While many new customers may visit a department store during peak season, they might not become loyal clients right away. Many retailers wonder how to apply concrete methods to build meaningful relationships with customers and encourage them to return after peak season. This article offers a few tips to help convert new shoppers into long-term customers through scalable and tested engagement and loyalty techniques, ensuring sustained growth even during slower periods.

Building a seamless omnichannel strategy

During the low season, tracking sales and interactions without any blind spots becomes crucial in determining the effectiveness of specific operations. It also allows retailers to react quickly with targeted campaigns when certain strategies are not successful.

Many department stores face common challenges in tracking sales and communications across different departments and branches. Managing various divisions that cannot access each other's data can become a major obstacle to delivering a great customer experience and achieving growth.

This is why more and more department stores are implementing omnichannel solutions that:

1. Track customer behaviour
2. Measure the effectiveness of store operations
3. Monitor inventory
4. Facilitate data transmission between stores and branches

Implementing an omnichannel platform is a crucial first step in building an effective engagement strategy. It streamlines operations, enables data-sharing between branches, aligns different teams to work seamlessly toward results-drivengoals, and, most importantly, ensures consistent client services across all locations.

Anticipating customers' needs and wants

Once an omnichannel strategy is in place, one of the most valuable data points to record is individual customer information. This allows retailers to personalise their offerings and anticipate customer needs.

Personalisation is one of the most significant factors in enhancing client engagement. However, the challenge for most retailers is that personalising their offerings requires understanding individual customer preferences with a scalable method. They must also ensure this information is shared across branches and stores.

One effective solution is creating detailed customer profiles. By storing key client information—such as past interactions with sales representatives, purchase history, brand preferences, and average spending—retailers can better tailor their services to meet individual needs.

On a practical level, sales associates should have easy access to this information to deliver highly personalised recommendations during one-on-one interactions. Not only does this enhance the customer experience, but it also boosts employee confidence by removing the guesswork from the sales process.

Customer engagement is proportional to sales associates' engagement

Sales associates are the face of their company. Giving them more opportunities to engage with clients and rewarding them for doing so successfully is crucial for any retailer's growth. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. retail organisations experience an average employee turnover rate of 60%. High turnover is problematic for retailers, as

studies show that customers are 77% more likely to purchase a product when they trust the person recommending it. In this sense, customer engagement is directly linked to associate engagement and trust.

Empowering sales associates to take ownership of their roles as local experts and even micro-influencers has proven effective, especially when combined with an omnichannel strategy and a highly targeted, personalized approach. More companies are investing in solutions that provide sales associates with opportunities to engage through recommendation pages, social media, appointment scheduling, and direct communication with shoppers outside the store. By increasing touchpoints with customers, retailers can deliver high-quality service while also motivating sales associates to build lasting one-on-one relationships. Tracking successful interactions and rewarding individuals for their engagement has also been shown to boost associate morale and performance.

Building a scalable communication strategy

Nourishing 1-1 relationships with customers is essential to build loyalty, but how can department stores also grow customer engagement through a repeatable and scalable methodology?

It has been demonstrated that personalized interactions and recurring positive engagements drive customer loyalty.

Many retailers have found success by implementing the 3-3-3 or 2-2-2 strategy.

What is the 2-2-2 strategy?

The 2-2-2 strategy in retail communication is a structured approach designed to maintain consistent, personalised follow-ups with customers after a sale or interaction. It nurtures customer relationships and enhances loyalty, proving highly successful within various client bases.

Example:

• 2 days after the sale: Send a thank-you message and offer assistance if needed.
• 2 weeks after the sale: Follow up to ensure the product meets expectations and suggest complementary products based on the initial purchase or recent browsing history.
• 2 months after the sale: Reconnect with the customer to share updates on new arrivals, promotions, or loyalty programs.

The shift from manual to automated processes offers several benefits. Associates no longer need to spend valuable time identifying which customers to contact or tracking down past purchase details. This efficiency allows them to focus on high-value interactions, increasing productivity and optimising clienteling efforts.

Delivering the in-store experience online with AI

E-commerce has become a crucial aspect of the customer buying experience and changed shoppers' habits by providing round-the-clock shopping accessibility. With this new reality, providing personalised responses at any time of the day is becoming an expectation for customers.

While AI cannot replace human recommendations on an emotional level, it can bridge the gap by offering off-hours support and relevant product suggestions when a sales associate is unavailable. AI technology is increasingly tailored to specific retail use cases, making it an essential tool for retailers to consider.

In today's highly competitive market, incorporating AI has become a crucial part in implementing an effective customer engagement journey. A well-designed conversational AI becomes stronger and smarter over time, because it can be trained from your own retail intelligence, allowing it to deliver autonomous, human-like interactions, enhancing the shopping experience. Leveraging years of customer and associate interactions, AI-powered solutions can assist shoppers with visual browsing and personalised product recommendations. Advanced systems also integrate seamlessly with inventory, ensuring only available products are suggested. Additionally, retail-specific AI models can automate product tagging, identifying key features of new items to provide accurate and relevant recommendations during customer interactions.

Conclusion

The key to a successful client retention strategy lies in a retailer's ability to accurately understand their shoppers' needs and deliver personalised outreach. By incorporating automation, empowering sales associates, leveraging AI, and implementing a scalable engagement strategy, retailers can build a strong foundation for long-term success.

*Salesfloor stands as an award-winning clienteling and customer engagement platform, empowering retailers to foster meaningful conversations, drive recommendations, and boost sales. By offering innovative tools such as clienteling, virtual shopping, and conversational AI, Salesfloor enables seamless customer engagement across all channels.

Trusted by over 50,000 associates from leading retailers in apparel, beauty, jewelry, and beyond, Salesfloor is redefining the role of store associates in the modern retail landscape. Renowned brands such as Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdale's, and Chico's rely on Salesfloor to achieve measurable results, including higher online conversion rates, larger basket sizes, and reduced return rates.*

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