Omnichannel customer retention is correlated with customer satisfaction and loyalty, two factors contributing to your sales performance across touch points.
A Point-of-Sale (POS) system can provide a unified hub with essential information in one platform, easing customer management and relationship-building. After all, fractured customer management in each channel can make you more prone to customer loss – and to dissatisfied customers for systematic errors or lack of data sync. This article deep dives into how a Point-of-Sale system can help you improve customer retention and omnichannel sales performance.
How does customer retention impact a retail business?
Customer retention refers to how long you attract and maintain your existing customer base. Retained customers have already experienced your products and services, if they are happy and satisfied, they are likely to become repeat customers and refer more customers to your business.
Zippia’s study shows that even a small increase of 5% in customer retention can result in a profit increase of 25% or more.
Next, you will also experience higher customer lifetime value (CLTV), indicating the total revenue a customer generates throughout their relationship with your business. Thus, your sales performance gets more positive over time, regardless of the competitive market.
Additionally, a loyal customer base has a more predictable sales pattern due to their repeated sales, browsing behaviors, and preferences. It eases your inventory management and forecast, staffing decisions, and overall business planning. From the point of retained customer base’s preferences and behaviors, you can leverage such insights for a more customer-centric business strategy to develop targeted promotions and improve your product offerings.
Another point is that acquiring new customers is significantly more expensive than retaining existing ones. Thus, keeping your current customers happy can save money on marketing campaigns while enhancing the effectiveness of promotional activities.
Take advantage of a Point-of-Sale system to optimize the omnichannel customer retention strategy
- Fast and secure checkout process
A POS accounting integration enables the automatic calculation of taxes, discounts, and the total amount due. It eliminates the need for manual calculations by the cashier. So, the waiting time of customers gets shorter while the errors significantly decrease.
Moreover, POS systems can help you offer self-checkouts or display prices along with discounts on screen. Thus, your customers have more active roles in the checkout process, which also contributes to customer satisfaction and customer retention rate with your brand.
Integrating your POS system with payment processors such as PayPal and Stripe eliminates the need for multiple merchant accounts for each channel. It can alleviate your management and ensure consistent security protocols across all transactions.
Various payment methods bring convenience to your customers as they are not restricted to traditional approaches like cash or credit cards.
- Synchronized promotion programs
Running an omnichannel business exposes your brand to a larger audience base. Yet, it requires an effective management system to ensure consistent operation across channels. Otherwise, customers will be dissatisfied when they encounter difficulties or inconsistencies when shopping on your different platforms.
POS integration enables you to sync promotion programs and update crucial data in real time for both online and offline stores. In other words, your customers can get consistent discounts and loyalty programs across different channels.
Seamless execution of loyalty programs from all touchpoints can level up your customer satisfaction. It also encourages them to repeat purchases to earn more points for bigger discounts.
- Effective inventory management
A POS system collects data across your sales channels. Its unified information hub gives you the leverage of synchronized and real-time updated inventory data.
Thus, customers can easily browse online, check product availability in-store at high accuracy, and still have the option to buy online for delivery or vice versa. Such flexibility and consistency in product availability build trust and avoid customer frustration.
- Easy delivery tracking, refunds, and exchanges
A POS integration with your online store can provide a unified information hub. It helps your team easily access and effectively track orders, stock, and delivery status.
Centralized management stimulates collaboration among departments. Hence, your team can communicate better and facilitate customers with quicker resolution of order-related issues.
Besides, the POS system stores all transaction details. So, in case your customers are not satisfied with the products, you can easily find a specific order to process a return or exchange. The POS integration also allows customers to directly process the refunds with the original payment method or store credit.
- Modern shopping experience
Having a POS integration can help modernize your customers’ shopping experience at your physical store. They can complete checkouts without needing one-to-one staff assistance. This approach is called self-checkout (SCO), in which customers scan item barcodes and then pay for their total shop by themselves. It offers customers more active roles in their purchases and saves them from waiting in a long queue to checkout.
