Introduction
Luxury shopping has a reputation for being personal, intimate, and one-on-one. As a result, many luxury brands are latecomers to the world of digital commerce. But in a post-pandemic environment, where many consumers have become avid e-shoppers, online customer relations among luxury brands are due for a makeover.
Clienteling is the fine art of long-term customer relations, but it’s no secret that among luxury brands, digital marketing has a reputation for being a little cold. Consumers of luxury brands—whether shopping in-store or online—expect a personal, one-on-one shopping experience.
Salesforce can help luxury projects give customers the hyper-premium relationship that they expect from their favourite brands, by providing businesses with a detailed knowledge of their individual customers’ preferences and purchasing behaviour.
Luxury brands must become data champions. This will translate to friendlier, more enthusiastic consumer/brand relations—and more growth in sales. With the Salesforce CDP, brands can map customer journeys and cultivate the personalised buying experiences that luxury consumers require
Online marketing strategy has shifted from data collection to data analysis. This allows development of a relationship of trust and reciprocity in which the consumer and the brand know, recognise—and trust—each other.
This means that e-commerce is necessarily becoming the intimate experience that luxury brands already specialise in. It also means that data utilised is data voluntarily provided by the consumer.
How does a luxury brand make the most of the data shared by their consumers, while capturing the boutique charm they are known for?
With the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Luxury brands are now able to curate a detailed database of each consumer’s shopping experience, and offer the customer a friendly, personal relationship. Using a fully detailed database compiled using the technology offered by the Salesforce CDP, it becomes possible to orchestrate marketing campaigns that proactively address the 20% of customers with the highest spending power.
While widespread use of CRM is already a matter of fact for many players in the retail industry, the same is not always true for luxury brands, and yet, with online sales soaring, luxury players are rethinking clienteling and long term customer relationships— as they should be.
This means having information—data—on your consumers, including things like measurements, favorite cuts and colors, latest purchases, products they’ve liked on Instagram—and others that they don’t. The houses that are pulling ahead are the ones that have access to this information. In other words, the winning business are the ones that invested in their CRM five to ten years ago and have had the time to rethink, strategize, improve, and build better.
It’s true that implementing up a CRM takes time. That’s because it impacts the fundamental organization of the company—the Salesforce CDP can provide a much-needed single source of truth, and the benefits are undeniable.
Communication has more to do with brand presence and engagement than the bottom of the funnel— how can they interact effectively with customers on social media? How can they scale up through an omnichannel strategy? By digitizing the charm their consumer’s desire
For example, classic phones calls have fallen out of fashion in favor of hip events and engagement strategies. A customer might discover a brand via their Instagram, and they make a first purchase. With the technology offered by the Salesforce CDP—such as Omnichannel—the brand is able to personally invite the customer to a fashion show. A digital platform allows them to attend, and a personal shopper is able to offer advice and provide a shopping list—all online.
Next, the customer can find the designs they like via the brands application. The customer meets their personal shopper in the brand’s private showroom—utilizing tech like augmented reality.
This is the future of the VIP, one-on-one shopping experience.
Customers are driving what’s next by going beyond in every step of their digital journey. Whether it is online shopping, social commerce, smart chatbots or subscription or membership-based shopping, what matters is Customer Experience.
When it comes to luxury retail, digital trends are impacted by emerging technologies at an unprecedented rate along with evolving customer behavior, mainly coming from two new generations –Millennials and Generation Z.
This big shift in customer preferences demands a different type of white-glove experience – one that offers omnichannel communication geared to fit individual taste and style. These customer preferences are stored and activated within the Salesforce CDP.
The Salesforce CDP is a surefire way for luxury brands to get ahead of evolving customer expectations and competition, by unifying customer data sources to provide a complete picture of the Customer Journey.
Built on the world’s #1 CRM, Salesforce CDP helps companies unify customer data from any source—including sales, service, marketing, loyalty and commerce—and consolidate it into a single source to be used for powerful personalization and analytics use cases.
To sustain customer loyalty, luxury brands need to maintain their reputations for creating exceptional, personalised experiences.
So how does Salesforce provide these experiences?
The Salesforce CDP offers a way of creating a unified profile of each customer — a single source of truth housing all customer data, including profile information, details of past transactions, and any digital interactions. Even better, it’s augmented by the latest tech across AI and automation to deliver those real-time, personalised experiences that drive business efficiency.
With Salesforce CDP you can create a clear picture of your customers, which helps you to make the impossible possible and create a better customer experience.
The marketing field is constantly improving, and it can be challenging to keep up with what’s next in the unpredictable nature of customer journeys. CDPs are relatively new but they are crucial in the age of data-driven marketing. The Salesforce CDP aims to be the growth driver for today’s luxury retail brands. Whether it is launching a digital strategy to deliver precise personalised engagements or building a modern technology stack that ensures productivity, marketing effectiveness and reporting
