give each pilot store a manager motivated to make sure the program works.
- Measure one number: Follow-up completion, the amount of assigned outreach that gets done, is the initial metric to measure. Customer replies, repeat visits, and revenue all depend on follow-ups actually happening.
The first 90 days will look different for an associate-based clienteling program versus a team-based one, and what comes next depends on how your stores sell. Veronica Beard doubled industry benchmarks in under a year, with 42% higher average order value, and its case study credits the result to its rollout strategy. AG Jeans saw a 3.6x increase in conversion on its outreach in its first six months on Tulip Clienteling.
With the foundation in place, the next decision in building your retail customer engagement program is which model fits how your customers shop and how your stores are measured. Our guide to relationship selling in retail breaks down associate-based and team-based clienteling, and what each needs to work.
