4 key clienteling strategies to drive retail growth in 2025
Retail leaders like you are constantly looking for clear data to guide strategy and investment. When it comes to engaging your best customers, the question isn’t just if clienteling works, but how well it works and where to focus your resources.
Our 2nd annual Tulip Clienteling benchmark report reveals exactly where the most successful brands are investing their time and resources to drive revenue and build lasting customer loyalty. The key finding: Proactive, personalized, human-led interaction is more powerful and profitable than ever.
Here are the top 4 strategic takeaways from the 2025 Tulip Clienteling benchmark report.
How relevant is clienteling in 2025?
For retail leaders focused on store performance, the answer is a yes, a great deal. Our data shows an 11% increase in total clienteling communications per store this year compared to last year. Retailers are actively leaning into this strategy because other methods are losing their effectiveness.
For years, customers have been overloaded by automated, corporate-driven mass marketing—even the types that claim to be “personalized” often feel cold and impersonal. This has led to customer fatigue, causing click-through rates and conversion rates to continue to drop.
What shoppers truly want now is authenticity: Thoughtful, personal, human-centric engagement that builds trust.
Clienteling provides the essential human connection that automated marketing cannot, protecting and strengthening the store associate’s role as a trusted advisor and directly driving higher quality customer interactions (which we’ll discuss more below).
This growth confirms that modern clienteling is a vital, non-negotiable strategy. Investment in secure, stable, and associate-friendly platforms to enable this human element is necessary to support sustainable revenue growth.
What communication channels do customers prefer?
Customer preference for how they receive and respond to personal communication is rapidly changing, and retailers must adjust their customer engagement strategies accordingly. Because clienteling communications through Tulip are delivered through a customer’s preferred channel, the shift in overall usage clearly reflects evolving customer choice.
The biggest shift we saw this year was the move away from traditional corporate channels:
- Email remains a popular channel, but its overall usage dropped by over 3% from last year.
- In contrast, text & iMessage usage increased by 7%.
This channel shift means customers increasingly see clienteling communication as a personal, two-way conversation that belongs in their messaging apps, not their cluttered email inbox.
What are global channel trends like?
The preferred channel for clienteling varies significantly around the world, meaning a one-size-fits-all approach will fail for brands with a global presence.
- Asia-Pacific (APAC): WhatsApp is the most used channel, followed by email.
- Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA): Email remains dominant, but WhatsApp is a close second.
- North America: Email and text & iMessage are almost equal in usage.
This insight makes it clear that retail leaders must choose a clienteling platform that gives their teams the capability to communicate with customers through multiple, regional-specific channels.
How does clienteling perform against corporate marketing and regular selling?
The effectiveness of proactive, 1:1 communication far surpasses impersonal mass methods.
Typical corporate company-to-consumer marketing communications convert at just 2−5%. Clienteling, however, delivers a significantly higher return.
Communications from store associates convert to a sale at an average of 11%, and for the highest-performing brands, this can reach up to 37%. Beyond boosting conversion, clienteling significantly increases Average Order Value (AOV) by as much as 194% when compared to the total AOV without it.
This is not a marginal improvement—it’s a fundamental difference in performance. Clienteling provides highly qualified leads and personalized attention that turns communication directly into high-value revenue.
How does clienteling influence customer behavior?
Clienteling’s most powerful effect is changing customer behavior over time.
To measure this, we compared customer behavior 12 months before their first clienteling communication to their purchasing behavior during the following 6 months (where they could receive between 1 and 20 clienteling communications), using a control group that received none as a baseline.
The data makes it clear: When a customer receives clienteling communications from a retail associate, they make more purchases, return to purchase faster, and have a higher overall spend over time (see the full report for the exact facts and figures).
Clienteling is a long-term strategy for increasing Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). By enabling associates to build genuine relationships, you are building a more valuable, stable, and predictable customer base.
Key clienteling strategies and takeaways for 2025
Clienteling is no longer an optional strategy; it is a crucial discipline for driving both immediate revenue and long-term customer value. You might even say that retention & loyalty are the new acquisition.
The top four takeaways from the 2025 Tulip Clienteling benchmark report prove that retailers must empower their store teams with the best tools to maintain a human-centric approach to sales:
- Clienteling is a critical growth driver: The 11% increase in communication volume proves top retailers are doubling down on this strategy to combat customer fatigue from impersonal, mass-market efforts.
- The channel shift is real: Customers are abandoning email for more personal 1:1 channels like Text/iMessage and WhatsApp. Strategic investment in platforms that enable these channels is necessary.
- Clienteling delivers massive ROI: Conversion rates average 11% and can reach 37%, far exceeding the 2−5% seen in corporate marketing. Furthermore, Clienteling increases the Average Order Value (AOV) by up to 194%.
- Clienteling builds long-term value: Customers who are clienteled make more purchases, return faster, and have a higher overall spend in the long run, directly improving Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
Learn more
This blog just scratches the surface of all the robust insights covered in the 2nd annual Tulip Clienteling benchmark report. If you’re ready to see how your brand stacks up and dive into the full data set, download the report now.
If you want a personalized, 1:1 demo of what Tulip Clienteling could look like for your brand, book a demo with our team of retail experts today.
