Sales are great aren’t they? For every marketeer, pretty much without exception, looking at response rates, average baskets, and sales from your campaign is like a shot in the arm. Triumph. We look at our response uplifts, congratulate ourselves on our customer selections, creative execution and content and move to using what worked, to make the next campaign even better..
But.. what if, 60% of all the dresses we sold through our campaign get returned? What if the customers I think are my best customers are actually serial returners who are costing my business a fortune? Well, let’s not think about that because the sales were great weren’t they. Reverse logistics nightmares, handling costs, out of stock issues, that is surely someone else’s problem, isn’t it?
The reality is, it’s time for a seismic paradigm shift in the way we think about the sales and our customer. With the increasing growth of online fashion sales, and as customers become more and more comfortable with the concept of their home being their changing room, retailers have to grasp a basic concept – a sale is not a sale until the customer decides to keep it.
The simple reality is, using our big data algorithms to match customers with a product they will actually keep is game changing in its simplicity. Optimizing what a customer ‘keeps’ rather than ‘sales’ is the only viable way forward. The benefits are endless for every business unit – sales growth, retained revenue, operation cost savings, improved personalisation and stock availability improvements, not to mention the fact that by marketing products to customers they will want to keep is putting them at the heart of what you do.
We are the only company globally that can lead this change. We understand who are keepers, who are high risk to your business from a return, who should be encouraged to return and explore and what product or category your customer should be marketed with to make sure what they buy they actually keep. Feeding customers who are costing your business money with endless marketing campaigns, promotions and incentives has to become a thing of the past and with new big data technology, it can be.
Adding revenue to the bottom line has actually never been easier, retailers simply need to take the blue pill and delve into the new world of customer returns behaviour.
Viv Sutherland
Director of Sales
Tel: +44 (0) 141 554 4175
Email: [email protected]