Endear’s base of retail clients ranges in size, but our sweet spot has always been small to medium-sized businesses. These SMBs all have a lot in common, especially in their pain points.

One key pain point we have heard is the need for smaller marketing & sales teams to do more with less. It’s costly to hire new associates, especially when the average tenure of a sales rep is just 18 months. Often, it’s a better business move to empower smaller, dedicated teams to manage more clients with ease through smart software.

Enter Endear Campaigns.

Campaigns are smart messages that can be automated to send to customer segments based on specific triggers such as dates, milestones, location, and more. These campaigns can also be sent from a specific sales associate, facilitating 2-way dialogues as these email or SMS messages can be replied to by the customer, and end up in that associate’s inbox.

Let’s dive into a few use-cases for Campaigns.

Birthday messages are great ways to surprise your customers with unique discounts, a free gift if the customer visits the store, and new products that might have recently been released.  

In the example above, a Birthday campaign has been created to send to customers who have a known email and have a birthday in the current month. This message can be customized with a birthday promotion to target these customers; a strategy with one of the highest conversion rates in retail at up to a 481% transaction rate.

Manually sending and responding to these birthday emails would be a chore for any sales or marketing team, yet neglecting them would leave revenue on the table. With Campaigns, these can be ‘set-and-forget’ automated messages.

Every retail team knows how difficult it is to bring in and sell to new customers compared to ones who already have a relationship with the brand. One stat you might not be aware of though is that the Lifetime Customer Value is 2X for customers who return compared to those that are lost. Meaning your business is losing more revenue than you may think by letting customers lapse.

The solution to customer churn is better, more personalized messaging. It’s part of what is known as Omnichannel Retail Marketing, where brands work to engage customers wherever they are, through email, SMS, social media, and in-store; and to provide understanding and guidance in their retail journey.

Endear’s Campaigns can be set to automatically send messages to lapsed customers, say, 30 or 60 days after their last transaction. And while the software is clicking ‘send,’ your team is populating the messages with personalized touches. For example, you can segment a lapsed customer group by the last product they purchased:

This way, your team’s email can include messaging such as:

“Hi Emma, it’s been a couple of months since you last bought that sundress. We’re having a promo on similar sundresses in your size if you’re interested in coming back. Here’s a 20% off coupon code just for you.”

One of the most important communications a brand can engage in is to follow up on recent purchases. In fact, research shows that follow-up messages increase conversions and build brand trust. Yet many businesses don’t send any follow-up messages at all, often because they are time-consuming for small teams.

Endear Campaigns alleviates this pain point by making follow-up messaging automatic. Especially effective are when they are delivered by text messages, which have a much higher open rate than email. These follow-up campaigns can be triggered 5-7 days after a purchase, gauging customer satisfaction and reassuring them that their relationship with your brand doesn’t stop with the transaction.

And these follow-up messages are also great ways to upsell customers automatically as well. Campaigns allow teams to embed Lookbooks which can cater to the last item purchased by a customer:

Embedding Lookbooks with similar products to the one they just purchased is an effective way to personalize these messages, telling your customers that your team knows just what they are searching for.

While automatic and recurring messages are the main features of Campaigns, the messaging system can also be used for one-off events. Due to the powerful audience segmentation that Endear’s CRM allows, your team can target specific customers to promote special, local events.

Have a fashion expert coming to one of your locations to provide tips and advice? Choose a segment of your audience who live within a few miles of that location to send a message to through your Campaign. Your team can even make this a 2-way message by soliciting questions to ask the expert, or by inviting your customers to bring along friends or family to get a group discount on any purchases.

This type of hyper-targeting allows your brand’s communications to be that much more personal, and thus, much more effective. Despite having a small team to manage communications, automating these targeted messages can help them reach more of your customers with more touch-points overall.