Data-Driven Decisions
Leveraging Subscription Management Solutions for Enhanced Customer Insights in Retail
What’s important about customer insights? The best insights can personalize offerings and CX, manage inventory, and optimize customer relationships and revenue. It’s all about harnessing the most cutting-edge analyses to support operations in an ultra-competitive industry.No one knew what Egyptian hieroglyphs meant.
They were just a mystery, packed with meaning, but inaccessible to everyone.
Until French soldiers accidentally discovered the Rosetta Stone in 1799 during Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt.
The Rosetta Stone was a decree written in three different languages side by side- demotic, Greek, and hieroglyphic.
And it helped Jean-Francois Champollion translate it in 1822, opening up a new world, and transforming our understanding of one of the most important cultures in ancient history.
You might be wondering the point of this story in an article about subscription retail.
It’s about how unlocking the meaning of information that’s always been there can change everything.
Retail Subscription
Given the instability of the last couple of years, retailers have looked for ways to bring in a little stability. Enter the subscription model, which has become a way to bring in steady revenue, and grow customer loyalty.
Everyone wins, right?
Not necessarily. Because there’s another level to subscriptions that many retailers don’t understand. But the thing is that this level can change everything.
The subscription model relies on an intense understanding of customer needs and preferences, and the insights that provides. It’s the only way to effectively create and evolve the retail offering, as well as figure out what they will want in the future to keep them happy and loyal.
A whole world that’s completely hidden without the right translation, so to speak.
What Happens without Customer Insights
How are you supposed to make your customers happy if you don’t know who they are or what they want?
If you’re a subscription retailer who doesn’t have customer insights, you’re probably facing some or all of these problems:
Higher churn rates: It’s easy to lose customers in the retail landscape. There’s so much competition, and bigger brands can afford to give huge discounts, offer products and experiences that are personalised, to a wider market.
Customers expect an excellent customer experience that’s completely tailored to who they are as individuals. And if they don’t get it, they will easily go to a competitor that will give them what they want. And there’s no reason to think they will come back.
Retail brands with superior customer experience bring in 5.7 times more revenue than competitors that lag in customer experience.
– Forbes/RetailCustomerExperience.com
Inefficient Inventory Management: All retailers know how costly mistakes in inventory management can be. And it’s not usually their fault – retail is volatile and notoriously fickle. We’re all human and without the right tools, we’re going to guess wrong sometimes.
Without reliable customer insights (that include predictive analytics) you’ll get caught out from time to time. And whether you’re paying storage for deadstock, or you’ve run out so lose customers to companies that have the items they’re after, you’ll lose money.
Missed Cross-Selling and Upselling Opportunities: Retailers know it’s a lot easier to sell to customers you already have, rather than convincing new and potential customers to spend their money.
One of the great things about subscriptions is that you have a base of customers who are more willing to buy from you and spend more per item.
But without the knowledge you need about your customers, you can’t identify and leverage those opportunities for cross-selling and upselling. That impacts both your short-term and long-term revenue and growth.
How Customer Insights Help Subscription Retailers
Just like Jean-Francois Champollion created a completely new understanding of people by cracking open the “data” about them, you can unlock that customer data just sitting in your system.
It’s there for the taking.
And here’s how you can get insights you can leverage to seriously boost your chances of success as a subscription retailer.
Personalization: Knowing how the behaviour and preferences of your customers changes and alters as time goes on (and the reasons that happens) will help you not only personalise your subscription offerings, but how you interact with your customers, from how you shape your website CX, to how you create social media, rewards programmes, etc.
Keep your customers: When you understand what makes your customers (and potential customers) happy in everything from what you offer to the words that you use, you’ll be able to cut churn. And this is especially true with subscription customers where you have the chance on an ongoing relationship to remind them of why you’re so awesome.
Clued-up inventory management: The best analytics will be able to forecast demand more accurately while keeping a real-time eye on your stock levels. That way you’re far less likely to get “pinched” with either stockouts or deadstock.
Better product development: The more feedback and hard data you get about what makes customers excited and what turns them off, the more insights your teams will have to shape future offerings. And that can work for retail curation (building collaborative relationships for future offerings) or your own product innovation and development that stands out and meets needs.
Critical decision-making: Retail businesses need to always have one eye on the future. And when you have the best subscription customer analytics, you’ll get an overall view of not only your performance, but the customer lifecycle, what your competitors are doing, market trends, and a host of other things that you need to know about to guide strategic decisions that are critical to driving growth and efficiency.
You must know what the present is to know what the future could look like.
Here’s the Key to Unlocking Those Insights
You want to unlock that sweet, sweet data.
The great news is that just like the Rosetta Stone was one thing that changed everything, you only need one thing to change everything.
That’s a subscription management solution that knows exactly what to do with your data and tie it up in a neat package for you, with no extra effort on your behalf. After all, you’re busy enough.
The best subscription management solution will combine all the power of data-driven AI and advanced analytics, to give you the insights you need to take your retail business forward.
Here’s how they can make a difference in how you work:
Forecasting: AI-powered tools can analyze historical customer data, as well as what’s going on in the world, market trends, seasonality, past events, etc.) to predict the future behaviour of both your current and potential customers. This helps you anticipate demand in an ongoing way, not just a one-off.
Segmentation and personalization: The more you can whittle down your current and ideal customer bases into segments and microsegments, the easier it will be to meet them where they are. Analytics will segment those customers for you, based on their behaviors and preferences.
That means you’ll have targeted marketing and tailored offerings in your personalized subscription experiences. That boosts their loyalty and keeps them coming back for more and stops them from leaving.
According to Zippia, a 5% increase in customer retention results in a profit increase of 25% to 95% percent.
Automated inventory management: All the problems that come with manual inventory management will be gone. No more human errors, no more guesswork, no more oh-we-missed-that. Even your supply chain can be monitored! You’ll have a system that constantly checks how much you have of everything, at all times. And the best systems will order things for you.
No more missed sales opportunities: Data-driven insights will also be able to spot customers who are at-risk so that you can action targeted retention strategies. AND the analytics will identify the opportunities for upselling and cross-selling at the best time, so you’ll never miss another sales opportunity.
More agility: It’s a word that’s thrown around a lot, but it’s still important! When you have access to real-time data on customer interactions, transactions, and feedback, you’ll always be able to make agile, informed decisions whether for individual customers or long-term growth of your company. You won’t have to wait around anymore or cross your fingers and hope for the best.
Excellent product development and decisions: Data-driven AI subscription management solution will continually push feedback to multiple areas in your retail business. You’ll get what you need for innovating your products. And you’ll always have a clear idea of the numbers, so that you can make decisions that keep building your growth and revenue.
It Can Be Yours for the Taking
Even though they didn’t know what the Rosetta Stone was, Napoleon’s soldiers knew they had something of value. They just had to find the person to unlock its value.
And it’s the same with you and your subscription retail business.
Don’t deny yourself all the benefits you can get with data-driven insights. You have nothing to gain but happy customers and a stronger revenue stream.
Let’s chat further.
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