Retail marketing teams never seem to have enough time in the day, especially in this new era of clienteling we’re doing business in. When marketing needs to be so personal to be as effective as can be, it’s tough for small teams to execute on that level of engagement with each customer.

Yet this type of 1-on-1 marketing matters. A 2020 study showed “70% of companies that use advanced personalization have already earned 200% ROI or more from it.” And 51% of marketers said personalizing across multiple touchpoints saw a 300% ROI.

And retail marketing teams are usually tiny, especially for smaller retail brands. In one study on Marketing Managers, a company of 50-100 employees had effectively zero staffed! While they might have a handful of lower-lever marketers, it highlights just how much work is on the table for these very small marketing teams.

So what’s the solution here?

Today, retail marketing automation can help smaller teams do more with less. According to Forrester (via ingage), by using the right software platforms, companies that nurture leads using marketing automation earn 50% more sales-ready leads, while lowering the overall cost to a third.

Similarly, Nucleus Research (via MarTech) found “marketing automation can result in a 15% increase in sales productivity as well as a 12% decrease in marketing overhead.”

With results like this, you’d think all brands would be leveraging these tools. Yet a whopping 41% of companies are not using any at all! This shows your brand can still gain a clear advantage over your competitors by applying intelligent retail marketing automation to your process.

So where should you start?

Well, we started off by touting the importance of personalized marketing and how much of an ROI your brand can see with the right communication. This is an excellent place for smaller teams to leverage retail marketing automation apps, like the ones offered by Endear.

Namely, Campaigns.

Endear’s automated Campaigns are an efficient way to personalize messages en masse, without sacrificing the quality of the engagement. Available for both email and SMS, Campaigns leverage branded templates, automation, and a robust user interface where a marketing team member can manage multiple communications from one location.

All this is made possible by parsing the customer data captured in the Endear CRM, and intelligently segmenting your audience into tight groups allows you to send targeted marketing messages that feel like a 1-on-1 conversation.

For example, your team can create a Campaign geared toward an audience segment that 1) has a birthday this month, 2) recently purchased shoes, 3) lives within a 5-mile radius of one of your retail locations.

Then your team can set up a trigger to send a birthday promo marketing email 2 weeks before the birthday with a message like:

Happy Birthday [first name]!

I hope you’re enjoying your new shoes! To celebrate, I can give you a BOGO deal on a pair of socks the next time you come into our store. Feel free to message us back about which design you like best, and we’ll make sure to have it in stock when you arrive.

Replies will be sent to the assigned sales or marketing associate to continue the nurturing, which can be handled right in the Endear interface as well. Or set up another round of automated messages that trigger off their reply.

These automated messages triggered by audience segments can save your team hours each week on not just the communication aspect, but the time it takes to analyze and segment your customer data manually. Endear’s CRM handles all that for small (and large) teams, so you can spend less time on the data scraping and more time on the creative aspect of marketing.

And according to research compiled by invesp, using this type of retail automation software can increase conversions by 77%.

At Endear, we’ve witnessed our clients use Campaigns for some truly savvy marketing communications. Sure, the birthday example above is a no-brainer; but how about sending an SMS of curated product recommendations triggered off their last purchase? Or offering a ‘we miss you’ promo, sent by a personalized email triggered off no purchase activity in the last 3 months?

gorjana, a jewelry brand, leveraged Endear’s retail marketing automation to send short, personal SMS messages that read like they were written by a human, even though it was a mass marketing campaign. By enticing customers with in-store-only offers, and giving the name of the sales associate messaging with them, they saw their conversion rate increase to 20% from single digits.

Of course, bulk personalized messaging is just the tip of the retail marketing automation options available to your team. From intelligent product recommendations to thorough conversion tracking & analysis, and one-click 1-on-1 appointment booking, Endear offers a suite of solutions to make even the smallest marketing teams seem big.

Ready to try your hand at automation? Endear’s here to help. Click here for a free demo of our CRM, as well as our Campaigns feature, and see if our tools are the right fit for your team.