Besides, the transparent display of order details, accumulated points, and total payment on the POS screen alleviates their self-checkouts. If it comes to traditional checkouts with staff, the POS screen can also see such details on the monitor to check before printing bills. It helps enhance their trust in your brand’s prestige.
5 tips to win higher customer retention with a POS system
- Leverage insights for targeted marketing
Knowing your customers, such as their pain points and preferences, is the key to unlocking the success of your marketing campaigns. You can get such valuable insights from the POS system’s centralized data hub on customers across your omnichannel business.
These metrics and data-based insights ease customer segmentation based on demographics, purchase history, or browsing behavior. Hence, your targeted marketing campaigns and promotions can resonate better with specific customer groups.
Additionally, POS’s analytics reports provide a great foundation for identifying buying trends, popular products, or peak sales times. Thus, you can optimize inventory management, product offerings, and staffing to meet customer needs better.
- Develop your loyalty and referral programs
The best way is to incentivize your retained customers through your loyalty programs. A popular method is to offer point collection and classify customer tiers based on their repeat purchases.
The more points they accumulate, the more free samples, discounts, and gifts they can receive. Such programs can encourage your customers to repeat and even increase the value of their purchases. To get the word out about the loyalty program, and to send alerts about discounts and deals, consider push notifications or in-app notifications.
A referral program can activate the process, incentivizing customers to refer others to shop in your store. According to Viral Loops, 90% of customers tend to trust a brand their friends recommend more than other marketing sources.
You can easily create and manage all the programs thanks to a POS’s centralized information hub and real-time tracking. Its automatic system also minimizes human errors by manual inputs and data extractions. Overall, it can enhance your campaigns’ effectiveness.
- Optimize your post-sale services
Building relationships with customers is the core of retention efforts. Thus, you should maintain and strengthen these connections even after the completed sales process.
A point-of-sale system enables you to collect customer profiles, including all their contact information. You should also integrate a POS into a CRM and CDP system to create a centralized information hub and support your customer services. Thus, you can reach out to your customers through different touchpoints, including social media, emails, and phone.
For example, you can develop delivery tracking systems through integrated POS into your store. You can send push notifications of the delivery status on your customer phones. You should also send post-purchase emails to thank their purchases and suggest relevant usage tips, product recommendations, birthday greetings, or exclusive offers.
Moreover, you can use POS to send automated reminders about expiring points, upcoming rewards, or special program events. Thus, you can constantly update customers about your new loyalty programs.
- Diversify payment methods securely
A POS system allows you to accept different payment methods, such as cash, cards, and online payments. The variety provides more convenience in your customers’ digital experience. In addition, a POS system can help connect your store with payment processors such as PayPal and Strive.
These platforms can guarantee high security for online payments and protect your customers’ sensitive information from leaks or hacks. They can correspondingly build and strengthen your customers’ trust in your business.
- Choose a suitable POS system
Here are some POS system features to look for when choosing a POS system:
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) integration: An ideal POS system for customer retention improvement can support your integration with a CRM system. Hence, you can create a unified customer profile with purchase history and interactions across all touchpoints.
- Loyalty program management: Loyalty programs are crucial to retaining customers. So, you should look for a POS system that manages loyalty points, rewards, and tiers, incentivizing repeat purchases like Magestore POS for Magento and Shopify POS.
- Data Analytics and Reporting: To reduce guesswork, choose a POS system with robust reporting tools. This will allow you to achieve deeper insights into customer behavior and feedback.
Magestore POS for CRM
Revamp your omnichannel customer retention strategy today
Omnichannel customer retention is important for a business’s growth. Acquiring and satisfying retained customers requires a lot of work and effort. Integrating a POS system is an ideal solution for your management and marketing campaign creation, thanks to its unified customer information hub, automation, and ability to sync data.
We hope the aforementioned strategies are helpful clues for your business strategies to extend customer retention through optimal shopping experiences, personalized marketing campaigns, and insightful post-sales activities. To take your omnichannel business messaging to the next level, consider implementing push notifications, SMS notifications, in-app notifications, and WhatsApp messaging to reach customers on the channel of their preference. Start a free trial or contact us for more tailored solutions to your interaction with existing customers.
