We’ve recently discussed why it’s important to get to know your customers, and how to put what you know about customers to the test.
Now we’re ready to discuss proving what you know about your customers, and refining that knowledge over time.
See also: How customer profiling can fuel your business growth
Confirm what you know
If you’ve begun sending assortments to stores based on your customer profile hypotheses, you should be getting data back that confirms you’re on the right track.
But there are other ways to confirm what your customers want — and sometimes, they’ll even tell you themselves! That’s what makes loyalty programs so effective — in exchange for a discount or exclusive promotions, your customers will share information about their buying habits that you can use to confirm and refine what you already know.
Big-name retailers are leading the way; Target recently announced that its new loyalty program, Target Circle, will officially launch in fall 2019. The retailer explicitly stated that the program gives the company more data about shopping habits, that it in turn uses to provide personalized deals to members.
Proactively plan your buys
daVinci’s Buy Management System was built with omni channel in mind. With daVinci, once you’ve defined your profiles. It also allows you to assort your stores into these profiles. And with our advanced retail store clustering algorithm, you’ll be able to identify the optimal SVG for each product category and derive your assortments accordingly.
By leveraging what you know about your customers and optimizing your clusters for your customer profiles, your plan and buys will be more accurate than ever, and you’ll reap the rewards — in fewer markdowns and greater profits.
Continue to refine
Omni-channel assortment planning isn’t something you do once, and then you’re good to go — it’s an approach that you work at and constantly refine. After all:
- There’s always more to learn
- Customers change
- Trends change
What you know today may not be true in a month or a year. That’s why it’s important to continually monitor, refine and test the following:
- Your product attributes
- Your customer groups
- Your loyalty program
- Your marketing and messaging
See also: Download the complete guide to Omni Channel assortment planning
Identifying the right products for your customers and ensuring their availability in the right channels is one of the toughest challenges that a retailer faces. And it’s a challenge that’s not going away — as technology evolves, we continue to learn more and more about shoppers and their habits, and the retailers that effectively track, measure and use that data will find themselves with a serious leg up on the competition.
Related Product
daVinci Assortment Planning
daVinci’s Assortment Planning solution gives merchants the power to tailor buys by the customer to improve sell-thru and ensure each assortment is profitable from the start.
