2024 is heading for a grand finish. Do you know whether your customers are ready to spend their time (and money) with you during the holiday season? Well, just how personal did you get?

65% of your customers expect your retail brand to cater to their changing needs. It’s not enough to just treat retail as a transaction. In fact, that’s exactly what your customers don’t want, as the same study showed that 61% say that most companies treat them as a number. Ouch.

Today, if your brand isn’t engaging in deep personalization of the customer’s entire shopping journey, you won’t be fostering the loyalty needed to win their limited dollars during Black Friday or Cyber Monday. It’s the key differentiator that the most successful retail brands are using to win during the holidays, especially when both online and offline shopping can feel so impersonal.

Remember that customers feel that most brands they interact with treat them like a number. That’s bad news for the industry as a whole, but great news for your brand because the bar is set so low. Even though so many in retail have been banging the drum for personalization for years, so many brands still get it wrong. So much so that consumer loyalty has dropped from 79% in 2022 to 68% in 2023.

So consider that come Black Friday, your customers will be inundated with sales and promotions and discounts and all sorts of marketing messages. The reason your retail brand should be clienteling starting now is to create that personalized relationship that will cut through that noise and activate their loyalty.

Clienteling, in short, uses the robust and multifaceted data collected in your CRM to provide custom, intimate shopping experiences for your customers. Instead of simply rewarding previous transactions, clienteling is more akin to having a relationship with a great personal shopper. They know what each customer likes, the fit, the color, the seasonal trend, and more to curate great offerings that lead to the right product match.

So if your customer has this sort of relationship with your brand, come the busy shopping season, they will be much more motivated to respond to your promotions.

Let’s start with some table stakes. While most retailers may be using a CRM solution, many on the market today do not have clienteling as a core focus. A platform like Salesforce, for example, has transactions at the core of the product. That’s great for conversions, but not for nurturing a long-term, personal relationship.

Investing in a CRM that automates your clienteling is half the battle, especially a solution that can track activities across all of your channels both online and in-store. Omnichannel retail is key to getting a holistic view of each of your customers, and once you do have such a CRM in place, your team can leverage all this data to provide the right clienteling experience.

Modern marketing lives and dies on SMS. While email is a powerful marketing tool, its open rate hovers around 30% at best. But SMS open rates are nearly 100%. That’s because SMS has a sentiment of being more personal, prompting users to read each and every one.

Should you worry about annoying your customers with text messages? Well, of course. Your strategy should be judicious and always convey good content. But you should also know that over half of the customers would like to receive promotions via text.

This means your brand should strive to collect as many phone numbers as possible from your clients. Doing so makes clienteling easier and more effective, as your messages will be read more often.

An effective way to collect phone numbers is by launching a keyword campaign:

Provide an irresistible promotion that requires customers to text. It’s also a great way to start a 1-on-1 SMS conversation with each client, which can be facilitated by your clienteling CRM.

Once your CRM starts collecting your customer’s data, now is the time to start earning their trust with curated marketing messages. Note the word curated, as in products intelligently chosen with their interests in mind, not just shotgun promotions of whatever is on sale that week.

By analyzing the products they have purchased online, simply browsed online, what they have purchased in-store, and what they responded to on social media (yes, that’s why omnichannel is so important!) your CRM can easily curate the right products to include in these personalized messages.

A CRM like Endear can collect these curated products in a visually-striking lookbook (we call them Shoppable Stories) that can be embedded into both email and SMS messages. This method has higher transaction rates, and is an overall better experience for the customer.

And because this curated marketing is embedded within a conversation, be sure to prompt your customer to provide feedback. “Hi Emily, if these products aren’t quite your style, just text back to let us know and we’ll switch it up and send you a few more to check out. All still with the 15% discount applied.” This type of engagement with your customer is exactly what you want to start today, to establish trust come Black Friday.

Retail brands know well that no matter how great the virtual experience is, there’s nothing like truly building a relationship by assisting your customers in person. Again, your CRM can help you bring them into your stores so you can elevate that clienteling experience.

By using smart segmentation within your CRM, your team can market to tight groups of your customers with the perfect promotion to get them into your store. For example, your CRM can help you create an SMS campaign focused on shoppers who last purchased lipstick in person two months ago. This group is due to buy a replacement and you already know they don’t mind coming in. Target them with an SMS campaign: “Hi Bianca, it might be time to replace that lipstick! Come on in for a 15% discount on your favorite shade, and a bonus gift as well!”

Once they are there in person, your team can continue the clienteling experience to further cement the relationship. And then…

…keep going! At least through December 2nd, which is Cyber Monday. The savviest retailers can leverage all the customer data gleaned through Black Friday to create highly-personalized email and SMS campaigns that drive ecommerce traffic.

For example, retailers can segment the customers who recently purchased athleisure clothing and hit them with a too-good-to-pass-up Cyber Monday 30% off digital coupon for related workout gear:

Hi Brian,

Hope you’ve been enjoying the warmup hoodie you picked up during Black Friday! We’re clearing out our stock for the year and found a pair of sweatpants that would go perfect with that hoodie of yours. Let’s make it happen this Cyber Monday with this exclusive 30% discount code!

These effective clienteling strategies are just a small sampling of what your brand can do today to lay the groundwork for an excellent Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Interested in the best clienteling CRM on the market today? Contact Endear for a free demo of our platform today!